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Few other clear-cut differences between boys' and girls' neural structures, brain activity, or neurochemistry have thus far emerged, even for something as obviously different as self-regulation.

Our actual ability differences are quite small. Although psychologists can measure statistically significant distinctions between large groups of men and women or boys and girls, there is much more overlap in the academic and even social-emotional abilities of the genders than there are differences (Hyde, 2005). To put it another way, the range of performance within each gender is wider than the difference between the average boy and girl.

The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.

Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.

When exposed to the high temperatures created by burning airplane fuel, steel columns in both towers lost strength, putting too much load on other structural supports.

When exposed to the high temperatures created by burning airplane fuel, steel columns in both towers lost strength, putting too much load on other structural supports.

Center towers lost strength rapidly when the fire reached 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Concrete heated to that temperature, though, doesn’t undergo significant physical or chemical changes; it maintains most of its mechanical properties. In other words, concrete is virtually fireproof.

We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.

I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.

The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.

Each week, two students led a discussion in class on the week's readings and ideas -- and those students determined whether or not their fellow students had met the standards.

she believes students did more work under this system

writing (she read every word, even while not assigning grades) was better than the norm.

O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a

The idea of wanting to be true to the music of a culture, to the people of that culture, and to one's students in teaching is at the heart of the discussion of authenticity.

However, teaching music without attention to its cultural context is a problem in several respects: it risks misrepresenting the musical practice being studied, it fails to take advantage of the potential benefits of culturally infused music teaching, and it promotes a conception of music as isolated sonic events rather than meaningful human practices.2 Discussion about this struggle to balance accurate performance practice with accessibility has focused on the concept of authenticity

The definitions of authenticity represented in the music education literature fall into four models: the continuum model; the twofold historical/personal model; the threefold reproduction, reality, and relevance model; and the moving-beyond-authenticity model.

Mazur believes the purpose of education is changing. It used to be about mastering a certain amount of knowledge. But knowledge is growing and changing at such a rapid rate that it's impossible to learn it all. The key now is to find and use information, not remember and repeat it. And Mazur says the goal of educators should be to help students develop the skills to understand all the new information that will be coming at them throughout their lives. In other words, the purpose of education now should be to learn how to learn.