Educators, policy makers and business leaders often fret about the state of math education, particularly in comparison with other countries. But reading comprehension may be a larger stumbling block, writes Motoko Rich in an important article in today’s New York Times: “Studies have repeatedly found that ‘teachers have bigger impacts on math test scores than on English test scores,’ said
Read More →
New research suggests that changes in way teenagers view risks and rewards when in the presence of their peers are not only a critical part of their development, but may also provide a key to motivating them, writes Sarah Sparks in Education Week. Emerging evidence suggests that changing teenagers’ behavior in positive ways requires taking account of their social circles:
Read More →
What’s an “entrepreneurial learner”? It’s an individual who can be in any situation and see the opportunity to learn, explained innovation and organization researcher John Seely Brown in a speech he gave last week. It is these individuals, he said, who will help organizations to thrive in a world of constant change. From the website of the learning and training
Read More →
Psychology writer Wray Herbert has an interesting column on why even intelligent people can fail to act rationally: “We all know people who are highly intelligent but not very smart. These people get good grades in school, ace a lot of tests, and often succeed professionally. But they nevertheless hold irrational beliefs and do a lot of foolish things. Such
Read More →
Many of us have enjoyed watching TED talks, the online videos of scientists, artists, inventors and others talking about their work. But do we actually learn anything from them? That’s the question raised by a new study led by professor Shana K. Carpenter of Iowa State University and published this month in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Carpenter and her colleagues
Read More →
Here’s the link to and abstract of the study mentioned in my article about what we learn from instructional videos: “Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning” Shana K. Carpenter, Miko M. Wilford, Nate Kornell, and Kellie M. Mullaney Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, May 2013 The present study explored the effects of lecture
Read More →
There’s been a lot of talk lately of college- and career-readiness for high-school graduates, notes Amanda Paulson in the Christian Science Monitor. But according to a just-released study, what community colleges actually require is less rigorous than we think—and many high school graduates aren’t meeting even those low standards: “Community colleges enroll nearly half of all college students in America, and
Read More →
Jon Hamilton has a very interesting segment on NPR about how the brain interprets language: “Just a few decades ago, many linguists thought the human brain had evolved a special module for language. It seemed plausible that our brains have some unique structure or system. After all, no animal can use language the way people can. But in the 1990s,
Read More →
The race is over. You (or your son or daughter) got into college, accepted the offer of admission, bought the sweatshirt with your school’s logo. There’s just one obstacle standing in the way: summer. A growing body of research shows that the summer before college can be a treacherous time for teenagers, poised as they are between home and high
Read More →
Early college counseling—as early as middle school—is essential to students’ aspirations for attending college, according to new study from the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). The study, “Preparing Students for College: What High Schools Are Doing and How Their Actions Influence Ninth-Graders’ College Attitudes, Aspirations and Plans,” found that instilling positive attitudes about post-secondary education is critical to
Read More →
