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A Scientific American article by Carl Wieman examines how lecture-style classes, the typical structure employed in most university classrooms, may not be the most effective method for teaching, especially when it comes to science and engineering. Instead, research favoured a... View Article

A New York Times article by Maria Konnikova cites a series of studies showing separate neural activations associated with printing, cursive (longhand) handwriting vs typing by children (Berninger et al., 2006 Dev Neuropsychol), and greater activation of a “reading circuit” during... View Article

According to a New York Times blog post by Benedict Carey, research at Washington University found that memory champions have better than average retention of memorized material than college students a day after being tested on memorized material: they can... View Article

A reaction of a parent to a sample subtraction assignment as guided by Common Core has gone viral. See here for some justification of the Common Core approach. It’s worth asking if students at this (age-seven) level are capable of the conceptual understanding... View Article

A Globe and Mail editorial describes how Canadian provinces have generally fared worse in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) math rankings since 2006, after adopting “discovery learning” – even though a review by Kirschner et al. (2006, Educ Psychol) of a hundred empirical studies found no... View Article

Sigman et al. (2014 Nat Neurosci) present cases in which neuroscience, and not only cognitive psychology, could inform education, “ranging from very general physiological aspects of human learning such as nutrition, exercise and sleep, to brain architectures that shape the way we... View Article

Finn et al. (2014 Psychol Sci) conclude from a study of 1,400 Boston-area students that individual schools can account for a large degree of the variation in performance gains on (MCAS) standardized test scores. However, the same school-identity variable accounted for... View Article

Hampson et al. (2013 JNE) point out “that after an intervening period of lack of exposure to the item, correct retention or retrieval of the item is dependent on the strength of encoding of the information at the time of... View Article

According to research by Harrar et al. (2014 Curr Biol), dyslexia involves an attentional deficit when shifting attention from aural to visual stimuli, and even more so when shifting from visual to aural stimuli. See also this MindShift blog post... View Article

In an EdSurge article, author Peter D. Lenn describes how the flipped classroom model was first tried out 40 years ago by the U.S. Army, with success. The author was involved in a lead contractor in that effort, and subsequently in adapting the... View Article

As reported in a THE Journal article by Dian Schaffhauser, the New York State teachers union has voted to pull out of the Common Core testing. Their complaint seems to center around the rapidity of curriculum changes and insufficient time... View Article