Learning&Technology

a national policy exists that requires schools to avoid ability grouping of students in what was described as preventing a “dead-end education for students.”

Teachers generally teach approximately 19 hours per week. The balance of their time is focused on working with their colleagues, reaching out to families and other duties

96% of teachers are unionized

High levels of teacher education and preparation allow them to be more independent in the classroom.

Broad commitment to the vision of a knowledge-based society.

Educational equality

Education is free of charge to all, including books, meals, transportation and health care

“Our secret is investing in early intervention so that students don’t need it later.”

Sweden and Norway spend less on the front end and more later in remediation.

The principal works as a pedagogical director.

A culture of trust in which no school inspectors or national exams exist.

Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistake

The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behavior, anticipate rewards and regulate attention

second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness.

subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain,

scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck

Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mindset

and those with a growth mindset,

subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes

those with a growth mindset generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes.

increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance.

When kids were praised for their effort, nearly 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles.

when kids were praised for their intelligence, most of them went for the easier test.

According to Dweck, praising kids for intelligence encourages them to “look” smart, which means that they shouldn’t risk making a mistake.

Students praised for their intelligence almost always chose to bolster their self-esteem by comparing themselves with students who had performed worse on the test. In contrast, kids praised for their hard work were more interested in the higher-scoring exams. They wanted to understand their mistakes, to learn from their errors, to figure out how to do better.

The experience of failure had been so discouraging for the “smart” kids that they actually regressed.

The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education

4 sense thinking is uncritical, episodic, and disjointed, but it is also powerful because it is taken for granted”. Thus whilst the past ten years have undoubtedly witnessed significant changes in the technological practices and predilections of children, young people and young adults, it would seem sensible to reconsider the status of the ‘digital native’ description as a prima facie account of young people’s lives in the early twenty- first century. In particular, there is a pressing need to develop and promote realistic understandings of young people and digital technology if information professionals (especially librarians, teachers and other information specialists) are to play useful and meaningful roles in supporting current generations of young people. Against this background the present paper now goes on to question the accuracy and primacy of the ‘digital native literature’ in reflecting the realities of young people’s actual engagements with digital media and technology. IMPLICATIONS OF THE DIGITAL NATIVE DISCOURSE We should first examine in closer detail the broad body of work that can be said to constitute the digital native literature1, particularly in terms of how the conditions, capabilities and consequences of young people’s technology use are portrayed. In this sense, there are a number of differing practices and dispositions that are associated with the digital native condition: i) The empowered di