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lkryder

Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.
  • the illusion that they know material better than they do.
  • “I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”
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  • These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students
  • But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers. They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from memory.
  • The final group took a “retrieval practice” test. Without the passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test.
  • we are organizing it and creating cues and connections that our brains later recognize.
  • But “when we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access” to that information, Dr. Bjork said. “What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense you are practicing what you are going to need to do later.”
  • The Purdue study supports findings of a recent spate of research showing learning benefits from testing, including benefits when students get questions wrong.
  • Howard Gardner, an education professor at Harvard who advocates constructivism — the idea that children should discover their own approach to learning, emphasizing reasoning over memorization — said in an e-mail that the results “throw down the gauntlet to those progressive educators, myself included.” “Educators who embrace seemingly more active approaches, like concept mapping,” he continued, “are challenged to devise outcome measures that can demonstrate the superiority of such constructivist approaches.”
    • lkryder
       
      I am impressed by the constructivist community realizing what a powerful study this is. I think this is an indication of what we will start to see as brain based learning studies increasingly show us what is happening biologically when we learn.
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    This NYTimes article does contain a link to the actual study but you need an account. The excerpts though and the responses by Gardner was very interesting
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    This NYTimes article does contain a link to the actual study but you need an account. The excerpts though and the responses by Gardner was very interesting. I will try to find access to the study in the library database
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    This NYTimes article does contain a link to the actual study but you need an account. The excerpts though and the responses by Gardner was very interesting. I will try to locate the study in the library database
Amy M

Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe — a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.
  • For example, the Khan Academy, which focuses on high school and middle school, intentionally turns the relationship of the classroom and homework upside down. Students watch lectures at home, then work on problem sets in class, where the teacher can assist them one on one.
  • Dr. Widom said that having Stanford courses freely available could both assist and compete with other colleges and universities.
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    An article about MOOCs and AI open courses, including Standford's.
Shoubang Jian

Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
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    another related article on plagiarism
James Ranni

Sitting Quietly, Doing Something - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • So how did he get that way? Apparently, the same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice.
  • One flavor of happiness at which Rinpoche seems to excel has been well-studied by scientists specializing in how emotions operate in our brains.
  • who heads the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, has found one distinct brain profile for happiness. As Davidson’s laboratory has reported, when we are in distress, the brain shows high activation levels in the right prefrontal area and the amygdala. But when we are in an upbeat mood, the right side quiets and the left prefrontal area stirs. When showing this brain pattern, people report feeling, as Davidson put it to me, “positively engaged, goal-directed, enthusiastic, and energetic.”
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  • One of the first findings from the research showed that when these adepts meditated on compassion, their left prefrontal areas jumped in activity an average 100 percent — by contrast a control group who were taught the same meditation practice showed an increase of just 10 percent. Two of the adepts had spectacular increases, in the 700-to-800-percent range, in key neural zones for good feeling. The more lifetime hours of practice, the greater the increases tended to be. All this seems to confirm the idea that in the realm of positive moods, as in nearly every endeavor, worldly or spiritual, practice matters.
  • Watch a talk by Professor Richard Davidson on mapping the brain activity of monks.
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    Meditation to achieve happiness through alteration of brain function.
efleonhardt

Rise in Online Classes Flares Debate About Quality - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “It’s a cheap education, not because it benefits the students,” said Karen Aronowitz, president of the teachers’ union in Miami, where 7,000 high school students were assigned to study online in computer labs this year because there were not enough teachers to comply with state class-size caps. “This is being proposed for even your youngest students,” Ms. Aronowitz said. “Because it’s good for the kids? No. This is all about cheap.”
  • But administrators insisted that their chief motive was to enhance student learning, not save money in a year when the 108,000-student district is braced for cuts of $100 million and hundreds of jobs. “What the online environment does is continue to provide rich offerings and delivery systems to our students with these resource challenges,” said Irving Hamer, the deputy superintendent.
  • Teachers’ unions and others say much of the push for online courses, like vouchers and charter schools, is intended to channel taxpayers’ money into the private sector. “What they want is to substitute technology for teachers,” said Alex Molnar, professor of education policy at Arizona State University. In Idaho, Gov. C. L. Otter and the elected superintendent of public instruction, Tom Luna, both Republicans, promoted giving students laptops and requiring online courses. The State Legislature, pressed by critics who said the online mandate would cost teachers jobs, rejected it, but Mr. Luna said in an interview that he would propose it this summer through the State Board of Education, which supports him. “I have no doubt we’ll get a robust rule through them,” he said. Four online courses is “going to be the starting number.”
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  • Sherri Wood, president of the Idaho Education Association, the teachers’ union, strongly disagreed. She said Mr. Luna’s 2010 re-election campaign had received more than $50,000 in contributions from online education companies like K-12 Inc., a Virginia-based operator of online charter schools that received $12.8 million from Idaho last year. “It’s about getting a piece of the money that goes to public schools,” Ms. Wood said. “The big corporations want to make money off the backs of our children.”
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    online classes costing teachers their jobs
rhondamatrix

Guest Post | Helping Students Motivate Themselves - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    This article tackles the subject of student motivation - specifically, how students can be intrinsically motivated rather than just going for the grade. Several possible options are discussed for how to build up motivation over time. The article mostly focuses on younger children, but perhaps some of the strategies can be adapted for college students?
Hedy Lowenheim

Universities Team With Online Course Provider - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • At SUNY, which has 468,000 students at 64 campuses, the Coursera partnership is tied to Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher’s announcement this year of Open SUNY, an online effort to enroll 100,000 new students and make it possible for a quarter of them to earn a degree in three years.
    • Hedy Lowenheim
       
      Great to see that SUNY is partnering up with Coursera! This is a very exciting development for the world of online learning!
  • “We hope this will help public universities do more with the less they’re getting in state support,” Dr. Koller said.
    • Hedy Lowenheim
       
      Public education funding seems to be in constant jeopardy these days. Adding distance learning classes at an extremely low price has the potential to bring college level classes to students who might never have had the opportunity to attend a university.
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  • Some faculty resistance has emerged recently against using online materials, even if they are blended with classroom work. This week, 58 Harvard professors wrote a letter seeking the creation of a new committee to consider the ethical issues related to edX and its impact on higher education.
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    Universities Team With Online Course Provider By TAMAR LEWIN "In a move that could open online classes to 1.25 million students at public institutions, a California company is forming partnerships with 10 large state university systems."
Celeste Sisson

New Technologies Aim to Foil Online Course Cheating - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    The article speaks on concerns of the validity of testing for online courses.
Hedy Lowenheim

Libraries Struggle to Close the 'Digital Divide' - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In the 21st century, high-speed Internet access is almost as essential as electricity. That libraries serve as the provider for millions of Americans isn't something to celebrate. It's a sign that we're in trouble. We're depriving people of basic information access that is central to every policy we care about – including health, education and national security – even though every American should be able to communicate reliably and access information at any time.
Amy M

Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Most gains on F2F teaching when online  classes involved an engaging and peer components.
Amy M

Much of Rural America Still Struggles With Broadband Access - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In rural America, only 60 percent of households use broadband Internet service, according to a report released Thursday by the Department of Commerce. That is 10 percent less than urban households. Over all, 28 percent of Americans do not use the Internet at all.
  • It took her three days to try to arrange a meeting with the governor 150 miles away in Montgomery because such inquiries cannot be made over the phone and she had to drive 45 minutes to her daughter’s house to use e-mail.
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    rural areas still cannot get fast  internet access
Joan McCabe

The Attention-Span Myth - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Interesting rant on how technology affects attention span is a myth.
Amy M

The Flight From Conversation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. W
  • We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance
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    community vs converstation
b malczyk

Consortium of Colleges Takes Online Education to New Level - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • registered 680,000 students in 43 courses
  • massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.
  • free online artificial intelligence course attracted 160,000 students from 190 countries.
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  • 40,000 students downloaded his videos
  • I had about 200 years’ worth of students in my class.” Professors say their in-class students bene
  • not want to give credit until somebody figures out how to solve the cheating problem
  • Grading presents some questions, too. Coursera’s humanities courses use peer-to-peer grading, with students first having to show that they can match a professor’s grading of an assignment, and then grade the work of five classmates, in return for which their work is graded by five fellow students. But, Ms. Koller said, what would happen to a student who cannot match the professor’s grading has not been determined.
Erin Fontaine

New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology - New York Times - 0 views

  • Perhaps there’s a nicer way to put it. “The baby boomers seem to see technology as information and communication,” said Prof. Michael Bugeja, director of the journalism school at Iowa State University and the author of “Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age.” “Their offspring and the emerging generation seem to see the same devices as entertainment and socializing.”
  • The fact is, we’re not here to entertain. We’re here to stimulate the life of the mind.”
Amy M

Open Courses, Nearly Free - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Mr. Reshef sees his project as a way to use the Internet to bring higher education to poor students around the world.
  • The university is not accredited, and it offers programs only in business administration and computer science. But in June, it got two votes of confidence: New York University announced a partnership under which unusually promising but needy University of the People students might be able to enroll at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi campus and receive financial aid, and Hewlett-Packard announced an internship program, saying it believed strongly “in the work UoPeople is doing to democratize higher education.”
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    Open Courses needed in Haiti after earthquake
Amy M

Researchers Boycott Elsevier Journal Publisher - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Last week 34 mathematicians issued a statement denouncing “a system in which commercial publishers make profits based on the free labor of mathematicians and subscription fees from their institutions’ libraries, for a service that has become largely unnecessary.”
  • For 2010, Elsevier reported a 36 percent profit on revenues of $3.2 billion
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    NYT article on the Elsevier boycott.
Amy M

MOOCs, Large Courses Open to All, Topple Campus Walls - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Mr. Thrun sent the 23,000 students who completed the Artificial Intelligence course a PDF file (suitable for framing) by e-mail showing their percentile score, but not the Stanford name; 248 students, none from Stanford, earned grades of 100 percent.
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    Standford's AI course
Heather Kurto

Mindfulness Requires Practice and Purpose - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • “Take yourself out of autopilot,” she said. And eventually expand that “being in the moment” to other parts of your life.
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