Federal education law now requires one non-academic measure of school progress, which has led some districts to consider including students’ social and emotional growth as a performance measure.
She writes that even the researchers who popularized terms like “grit” think using it to measure school effectiveness is a bad idea:
The absence of images in podcasts seems to be a source of their creative potential. Without visuals, listeners are required to fill the gaps—and when these listeners are children, the results can be powerful.
Not only are children listening and responding creatively, observations suggest they’re also learning.
When it comes to using public radio in the classroom, Brady-Myerov believes three-to-five-minute segments are most effective, leaving the teacher significant time to build a lesson around the audio.
That said, a number of schools have already begun incorporating longer podcasts into their curricula, to great success.
high-school teachers in California, Connecticut, Chicago, and a handful of other states have been using Radiolab, This American Life, StoryCorps, and, overwhelmingly, Serial.
TeachersPayTeachers.com (a site where educators can purchase lesson plans) saw a 21 percent increase in downloads of plans related to podcasts in 2014, and a 650 percent increase in 2015.
Research further supports the benefits of audio learning for children. When words are spoken aloud, kids can understand and engage with ideas that are two to three grade-levels higher than their reading level would normally allow.
Aural learning is particularly helpful for students who have dyslexia, are blind, or for whom English is their second language, who might struggle with reading or find it helpful to follow a transcript while listening.
The idea that individuals have different learning styles, such as auditory or kinesthetic, is a pernicious myth. Boser compares it to the flat-earth myth — highly intuitive, but wrong.
Almost 90 percent of respondents agreed that simply re-reading material is "highly effective" for learning. Research suggests the opposite.
On the topic of "growth mindset," more than one-quarter of respondents believed intelligence is "fixed at birth". Neuroscience says otherwise.
Nearly 60 percent argued that quizzes are not an effective way to gain new skills and knowledge. In fact, quizzing yourself on something you've just read is a great example of active learning, the best way to learn.
More than 40 percent of respondents believed that teachers don't need to know a subject area such as math or science, as long as they have good instructional skills. In fact, research shows that deep subject matter expertise is a key element in helping teachers excel.
"Parents' opinions are important, but teaching is a real craft," Boser says. "A lot of science goes into it. And we need to do more to respect that."
Edited highlights of a talk by John Hattie where he outlines some of the most successful methods to promote learning.
To join a network of teachers who aim to put evidence into practice, visit
www.ebtn.org.uk
For training sessions by Mike Bell in the UK on evidence-based classroom methods visit www.educationevidence.com or contact mikebell@educationevidence.com
For training in John Hattie's 'Visible Learning Plus':
In the UK: Osiris Educational www.osiriseducational.co.uk
In the USA: Lead and Learn www.leadandlearn.com
In Scandinavia: JN Partnership www.challenginglearning.com
In Australia: Macmillan Professional Learning www.macmillanprofessionallearning.com.au
I recently read a popular science book on a topic that I felt I needed to learn more about. The book was well written, ideas were clearly explained, and I finished the book knowing a lot more about the history of the subject than beforehand. However, I don't feel I understand the key ideas in the book any better. I won't mention the name of the book or the author because this post isn't really about that specific book. It's about how I feel books of this nature often fail to deliver on what they implicitly promise: that you will understand the science contained within their pages.
Search engines are, in a sense, the heartbeat of the internet; "googling" has become a part of everyday speech and is even recognized by Merriam-Webster as a grammatically correct verb. It's a common misconception, however, that googling a search term will reveal every site out there that addresses your search. In fact, typical search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing actually access only a tiny fraction - estimated at 0.03% - of the internet. The sites that traditional searches yield are part of what's known as the Surface Web, which is comprised of indexed pages that a search engine's web crawlers are programmed to retrieve