Group items tagged

"Problem based learning ( PBL) is a teaching strategy that involves the minimum amount of direct and formal instruction characteristic of lecture based teaching.  In a PBL model, students are provided with complex problems to work on and during the process they get to learn the lesson content and theoretical knowledge underlying the problem. In other words, unlike traditional content-based teaching where the primacy is put on the delivery of content and the imparting of knowledge to students, PBL foregrounds problem-based activities as a way to stimulate students cognitive skills and engage them in hands-on learning."

"There's no doubt that students find making to be a creative and engaging activity. But as they tinker, design and invent, are they actually learning anything? Making is too young a phenomenon to have generated a broad research base to answer this question. The literature that does exist comes from enthusiastic champions of making, rather than disinterested investigators. But there are two well-established lines of research within psychology and cognitive science that can inform how we understand making and help us ensure that making leads to learning. Taken together, these two strands of empirical evidence provide the best guide we presently have for maximizing the learning potential of maker activities."

"Exam season can be especially stressful for children in primary school; many of their high-brain neural networks, which manage emotions such as stress, won't have been built yet. Neuro-imaging research shows that stress blocks communication from the upper cognitive brain down to the brain's lower core, which is more emotionally reactive. This means that just when children need it most, they have limited access to the upper-brain regions that helpself-control, and access to their high-brain cortex where the memories they need are stored. Under pressure students can become emotional and find it hard to remember vital information."

The core of the opposition to what are being called "21st century skills" is contained in the following argument: "Cognitive science teaches us that skills and knowledge are interdependent and that possessing a base of knowledge is necessary to the acquisition not only of more knowledge, but also of skills. Skills can neither be taught nor applied effectively without prior knowledge of a wide array of subjects."

This research began with the premise that video game play, especially as it relates to participation in persistent virtual worlds, provides fictional spaces where players engage in cognitive and communicative practices that can be personally transformative in prosocial ways. Players' experiences with these worlds are as much defined by the technical design and construction of these spaces as they are influenced by the socio-cultural arrangements that develop. In support of this belief, we collected data on children's experiences with a range of technologies germane to the Digital Age, including their participation in the Quest Atlantis environment, an immersive space for learning that is intended to engage children ages 9-12 in a form of dramatic play comprising both online and real-world learning activities. By enlisting this innovation to nonintrusively collect data about children's participation as well as their engagement with media more generally, the research team was able to move beyond an ethnographic study of what already exists in the world and develop a grounded appreciation for what an innovative technology-rich context might make possible in the future.

Reivsed Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Levels

"Stick Pick is the first app of its kind to allow teachers to tie leveled question stems to the cognitive or linguistic needs of each individual learner. It all starts when a teacher names an on-screen soup can (class) and then fills it with popsicle sticks (students). During setup, teachers choose a category of question stems they wish to target for each learner: either "higher order thinking" (based on Bloom's Taxonomy) or "English as a Second Language" skills. Teachers can then set the degree of difficulty for each learner."

"Bloom's Revised Taxonomy breaks each learning stage (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create) into four separate levels of knowledge. These levels include the factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive. Together the levels of knowledge are making incremental movements from a factual understanding, to the personal command and realization of the learning process. The revised taxonomy also lists two cognitive processes within the applying stage: executing and implementing.1 These two processes illustrate the range of thinking skills possible within a stage. Executing requires the application of factual knowledge and refers to the ability to carry out learned procedures such as solving a long division problem. On the other hand, implementing reaches up into the metacognitive level and demands that students be able to apply learned skills to a task that initially appears to be an unrelated to prior learning experiences. "

"Pad is a versatile tool that can be used like a Swiss Knife, you mention it and there is an app for it. One of the cognitive areas we can improve through the use of iPad is creativity. There are several excellent apps out there that are specifically designed to unleash learners creativity, drawing and painting tools are some of them. Having access to apps is one thing but using them effectively is another thing and that's where a practical guide such as the one below comes in handy"

" Parents and teachers wrestle with all the time: Should we be making learning easier for kids-or harder? The answer, according to research in cognitive science and psychology, is both."

"The Franklin Academy High School implemented a 1:1 iPad deployment a the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year. Over the course of the next two school years, the pilot was expanded to include all grades 9-12 in the high school. This deployment has reached 475 high school students and all teaching staff. Our K-8 program deployed iPads across the grade levels in the form of class sets and mobile carts. This study targeted our 1:1 deployment at the high school to investigate the impact the device has had on teaching and learning. The survey used to gather the student data was administered in April of 2014. Students included in the survey used the device anywhere from 1 to 4 years. The students use the iPad while at school and home. Results of the survey hope to shed light on the impact the use of the iPad has had on academic gains as well as the development of the most important non-cognitive skills our program is founded upon."

"The notion of digital literacy, or "Information, Communications, and Technology Literacy" (ICT Literacy), usually takes into account the vocational skills required to operate digital machines or the intellectual skills required to program or 'code' them. The concept does not account for the social and intellectual advantages that are available to affluent students with access to more, and better integrated, educational technologies. In other words, it is not only about skills, but also about cognition, etiquette, motivation, socialization and culture - the context within which one uses the tools."

"This summer, I was introduced to sketchnoting and challenged to incorporate  the concept of sketchnoting as a means of note taking.  Sketchnoting is the process of creating a personal visual story while listening, reading, or recording an experience as it happens or on a later date. Sketchnoting brings in a variety of cognitive processes, increasing the connection between speaker and listener due to the engagement needed to listen intently while synthesizing the spoken word into drawings and short narratives.  I decided to to take the challenge seriously."

"Creativity, according to Albert Einstein, is intelligence having fun and for most neuro-cognitive scientists creativity is something that is inherently born with us and the proof is kids. All kids draw on their sharp sense of creativity to discover and explore the world around them. They can easily adapt their behaviour to new situations, develop new thinking skills and are constantly engaged in trying out "new ways of doing stuff". Sir Ken Robinson made a strong argument in this regard in his popular TED talk "schools kill creativity". Ken argued that kids come to school bursting with  creativity and by the time they graduate they have lost most if not all of their creativity. Sounds like schools are "educating kids out of creativity"!"

"It just might be that in a society where information is abundant, thinking habits are more important than knowledge. Somewhere beneath wisdom and above the "things" a student knows. Laws of economics say that scarcity increases value. It's no longer information that's scarce, but rather meaningful response to that information. Thought. And thought has a source-a complex set of processes, background knowledge, and schema that we can, as educators think of as cognitive habits. And if they're habits, well, that means they're probably something we can practice at, doesn't it?"