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Peter Kronfeld

Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21memory.html

education learning testing

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 23 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.
  • These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.
  • The second experiment focused only on concept mapping and retrieval practice testing, with each student doing an exercise using each method. In this initial phase, researchers reported, students who made diagrams while consulting the passage included more detail than students asked to recall what they had just read in an essay. But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers. They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from memory.
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  • “Educators who embrace seemingly more active approaches, like concept mapping,” he continued, “are challenged to devise outcome measures that can demonstrate the superiority of such constructivist approaches.”
  • “More testing isn’t necessarily better,” said Dr. Linn, who said her work with California school districts had found that asking students to explain what they did in a science experiment rather than having them simply conduct the hands-on experiment — a version of retrieval practice testing — was beneficial. “Some tests are just not learning opportunities. We need a different kind of testing than we currently have.”
Peter Kronfeld

Children With Autism, Connecting via Bus and Train - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...necting-via-bus-and-train.html

autism trains

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Like many children with autism spectrum disorders, Ravi is fascinated by trains and buses, entranced by their motion and predictability.
  • Now, the museum, and others like it, are moving beyond accommodating the enthusiasm for trains and buses among children with autism and trying to use it to teach them how to connect with other people — and the world.
  • The link between trains and autism is well documented. Autism refers to a spectrum of disorders that typically includes impairment in social interaction and sometimes includes stereotyped interests, like trains. People with autism have difficulty processing and making sense of the world, so they are drawn to predictable patterns, which, of course, trains run by.
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  • Some researchers have been trying to harness this preoccupation to help children with autism develop. Simon Baron Cohen, who runs the autism research center at Cambridge University, found that when young children with autism spent 15 minutes a day watching animated videos of vehicles with human faces on them, their ability to recognize emotions improved after one month. “Kids with autism treat moving trains, especially ones that have limited motion like just going along the tracks, as a natural reward,” he said. “It catches their attention. Once you’ve got the child’s attention, you can do many types of teaching.”
Peter Kronfeld

If You've Got the Skills, She's Got the Job - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iedman-You-Got-the-Skills.html

education math STEM

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 18 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Many years ago, people learned to weld in a high school shop class or in a family business or farm, and they came up through the ranks and capped out at a certain skill level. They did not know the science behind welding,” so could not meet the new standards of the U.S. military and aerospace industry. “They could make beautiful welds,” she said, “but they did not understand metallurgy, modern cleaning and brushing techniques” and how different metals and gases, pressures and temperatures had to be combined.
  • Welding “is a $20-an-hour job with health care, paid vacations and full benefits,” said Tapani, but “you have to have science and math. I can’t think of any job in my sheet metal fabrication company where math is not important. If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day; you need to compute angles and understand what happens to a piece of metal when it’s bent to a certain angle.” Who knew? Welding is now a STEM job — that is, a job that requires knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math.
  • even before the Great Recession we had a mounting skills problem as a result of 25 years of U.S. education failing to keep up with rising skills demands, and it’s getting worse.
Peter Kronfeld

Brain Calisthenics Help Break Down Abstract Ideas, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07learn.html

education learning math

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 07 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against.
  • Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of this same bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle, new studies suggest.
  • Yet there is growing evidence that a certain kind of training — visual, fast-paced, often focused on classifying problems rather then solving them — can build intuition quickly
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  • In a test on the skills given afterward, on problems the students hadn’t seen before, the group got 73 percent correct. A comparison group of seventh graders, who’d been taught how to solve such problems as part of regular classes, scored just 25 percent on the test.
  • “I find that often students will try to solve problems by doing only what they’ve been told to do, and if that doesn’t work they give up,” said Joe Wise, a physics instructor at New Roads School, where the study was done. “Here they’re forced to try what makes sense to them and to keep trying. The brain is very good at sorting out patterns if you give it the chance and the right feedback.”
  • Peter Kronfeld on 07 Jun 11
     
    Teaching 'perceptual learning skills' seems more effective than teaching 'mastery of the rules'. Developing an intuitive grasp of a problem (eg. fractions or graphs) helps students retain the ability.
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