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Martin Burrett

Is rote learning overrated? - 7 views

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    "No film set of a 1950's primary school classroom would be complete without the serried ranks of neatly dressed children chanting times tables aloud at their wooden desks. Since those days, learning through repetition has fallen in and out of vogue. That's why it's so interesting to witness the recent resurgence in support for rote learning, backed by high-profile figures from the world of politics and education alike."
Tonya Thomas

Future Work Skills 2020 - 3 views

  • Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines. More about transdisciplinarity.Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team. More about virtual collaboration.Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed. More about sense-making.Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions. More about social intelligence.Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings. More about cross-cultural competency.Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques. More about cognitive load management.Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based. More about novel and adaptive thinking.Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning. More about computational thinking.New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication. More about new media literacy. More about new media literacy.Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes. More about design mindset.
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    "Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines. More about transdisciplinarity. Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team. More about virtual collaboration. Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed. More about sense-making. Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions. More about social intelligence. Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings. More about cross-cultural competency. Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques. More about cognitive load management. Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based. More about novel and adaptive thinking. Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning. More about computational thinking. New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication. More about new media literacy. More about new media literacy. Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes. More about design mindset."
Nigel Coutts

Moving Beyond Rote Learning in Mathematics - The Learner's Way - 5 views

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    How do move from an emphasis on rote learning of procedures in mathematics towards a focus on mathematical reasoning?
trisha_poole

TCRecord: Article - 44 views

  • Education as a dwelling in the human experience of reality is ending. As with the Roman Empire, it is ending with a whimper, not a bang.
  • an education is learning to see, to think, to read, and to write.
  • Education is not chasing a grade.
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  • Ultimately an education is a deep unfolding involvement with life here on earth. The deeper the involvement in seeing and thinking, the more complex is the dance in which you participate.
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    A great article on the future of education with a view to a digital education - one where learners are not learning rote facts and figures but rather learning to engage and interact on a deeper level with the content and knowledge.
Kenuvis Romero

Memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Encoding of working memory involves the spiking of individual neurons induced by sensory input, which persists even after the sensory input disappears (Jensen and Lisman 2005; Fransen et al. 2002). Encoding of episodic memory involves persistent changes in molecular structures that alter synaptic transmission between neurons. Examples of such structural changes include long-term potentiation (LTP) or spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). The persistent spiking in working memory can enhance the synaptic and cellular changes in the encoding of episodic memory (Jensen and Lisman 2005).
  • Recent functional imaging studies detected working memory signals in both medial temporal lobe (MTL), a brain area strongly associated with long-term memory, and prefrontal cortex (Ranganath et al. 2005), suggesting a strong relationship between working memory and long-term memory. However, the substantially more working memory signals seen in the prefrontal lobe suggest that this area play a more important role in working memory than MTL (Suzuki 2007).
  • Consolidation and reconsolidation. Short-term memory (STM) is temporary and subject to disruption, while long-term memory (LTM), once consolidated, is persistent and stable. Consolidation of STM into LTM at the molecular level presumably involves two processes: synaptic consolidation and system consolidation. The former involves a protein synthesis process in the medial temporal lobe (MTL), whereas the latter transforms the MTL-dependent memory into an MTL-independent memory over months to years (Ledoux 2007). In recent years, such traditional consolidation dogma has been re-evaluated as a result of the studies on reconsolidation. These studies showed that prevention after retrieval affects subsequent retrieval of the memory (Sara 2000). New studies have shown that post-retrieval treatment with protein synthesis inhibitors and many other compounds can lead to an amnestic state (Nadel et al. 2000b; Alberini 2005; Dudai 2006). These findings on reconsolidation fit with the behavioral evidence that retrieved memory is not a carbon copy of the initial experiences, and memories are updated during retrieval.
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  • Physical exercise, particularly continuous aerobic exercises such as running, cycling and swimming, has many cognitive benefits and effects on the brain. Influences on the brain include increases in neurotransmitter levels, improved oxygen and nutrient delivery, and increased neurogenesis in the hippocampus. The effects of exercise on memory have important implications for improving children's academic performance, maintaining mental abilities in old age, and the prevention and potential cure of neurological diseases.
  • At the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University, researchers have found that memory accuracy of adults is hurt by the fact that they know more, and have more experience than children, and tend to apply all this knowledge when learning new information. The findings appeared in the August 2004 edition of the journal Psychological Science.
  • Interference can hamper memorization and retrieval. There is retroactive interference, when learning new information makes it harder to recall old information[59] and proactive interference, where prior learning disrupts recall of new information. Although interference can lead to forgetting, it is important to keep in mind that there are situations when old information can facilitate learning of new information. Knowing Latin, for instance, can help an individual learn a related language such as French – this phenomenon is known as positive transfer.[60]
  • Methods to optimize memorization[edit] Memorization is a method of learning that allows an individual to recall information verbatim. Rote learning is the method most often used. Methods of memorizing things have been the subject of much discussion over the years with some writers, such as Cosmos Rossellius using visual alphabets. The spacing effect shows that an individual is more likely to remember a list of items when rehearsal is spaced over an extended period of time. In contrast to this is cramming which is intensive memorization in a short period of time. Also relevant is the Zeigarnik effect which states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. The so-called Method of loci uses spatial memory to memorize non-spatial information.[72]
Steve Ransom

Attention versus distraction? What that big NY Times story leaves out » Niema... - 51 views

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    The web is a space whose very abundance of information - and whose very informational infrastructure - trains our attention to follow our interests. And vice versa. In that, it's empowering information as a function of interest. It's telling Vishal that it's better to spend time with video than with Vonnegut - simply because he's more interested in editing than in reading. Vishal needs needs no other justification for his choice; interest itself is its own acquittal. And we're seeing the same thing in news. While formal learning has been, in the pre-digital world, a matter of rote obligation in the service of intellectual catholicism - and news consumption has been a matter of the bundle rather than the atom - the web-powered world is creating a knowledge economy that spins on the axis of interest. Individual interest. The web inculcates a follow your bliss approach to learning that seeps, slowly, into the broader realm of information; under its influence, our notion of knowledge is slowly shedding its normative layers.
Nigel Coutts

Number Talks for Number Sense - The Learner's Way - 7 views

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    "Number Talks" is an approach to the teaching and learning of Number Sense. Rather than relying on the rote-memorisation of isolated number facts achieved through drills of "table-facts", Number Talks aim to build confident, number fluency, where learners recognise patterns within and between numbers and understand the properties of numbers and operations. Number Talks are a "mind on" learning task that engages students in an active learning process as they search for patterns, decompose and recompose numbers and develop a flexible understanding.
Martin Burrett

The Power of Repetition by @MrPatelsawesome - 34 views

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    "Rote learning defined as trying to learn something by repeating over and over has, in recent years, fallen out of fashion with western educationalists. However, I believe that fundamentally, repetition can underpin learning."
Nigel Coutts

Mathematical thinking presents teachers and students with new challenges - The Learner'... - 16 views

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    The shift away from teaching for the rote memorisation of prescribed methods requires teachers to rethink their approach to the discipline. With this new pedagogy comes a need to understand the processes of mathematical thinking in ways not previously required. When we require our students to be able to reason and problem-solve through unique challenges we also require our teachers to have an understanding of the mathematical moves that their learners are likely to call upon.
Maureen Greenbaum

Thinking - Why I'm taking full responsibility for my education - 8 views

  • High school isn’t an inspiring place. Not because of the students, but because of the credentialing process. Most schoolwork is for the sake of completion and rote learning.
  • Why should students do more than asked when their education isn’t their responsibility?
  • Good teachers actively demonstrate why what they’re teaching is interesting/useful/insightful.
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  • Good teachers don’t let the credentialing process get in the way of the students learning.
  • Bad teachers assign work merely to assess the student’s ability to complete it in a structured, timely fashion.
  • I don’t care about a piece of paper saying I’m awesome. I care about being awesome.
Maureen Greenbaum

The crucial need to hold students to a higher standard - The Week - 6 views

  • Even some high school valedictorians are taking remedial courses in college. Too many students are completely unprepared for the future.
  • Last year, the unemployment rate for Americans without a high school diploma was 14.1 percent. For those with a Bachelor's degree, it was 4.9 percent.
  • Common Core State Standards, orient instruction around critical thinking and problem solving, requiring students to demonstrate a deep understanding of concepts and then apply them to new situations.
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  • they are internationally-benchmarked and based on evidence and research about what it takes to be prepared for first-year college courses and entry level jobs leading to careers.
  • A student, for example, would no longer be required to simply memorize the formula for volume. Instead, they would need to use their conceptual understanding of volume to build different containers with the same volume. This approach differs from current standards and teaching practices, which too often place an emphasis on rote memorization over deeper understanding. 
  • Second, the standards are clear, focused, and rigorous
  • standards allow for economies of scale and the ability to share and compare across state lines.
  • Teachers in states that have adopted the Common Core can share effective practices and materials and collaborate more easily
robert morris

Education Theory/Constructivism and Social Constructivism - UCD - CTAG - 56 views

  • Deep roots classical antiquity. Socrates, in dialogue with his followers, asked directed questions that led his students to realize for themselves the weaknesses in their thinking.
    • Manuel Condoleon
       
      Good link to Socrates
    • robert morris
       
      I think this is the essence of teaching and learning - asking questions, for nothing is really true.
  • Emphasis is on the collaborative nature of learning and the importance of cultural and social context.
    • robert morris
       
      I agree - context, and culture play a very important role. And this might change from corner to corner, it can change quickly, neighbours etc
  • Believed that constructivists such as Piaget had overlooked the essentially social nature of language and consequently failed to understand that learning is a collaborative process.
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  • Constructivist learning environments provide multiple representations of reality
  • Multiple representations avoid oversimplification and represent the complexity of the real world
  • Constructivist learning environments emphasize authentic tasks in a meaningful context rather than abstract instruction out of context.
  • Constructivist learning environments provide learning environments such as real-world settings or case-based learnin
  • Constructivist learning environments encourage thoughtful reflection on experience.
  • Constructivist learning environments support "collaborative construction of knowledge through social negotiation, not competition among learners for recognition.
  • Jonassen (1994)
  • There is no absolute knowledge, just our interpretation of it. The acquisition of knowledge therefore requires the individual to consider the information and - based on their past experiences, personal views, and cultural background - construct an interpretation of the information that is being presented to them.
  • Teaching styles based on this approach therefore mark a conscious effort to move from these ‘traditional, objectivist models didactic, memory-oriented transmission models’ (Cannella & Reiff, 1994) to a more student-centred approach.
  • Students ‘construct’ their own meaning by building on their previous knowledge and experience. New ideas and experiences are matched against existing knowledge, and the learner constructs new or adapted rules to make sense of the world
  • John Dewey (1933/1998) is often cited as the philosophical founder of this approach
  • while Vygotsky (1978) is the major theorist among the social constructivists.
  • Bruner (1990) and Piaget (1972) are considered the chief theorists among the cogn
  • Dewey
  • Piaget
  • John Dewey rejected the notion that schools should focus on repetitive, rote memorization & proposed a method of "directed living" – students would engage in real-world, practical workshops in which they would demonstrate their knowledge through creativity and collaboration
  • Piaget rejected the idea that learning was the passive assimilation of given knowledge. Instead, he proposed that learning is a dynamic process comprising successive stages of adaption to reality during which learners actively construct knowledge by creating and testing their own theories of the world.
  • A common misunderstanding regarding constructivism is that instructors should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves. This is actually confusing a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a theory of knowing. Constructivism assumes that all knowledge is constructed from the learner’s previous knowledge, regardless of how one is taught. Thus, even listening to a lecture involves active attempts to construct new knowledge.
  • social interaction lay at the root of good learning.
  • Bruner builds on the Socratic tradition of learning through dialogue, encouraging the learner to come to enlighten themselves through reflection
  • Careful curriculum design is essential so that one area builds upon the other. Learning must therefore be a process of discovery where learners build their own knowledge, with the active dialogue of teachers, building on their existing knowledge.
  • Social constructivism was developed by Vygotsky. He rejected the assumption made by Piaget that it was possible to separate learning from its social context.
    • robert morris
       
      On Vgotsky`s side here - I don`t think you can forget the role of "social learning", peer to peer learning and the role of social interaction.
  • The basic tenet of constructivism is that students learn by doing rather than observing.
  • By the 1980s the research of Dewey and Vygotsky had blended with Piaget's work in developmental psychology into the broad approach of constructivism
  • 1. Discovery Learning (Bruner) In discovery learning, the student is placed in problem solving situations where they are required to draw on past experiences and existing knowledge to discover facts, relationships, and new information. Students are more likely to retain knowledge attained by engaging real-world and contextualised problem-solving than by traditional transmission methods. Models that are based upon discovery learning model include: guided discovery, problem-based learning, simulation-based learning, case-based learning, and incidental learning.
Steve Ransom

Digital Age Damaging Learning | Nicholas Carr - 72 views

  • excessive use of the internet and other forms of technology diminishes our capacity for deep, meditative thinking, "the brighter the software, the dimmer the user", a counter-revolution may be required.
  • curricula must be developed not only with the potential benefits of technology linked to every learning outcome in mind, but also the costs.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      The Faustian bargain that Postman so often wrote about
  • available where there is clear utility, to remove it when there is not
    • Steve Ransom
       
      And who do we leave this decision up to? The individual? If so, we are in big trouble.
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  • we must be mindful of any cost associated with allowing ourselves to devolve to a more machine-like state.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      NO ONE is striving for this. Just the opposite.
  • Of greatest importance, however, is the status of our thinking, understanding how we think and the effect new technologies have on our cognitive processes. This debate extends beyond the neuroscience to questions relating to what is worth knowing and what mental functions are worth preserving at their present level of development
  • As a senior high school teacher, one of my greatest bugbears is the reluctance of students to reflect on the information they have collected and plan their essays. Rather, some expect to Google their entire essay, often skipping from one hyperlink to the next until they find something that appears to be relevant, then pasting it into their essay, frequently oblivious to academic honesty and coherence of argument. The ability to discern reliability of sources is also severely lacking
    • Steve Ransom
       
      This is a by-product of failing to address and teach good research methods in a digital world and assigning work that can simply be cut and pasted. We must move beyond "reporting" in a digital, information-rich, and connected world.
  • A primary role of educators is to foster qualities that are distinctly human: our ability to reflect, reason and imagine
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Exactly... and this must happen, regardless of the types of information that we have access to. To say that technology impedes this is laughable.
  • In the curricula of tomorrow this may entail identifying topics and tasks that begin with an instruction to turn all electronic devices off.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      No- it should begin with teachers establishing and negotiating meaningful, interesting, and powerful learning opportunities with access to all available tools. The computer as a learning tool is meant to extend physical human capabilities, not weaken them. It is the low-level, rote tasks that we require that weaken them. It's time to recognize this and wake up. Blaming the technology does little more than preserve the status quo.
Jason Schmidt

School Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views

  • It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.”  His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line:  That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!
  • His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
  • As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture
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  • Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating? 
  • Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”
  • The more you reward people for doing something, or for doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward. 
  • People who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat their corporations.  The sort of schooling that results is the type almost guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
  • one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning is just a means to an end.
  • Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant primarily to raise test scores.
  • inner-city kids get the worst of the sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read: obedient).
  • “Motivation is weak because more students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.”  But why don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his premise is correct, they don’t succeed)?  What has happened to their desire to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which all children start out? 
  • if you want to see (intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but meaningful.
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    Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
Josh Flores

Common Core Curriculum Maps | - 215 views

    • Josh Flores
       
      Rote Memorization? Don't they know that's a Lower Order Thinking Skill? 
    • Josh Flores
       
      Writing an original poem could have the same effect. 
  • Moreover, once students have memorized a poem, they are able to carry it with them everywhere. It becomes part of their lives.
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  • Seminar discussions
    • Josh Flores
       
      Substantive Conversation Socratic Seminar Think-Pair-Share
  • research essays
    • Josh Flores
       
      Good use of EasyBib premium account's notebook feature
Gloria Maristany

Motivating the Child with Attention Deficit Disorder - 3 views

  • live very much in the present. Therefore, long-term goals and rewards (e.g., grades and report cards) are often ineffective motivators.
    • Gloria Maristany
       
      Reason for immediate rewards/consequences.
  • basically two time frames — now and not now.
  • This Now/Not Now worldview causes great frustration for the child, his teachers, and his parents, and must be seriously considered when designing activities and approaches for motivating the child with ADD.
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  • respond more positively to a curriculum that allows him choices and options. He will also be more likely to participate actively in tasks when there is a degree of creativity and novelty
  • the presentation should be creative, colorful, multimodal, and enjoyable.
  • pervasive and complex disorder that impacts nearly all of the child's activities and interactions.
  • The child's impulsivity ("Ready, fire, aim!") can present serious safety concerns; his distractibility makes it extraordinarily difficult for him to understand and follow instructions; his memory difficulties make even rote learning troublesome; his executive processing problems (ability to plan and prioritize) present great challenges when he attempts to plan simple daily activities; his organizational deficiencies cause him tremendous problems with homework, household tasks, and long-term projects.
  • two most important words when dealing with these special children: "support" and "challenge."
  • The adult should continually challenge the child by presenting him with activities designed to improve his behavior and his learning, while simultaneously providing him with the support that he requires to meet these goals. Support without challenge is meaningless. Challenge without support is equally ineffective.
  • Among the specific teaching strategies that may foster the child's motivation are:
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    Good description of the limitations they have and how it affects them in school.
Marianne Hart

The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 48 views

  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
  • “Creativity can be taught,”
  • it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Students are labeled as "creative" if they display a knack for art or music, and sometimes in writing, however, they are rarely recognized as creative in math or science where a lot of creativity is not only needed, but excellent for learning within those very two disciplines.
    • Bill Genereux
       
      This is precisely why creativity education is important. It is needed everywhere, not just in the arts. Those teaching outside of arts education need to start recognizing the importance of creative thinking as well.
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  • When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
  • The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.
  • When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
    • Ed Webb
       
      Surely, "more quickly"?
  • Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Likely because it was out of necessity and the hardships of life. Not that we don't have hardships and necessities, but innovation has solved a lot of problems and automation has made skills and tasks easy.
  • What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Everyday process of work or school... over time, consistent and non-prescriptive.
  • kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
  • project-based learning
  • highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
  • When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
  • solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
  • The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.
  • When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
  • The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
  • The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
  • The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.
  • “As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
  • In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
  • fact-finding
  • problem-finding
  • Next, idea-finding
  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
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    For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong-and how we can fix it.
Frederick Eberhardt

Powerful Learning: Studies Show Deep Understanding Derives from Collaborative Methods |... - 85 views

  • In essence, students must learn how to learn, while responding to endlessly changing technologies and social, economic, and global conditions.
  • students learn more deeply if they have engaged in activities that require applying classroom-gathered knowledge to real-world problems.
  • developing inquiring minds
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  • Studies of problem-based learning suggest that it is comparable, though not always superior, to more traditional instruction in teaching facts and information. However, this approach has been found to be better in supporting flexible problem solving, reasoning skills, and generating accurate hypotheses and coherent explanations.
  • design challenges need to be carefully planned, and they emphasized the importance of dynamic feedback.
  • When students have no prior experience with inquiry learning, they can have difficulty generating meaningful driving questions and logical arguments and may lack background knowledge to make sense of the inquiry.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Absolutely true. I discovered this when I used inquiry-based methods with my students in Qatar who were used to rote learning. They truly did not know where to start. They first needed to learn *how* to be inquisitive.
  • Requiring students to track and defend their thinking focused them on learning and connecting concepts in their design work
  • All the research arrives at the same conclusion: There are significant benefits for students who work together on learning activities.
  • groups outperform individuals on learning tasks and that individuals who work in groups do better on later individual assessments.
  • In successful group learning, teachers pay careful attention to the work process and interaction among students.
  • "It is not enough to simply tell students to work together. They must have a reason to take one another's achievement seriously.
  • She and her colleagues developed Complex Instruction, one of the best-known approaches, which uses carefully designed activities requiring diverse talents and interdependence among group members.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Interesting... worth checking out.
  • They require changes in curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices -- changes that are often new for teachers and students.
  •  
    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
  •  
    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
  •  
    Vocational Education meets Research in the dynamic classroom of Linda Darling-Hammond, 2008. The students are doing the research, teaching and learning. They control their own destiny and they are taking the world by storm! They are not waiting to be taught, they are teaching each other and themselves as teams of researchers. Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Powerful learning: what we know about teaching for understanding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Martin Leicht

A Breakthrough for A.I. Technology: Passing an 8th-Grade Science Test - The New York Times - 13 views

  • But others, like this question from the same exam, required logic:
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Why do we still test rote memory? Why do not more tests in involve logical choices?
  • A science test isn’t something that can be mastered just by learning rules. It requires making connections using logic
  • “We can’t compare this technology to real human students and their ability to reason,”
    • Martin Leicht
       
      And yet, AI continues to improve/make logical connections. What are we doing to help keep students improving?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The new research could lead to systems that can carry on a decent conversation.
  • the world’s leading A.I. labs have built elaborate neural networks that can learn the vagaries of language by analyzing articles and books written by humans.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      This was an improvement. Before, they showed AI thousands upon thousands of photos of dogs. In the end, AI can recognise a dog.
  • Bert learned how to guess the missing word in a sentence.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Bert (from Google) learned to fill in these missing words by analysing thousands of pages of wikipedia and online books. Bert soaked up so much with so little effort. Never send a Human to do a robots job.
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