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why school is so important. On a raw level, school can show students what it feels like to concentrate at different levels–what it feels like to write a paper, solve a difficult math puzzle, and synthesize various skills. That way, students develop a taste for cognitive satisfaction and learn to look for it throughout their lives.

, I don’t think that skills like memorization have decreased in importance. Sure, it may seem like we don’t need to commit facts to memory anymore and that the relevant skills today are navigation, retrieval, and analysis (how quickly you can find something, whether you can find it again later, and absorb what you need from it as quickly as possible). But memorization is still important; even in today’s world, where you have a universe of information at your fingertips, you have to remember how to navigate information, how to find it again, how to use tools to find it again as well as what you found in the past and how that might relate to the information rushing at you in the present. So in this sense, memorization is inextricably linked to navigation, retrieval, and analysis. The more you remember at any given point, the more space you have left in your “working memory” to perform complex cognitive processes.

adaptive learning will adjust every question based on a student’s previous answer.

Knewton is working on having educational content tagged so it can be placed into a “Knowledge Graph.” This system determines what concepts need to be learned before a student can move on to others, and how they all fit together.

The company recently parterned with Pearson to tag every textbook under their imprint work with the Knewton Knowledge Graph.

David Heckman, a mathematician, was accustomed to lecturing to the class, but he had to take on the role of a roving mentor, responding to raised hands and coaching students when they got stumped

Like institutions at every level of American education, it is going through some wrenching changes. The university has lost 50 percent of its state funding over the past five years.

alarmingly high numbers of students showing up on campus unprepared to do college-level work.

It doesn't solve anything. It is a great first step in reframing the role of the teacher in the classroom. It fosters the "guide on the side" mentality and role, rather than that of the "sage of the stage." It helps move a classroom culture towards student construction of knowledge rather than the teacher having to tell the knowledge to students.

We must first focus on creating the engagement and then look at structures, like the flipped classroom, that can support.

If the flipped classroom is truly to become innovative, then it must be paired with transparent and/or embedded reason to know the content.

Any accurate evaluation of adaptive-learning technology would have to isolate and account for all variables: increases or decreases in a class's size; whether the classroom was “flipped” (meaning homework was done in class and lectures were delivered via video on the students' own time); whether the material was delivered via video, text or game; and so on. Arizona State says 78 percent of students taking the Knewton-ized developmental math course passed, up from 56 percent before

in Japan, where it is common for managers who have studied English with the adaptive-learning software iKnow to list their iKnow scores on their resumes.

“The reality is that it's going to be done,” says Eva Baker, director of the Center for the Study of Evaluation at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It's not going to be a little part. It's going to be a big part. And it's going to be put in place partly because it's going to be less expensive than doing professional development.”