An article by Adam Shaw in the BBC explores whether brain-training exercises are really the hoax people claim they are. While brain-training has received a lot of criticism in the past, including a 2009 BBC study suggesting they are “no... View Article
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Success Academy experienced its humble beginnings in 2006, as a charter school in Harlem for economically disadvantaged students who could not attend the wealthier elementary schools because they lived outside the appropriate school zone. It provided these students with the... View Article
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash. Writing in The New York Times, Benedict Carey identifies some areas in which perceptual learning has been applied: visualizing high-dimensional genetic data (e.g. as has been done, at least implicitly, at the Albert Einstein... View Article
An article in the Economist brings into question the actual value of a university degree, a seemingly popular commodity in modern society. In recent years, a degree has become synonymous with “a decent job and an entry ticket to the... View Article
In an NYmag article, Anya Kamenetz suggests too much faith is being placed on standardized testing in the US educational system, as these appear to be an incomplete measure of student intelligence. MIT neuroscientists alongside researchers at Harvard and Brown... View Article
Writing in the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss criticizes the US Department of Education’s overbearing reach into classrooms with policies and programs that provide no real benefit to teachers or students. Federal programs, such as Race to the Top and NCLB... View Article
In an article in the New York Times, Susan Pinker questions whether the rise of technology in education will actually improve student learning. In a study conducted in the early 2000s at Duke University, economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd... View Article
Photo by Akshay Chauhan on Unsplash. The Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA) is a new standardized assessment created last year which covers mathematics, reading and writing. This test is taken by students in grades 3 to 8, as well as grade... View Article
In June 2013, the Los Angeles School Board of Education signed a $30 million iPad deal with Apple, with the intent of providing iPads to all of the students in the district. As Weiss says, the program was “envisioned as a... View Article
There has been an increase in talk to reduce standardized testing in grade school across North America. Ohio reduces standardized testing hours In Ohio, it was recommended by the Ohio Department of Education to reduce testing by roughly 20%. According... View Article
In a New York Times article, Susan Dynarski discusses why American students from low-income families are significantly less likely to receive a college degree compared to their high-income counterparts. Numerous attempts to close this gap in the US education system... View Article
Photo by Aedrian Salazar on Unsplash. The teenage brain continues to be a topic of contention among neuroscientists as they attempt to account for behavioural differences between teenagers and adults. Dr. Francis Jensen, chair of the Department of Neurology at... View Article
Brook Larmer’s article in the Hamilton Spectator highlights the extensive measures taken by students and families in preparation for the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam. The gaokao is written by over nine million students each year and remains the... View Article
There appear to be few consistent empirical demonstrations of the idea that studying materials printed on yellow paper are easier to recall than those printed on white paper, however there is evidence that warm colours (like yellow, orange and red)... View Article
According to a new research paper by Lester and Warda (2014 University of Calgary School of Public Policy), Canada ranks third of 36 countries (behind Chile and France, and just ahead of Spain and India) in terms of the size... View Article
Chang et al. (2014 Curr Biol) compare visual perceptual learning in young (19-30 year old) and older (65-79 year old) adults. The task (reporting two digits that were flashed in the center of a screen within a sequence of letters)... View Article
It is no secret that China consistently dominates standardized tests on the international platform. Their education system, although stressful, adapts students to roles needed in the economy. China’s Educational history While far from perfect, their education system has successfully served the... View Article
In a New York Times article on race and college admissions, Yascha Mounk exposes both the “racial balancing” at top schools like Harvard that discriminates against Asian-American applicants (as Harvard once discriminated against Jewish applicants), and the myth that “Asian-American applicants... View Article
Photo by William Hook on Unsplash. In a New York Times article, Natasha Singer relates criticisms of behavior-tracking apps, in particular the most popular, ClassDojo, which its developer reports is now “used by at least one teacher in roughly one out of... View Article
An article by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic touches on the neuroscience of wisdom. He cites work by UCSD clinical psychologist Lisa Eyler and psychiatrist and Dilip V. Jeste (e.g. Meeks & Heste, 2009 Arch Gen Psychiatry, and Bangen et al., 2013 Am J... View Article