Johns Hopkins study finds that insider research shows 70 percent more benefits to students than independent research

Eminent academics from worlds of neuroscience, education and psychology voice concerns over popularity of method

As is required of all women in their 30s, I am in a book club. At the first meeting of this group, one poor unsuspecting woman mentioned that she had listened to that month's selection instead of reading it. That, the rest of the group decided together, is definitely cheating. Never mind that no one could exactly articulate how or why it was cheating; it just felt like it was, and others would agree. She never substituted the audiobook for the print version again (or, if she did, she never again admitted it). This question - whether or not listening to an audiobook is "cheating" - is one University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham gets fairly often, especially ever since he published a book, in 2015, on the science of reading. (That one was about teaching children to read; he's got another book out next spring about adults and reading.) He is very tired of this question, and so, recently, he wrote a blog post addressing it. (His opening line: "I've been asked this question a lot and I hate it.") If, he argues, you take the question from the perspective of cognitive psychology - that is, the mental processes involved - there is no real difference between listening to a book and reading it. So, according to that understanding of the question: No, audiobooks are not cheating.

How long do you think teachers pause, on average, after asking a question? Several studies from the 1970s on have looked into the effect that the amount of time teachers pause after asking a question has on learners. In visiting many classrooms in the United States and other parts of the world, I've found that, with few exceptions, these studies are still accurate. For example, according to work done by Mary Budd Rowe in 1972 and Robert J. Stahl in 1994, pausing for three or more seconds showed a noticeable positive impact on learning. Yet the average length that teachers pause was found to be 0.9 seconds. Wow.

"Feedback is crucial for learning and improving, but it's rarely fun to be on the receiving end of it when it's critical. Many people have a negative reaction to feedback, especially feedback on their creative work. In a study of seven companies and 11,471 days of creative work, researchers found two striking patterns: First, getting feedback was incredibly rare, indicating that people seemed to avoid it; and second, when people did receive feedback, it generally left a negative emotional residue. So what might good feedback for creative work look like? By "good feedback," I mean feedback that creative workers actually want and that leads to changes that improve their creative output."

"If you think data-in education, or any field-is cut and dry, think again. Working with data in the classroom, especially, can be either exhausting or exhilarating-depending on your fitness level. Data can be big, but also quite small. It's often quantitative, but is increasingly qualitative. It's predictive, but not always inclusive. It's private, but not always protected. But one thing's for certain: data has enormous power to impact teaching and learning."

"Banana pianos are awesome, but what about playing music with your feet?"

"Given the burgeoning importance of iPad in education, we deemed it important to share with our readers some interesting resources to help them tap into the full educational potential of this versatile device. In this regard, we have compiled the list below featuring some important iPad tips for teachers. These are some basic functionalities to enhance your overall productivity and take your iPad usage to the next le"

These small but mighty aircraft advance learning in computer programming and photography, and prep students for careers in this burgeoning field.

"Jacqueline Prester was a self-proclaimed hustler in middle school. Mowing lawns, babysitting-she took the initiative to earn her own money. But she was also a responsible moneymaker, using the envelope system to budget every cent before she knew it was an actual budgeting strategy. Back then, her friends rolled their eyes when she tried to share her financial savvy. Fast forward two decades and Prester is a popular business and technology teacher at Mansfield High School in Massachusetts, working to give students real-life financial skills. Only this time her audience is keen to learn. (Her Personal Finance classes always reach their 28 student capacity.) Students are learning about personal finance, but not just because that's the name of the class. They're making it personal. Prester's passion is infectious, and the content she chooses-like Pathway To Financial Success created by Discovery Education and Discover-immerses students in authentic lessons with videos, interactive modules and real-world connections. Pathway To Financial Success Video: Being Financially Responsible EdSurge caught up with Prester to find out how she packs her classes with willing learners and to uncover her secret to finding compelling financial literacy content. She also shared how and why she helped pass a new Massachusetts bill focused on financial literacy."

"I had just pressed the glowing submit button on my screen. After two and a half years, I finally finished my Masters in Computer Science. As the immediate thrill of being done with my coursework subsided, I had a moment of reflection. How had I gone from a high school student who routinely finished in the back of the class to graduating with a near 4.0 in my second graduate program? I went from a bottom of the barrel student to an elite performer with good study habits. Through this story, I would like to highlight the fundamentals that I find instrumental to improving your learning capabilities."

"If you think that magic is something you only see in the Harry Potter series and you can't create anything even similarly engaging in your classroom - think again! Augmented Reality has a magical power to make your lessons so exciting that students don't want to stop exploring mathematics when the bell rings."

"Math deserves its own day, don't you think? Join the fun of Pi Day, celebrated on March 14 (3.14, get it?). Here are 31 Pi Day activities that you'll circle back to year after year."

"When you're the big fish, it's not OK to pick on the little fish just because you can. That's an important lesson for everyone. But some Houston first-graders got a particularly vivid demonstration in the form of a musical puppet show, which featured fish puppets and an underlying message about why it's wrong to bully others. The show left an impression on the students at Codwell Elementary, according to their teacher Shelea Bennett. "You felt like you were in that story," she said. "By the end of the story they were able to answer why [bullying] wasn't good, and why you shouldn't act this way." The puppeteer's show was part of an effort to expand arts education in Houston elementary and middle schools. Now, a new study shows that the initiative helped students in a few ways: boosting students' compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students' scores on writing tests. It's just the latest study to find that giving students more access to the arts offers measurable benefits. And adding time for dance, theater, or visual arts isn't at odds with traditional measures of academic success, according to the research - which amounts to one of the largest gold-standard studies on arts education ever conducted. "Arts learning experiences benefit students in terms of social, emotional, and academic outcomes," write researchers Dan Bowen of Texas A&M and Brian Kisida of the University of Missouri. The study, released Tuesday through the Houston Education Research Consortium, looked at elementary and middle schools - which predominantly served low-income students of color - that expressed interest in participating in Houston's Arts Access Initiative. There appeared to be significant need: nearly a third of elementary and middle schools in the district reported lacking a full-time arts teacher."

"Using built-in iOS settings, Apple users can configure their mobile devices to read any form of text aloud with a simple gesture."

"The groundwork for machine learning was laid down in the middle of last century. But increasingly powerful computers - harnessed to algorithms refined over the past decade - are driving an explosion of applications in everything from medical physics to materials, as Marric Stephens discovers When your bank calls to ask about a suspiciously large purchase made on your credit card at a strange time, it's unlikely that a kindly member of staff has personally been combing through your account. Instead, it's more likely that a machine has learned what sort of behaviours to associate with criminal activity - and that it's spotted something unexpected on your statement. Silently and efficiently, the bank's computer has been using algorithms to watch over your account for signs of theft. Monitoring credit cards in this way is an example of "machine learning" - the process by which a computer system, trained on a given set of examples, develops the ability to perform a task flexibly and autonomously. As a subset of the more general field of artificial intelligence (AI), machine-learning techniques can be applied wherever there are large and complex data sets that can be mined for associations between inputs and outputs. In the case of your bank, the algorithm will have analysed a vast pool of both legitimate and illegitimate transactions to produce an output ("suspected fraud") from a given input ("high-value order placed at 3 a.m."). But machine learning isn't just used in finance. It's being applied in many other fields too, from healthcare and transport to the criminal-justice system. Indeed, Ge Wang - a biomedical engineer from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US who is one of those pioneering its use in medical imaging - believes that when it comes to machine learning, we're on the cusp of a revolution."

"When you show your work, you are forced to communicate what you did and how you did it in a way that others understand. It becomes a chance to reflect on your work but also clarify misconceptions and catch any blind spots. If you look at the entire metacognition cycle mentioned in the video, you'll notice that the last part of metacognition is the reflection piece. When students are sharing their journey, they are more reflective on their process and better able to plan a new approach in the future."

"THE ARRIVAL OF iOS 12 means you can now use Apple's long-awaited suite of Screen Time tools. The new features, which appear under Settings > Screen Time, are designed to give you a better idea of how you're spending time on your phone and limit the time you spend on certain apps. It's all part of a greater push by tech companies to mitigate the ways personal devices are engineered to be addictive, by creating all kinds of new "digital wellness" features. Similar features showed up on Facebook and Instagram this summer, and Android's own set of screen time tools are currently in beta on Android Pie. Looking to use your phone less? Scroll down-mindfully and purposefully!-to find out how to get the most out of Apple's Screen Time tools."

"Recently, my students gave me one of those golden moments in teaching.  Allow me to set the stage. We were over six weeks into a project-based life science unit in which students apply systems-thinking to closely examine the inner workings of a body system and relate that system to others as a subsystem. The set of standards housing our work is juicy with Crosscutting Concepts and ripe with potential for Science and Engineering Practices.  We began the unit exploring how cells themselves, a structure students often initially perceive as an end-all-be-all baseline to life, are instead a very complex system of subsystems.  That particular day, students were outlining components of their selected body system in preparation for writing  a podcast."

Computational thinking skills are important for all students, not just for future computer scientists. That's one of the key messages from a new report commissioned by the Department's Education for a Changing World initiative, and a message bolstered by growing international evidence.