Qin et al. (2014 Nat Neurosci) found that as children transition from counting to a memory retrieval strategy when solving arithmetic problems (between ages 7 and 9), there are corresponding changes in BOLD activation from prefrontal-parietal to hippocampal areas (along... View Article
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According to Daniel J. Levitin in the New York Times, by “some estimates, preventable medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year”. Photo by Jair Lázaro on... View Article
Finn et al. (2014 PLoS One) find evidence that the more “effortful” language learning of adults vs. children interferes with their learning of an artificial language (consisting of two-syllable, three-category nonsense words). In particular, adult learners under given instructions to... View Article
A New York Times article by Elizabeth Green, “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?”, easily challenges the notion that Asian students are more passive and drilled than their US counterparts. Photo by Antony Hyson Seltran on Unsplash.
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
Christopher Nyren writes about “The EdTech Failings of Silicon Valley” in an EdReach piece. The article highlights “10 EdTech Startups that Silicon Valley Loved” during the 1997-2001 Internet Bubble: UPromise, Lightspan, Advantage Schools, Saba Software, QuinStreet, ApexLearning, SchoolPop, TrainingNet, Academic Systems,... 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
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash. 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... View Article
In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, author Steve Kolowich describes the satirical creation of the Babel (Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language) Generator, by Les Perelman and his students at MIT. The software generates essays prompted only with... View Article
According to Bauer and Larkina (2014 Memory), children do retain their earliest memories through age 7, at which point “childhood amnesia” (i.e. the forgetting of memories beyond the normal rate) sets in. In fact, this phenomenon was evident long before... 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
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash. 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... 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
Photo by Yustinus Tjiuwanda on Unsplash. 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... 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
Photo by Samantha Borges on Unsplash. In an EdSurge article, Dhawal Shah provides an analysis of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) worldwide, as of 2013. As he writes, “The number of courses offered has grown from about 100 MOOCs in 2012 to... View Article
According to an EdSurge article by Esther Wojcicki, the US spends more per student ($7,743) than other OECD nations, yet has fallen badly in the most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test scores, released on December 3, 2013: “US students slipped... View Article