“Sometimes it takes a long time and lot of painful grading in order to figure out the mistakes. You have to be open to your own errors in the assignment. When you see kids all making the same kind of mistake, you need to notice that maybe it’s how you phrased the question, or the emphasis you gave to a certain point in class, or your lack of emphasis on another crucial point.”
“When he got home, Rowan would turn on his laptop and sit in front of the glowing screen for hours, or flop onto his bed, his phone hovering above his face. His Instagram feed flashed before him like a slot machine. His most popular account, @Zuccccccccccc, taking its name from Facebook’s chief executive, had 1.2 million followers. If his posts were good, his account would keep growing. If he took some time off, growth would stall. Rowan, like most teenagers on the internet, wasn’t after fame or money, though he made a decent amount — at one point $10,000 a month and more, he said. What Rowan wanted was clout.”
“Alpha manipulation really was controlling people’s attention, even though they didn’t have any clear understanding of how they were doing it.. After the neurofeedback training session ended, the researchers asked subjects to perform two additional tasks that involve attention, and found that the enhanced attention persisted.”
“Being creative isn't about being the first (or only) person to think of an idea. More often, creativity is about connecting ideas.”
“But the team didn’t just look at the relationship between songs and the behaviors that go with them. They also built a discography with actual song recordings, in order to understand if the music itself shared common features. The discography consists of one example of four types of songs—love, healing, lullaby, and dance—from 30 regions around the world.”
“We wait. We are bored. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. The confusion is not my invention.”
“The simple view is an equation that looks like this: decoding ability x language comprehension = reading comprehension. Notice that reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension; it’s not the sum. In other words, if you have good language comprehension skills but zero decoding skills, your reading comprehension will be zero, because zero times anything is zero… The simple view model was proposed more than 30 years ago and has been confirmed over and over again by research.”
“In effect, narrative feedback is a personalized message giving individualized feedback for the student regarding his or her writing. That is a human interaction, not a bureaucratized one, as with a rubric.”
“If you’re not convinced yet, here’s a quick algebraic proof…”
“The researchers found that when participants spent longer than normal doing their leisure activity, their belief in their ability to perform their job increased. But this was only the case when they had a serious hobby that was dissimilar to their job, or when their hobby was similar to their work but they only did it casually. When their hobby was both serious and similar to their job, then spending more time on it actually had a detrimental effect, decreasing their self-efficacy.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson