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Katie Day

How to Teach Students to Think Like Historians | History News Network - 0 views

  • The seminal figure in the current movement is Sam Wineburg, a cognitive psychologist who possesses a deep appreciation of the philosophy and practice of history.  His book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Temple University Press, 2001), which includes research reaching back into the 1980s, is a founding text, along with Knowing, Learning, and Teaching History, cited above.  Wineburg is now Professor of Education and History at Stanford University, and director of the Stanford History Education Group, of which Reisman was an active member.
  • The seminal figure in the current movement is Sam Wineburg, a cognitive psychologist who possesses a deep appreciation of the philosophy and practice of history.  His book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Temple University Press, 2001), which includes research reaching back into the 1980s, is a founding text, along with Knowing, Learning, and Teaching History, cited above.  Wineburg is now Professor of Education and History at Stanford University, and director of the Stanford History Education Group, of which Reisman was an active member.
  • The seminal figure in the current movement is Sam Wineburg, a cognitive psychologist who possesses a deep appreciation of the philosophy and practice of history.  His book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Temple University Press, 2001), which includes research reaching back into the 1980s, is a founding text, along with Knowing, Learning, and Teaching History, cited above.  Wineburg is now Professor of Education and History at Stanford University, and director of the Stanford History Education Group, of which Reisman was an active member.
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    "The seminal figure in the current movement is Sam Wineburg, a cognitive psychologist who possesses a deep appreciation of the philosophy and practice of history. His book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Temple University Press, 2001), which includes research reaching back into the 1980s, is a founding text, along with Knowing, Learning, and Teaching History, cited above. Wineburg is now Professor of Education and History at Stanford University, and director of the Stanford History Education Group, of which Reisman was an active member."
Sean McHugh

The Scientific Case For Teaching Cursive Handwriting to Your Kids Is Weaker Than You Think - 2 views

  • here is ample evidence that writing by hand aids cognition in ways that typing does not: It’s well worth teaching. And I confess I’m old-fashioned enough to think that, regardless of proven cognitive benefits, a good handwriting style is an important and valuable skill, not only when your laptop batteries run out but as an expression of personality and character.
  • if they have the time and inclination.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      But should we be dedicating swathes of curriculum time towards this? Surely not.
  • what teachers “know” about how children learn is sometimes more a product of the culture in which they’re immersed than a result of research and data.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Never were truer words written.
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  • What does research say on these issues? It has consistently failed to find any real advantage of cursive over other forms of handwriting
  • our real understanding of how children respond to different writing styles is surprisingly patchy and woefully inadequate
  • Evidence supports teaching both formats of handwriting and then letting each student choose which works best for him or her
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Shouldn't we include touch typing here as well?
  • So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade
  • They had apparently imbibed manuscript style from their reading experience (it more closely resembles print), even without being taught it explicitly
  • While pupils writing in cursive were slower on average, their handwriting was also typically more legible than that of pupils taught only manuscript. But the mixed style allowed for greater speed with barely any deficit in legibility.
  • The grip that cursive has on teaching is sustained by folklore and prejudice
  • for typical children, there’s some reason to think manuscript has advantages
  • freeing up cognitive resources that are otherwise devoted to the challenge of simply making the more elaborate cursive forms on paper will leave children more articulate and accurate in what they write
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Likewise if they can touch-type instead of wrestling with ascenders and descenders...
  • the difference in appearance between cursive and manuscript could inhibit the acquisition of reading skills, making it harder for children to transfer skills between learning to read and learning to write because they simply don’t see cursive in books.
  • There’s good evidence, both behavioral and neurological, that a “haptic” (touch-related) sense of letter shapes can aid early reading skills, indicating a cognitive interaction between motor production and visual recognition of letters. That’s one reason, incidentally, why it’s valuable to train children to write by hand at all, not just to use a keyboard.
  • even if being taught both styles might have some advantages, it’s not clear that those cognitive resources and classroom hours couldn’t be better deployed in other ways.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      In other ways... the time it takes for kids to learn cursive, spread over years, compared to the relatively short time it takes to master touch-typing being a case in point.
  • that cursive is still taught primarily because of parental demand and tradition, rather than because there is any scientific basis for its superiority in learning
  • inertia and preconceptions seem to distort perception and policy at the expense of the scientific evidence
  • How much else in education is determined by what’s “right,” rather than what’s supported by evidence?
  • Beliefs about cursive are something of a hydra: You cut off one head, and another sprouts. These beliefs propagate through both the popular and the scientific literature, in a strange mixture of uncritical reporting and outright invention, which depends on myths often impossible to track to a reliable source.
  • the reasons to reject cursive handwriting as a formal part of the curriculum far outweigh the reasons to keep it.
  • This must surely lead us to wonder how much else in education is determined by a belief in what is “right,” unsupported by evidence.
  • it’s often the case that the very lack of hard, objective evidence about an issue, especially in the social sciences, encourages a reliance on dogma instead
  • There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?
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    There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?
Sean McHugh

Daphne Bavelier: Your brain on video games - YouTube - 0 views

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    "Daphne Bavelier: Your brain on video games" How do fast-paced video games affect the brain? Step into the lab with cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier to hear surprising news about how video games, even action-packed shooter games, can help us learn, focus and, fascinatingly, multitask.
Jeffrey Plaman

To make it Google-proof, make it personal - Home - Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk ... - 2 views

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    "The program for this year's ISTE had a few sessions with "Google-proofing" in the title. Since, I suppose no one copies directly from print sources anymore, "Googling" and "plagiarizing" are synonymous. And as professor Hokanson suggests in the quote above, when there is a direct transfer of information from source to student product - with no cognitive processing stop in-between - little learning occurs as a result of the assignment. It is busy work that no one likes."
Katie Day

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Article on kids, technology, multi-tasking, and attention.... refers to recent research in cognitive science re children and digital device use
Keri-Lee Beasley

Cognitive Benefits of Playing Video Games | Psychology Today - 2 views

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    If you are a parent who has been limiting your child's computer play because of the claims you have read of harmful effects, the research summarized here and in my previous posts on video gaming might give you pause.  The bulk of the research suggests that the claims about negative effects of video gaming are largely myths and the positive effects are real.  As children know in their bones, the kinds of mental skills that video games help to develop are among the skills that are increasingly important in today's world.
Sean McHugh

How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn? | MindShift - 2 views

  • “We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”
  • media multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way.
  • But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts.
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  • Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”
  • Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at once, Meyer acknowledges, but “they are deluded,
  • This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated
  • “The good thing about this phenomenon is that it’s a relatively discrete behavior that parents actually can do something about,” she says. “It would be hard to enforce a total ban on media multitasking, but parents can draw a line when it comes to homework and studying—telling their kids, ‘This is a time when you will concentrate on just one thing.’ ”
  • Stop fretting about how much they’re on Facebook. Don’t harass them about how much they play video games. The digital native boosters are right that this is the social and emotional world in which young people live. Just make sure when they’re doing schoolwork, the cell phones are silent, the video screens are dark, and that every last window is closed but one.
Keri-Lee Beasley

How Might Video Games Be Good for Us? - 0 views

  • What is it about games that is transcendent? Perhaps it’s the fact that games are optional, they are obstacles that we volunteer to overcome. Games are what we choose to do. They are what we are drawn to when we have a choice about how to spend our time and energy.  Games are freedom.
  • There is something transcendent about playing games that lifts us up and out of the tedium and pain of everyday life.
  • When we ask “Are games good for us?” we should take more seriously the idea that games helps us feel better, in the moment, and that this is important work. Reducing the time we spend experiencing negative emotions and increasing the time we spend experiencing positive emotions is a fundamental good in and of itself. Even if games don’t change anything else in our lives, the power to change how we feel in the moment is a very good thing indeed.
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  • Parents who spend more time playing games with their kids have better relationships with them
  • improve children’s ability to manage difficult emotions
  • Children who spend more time playing videogames score higher on tests of creativity.
  • Gamers of all ages perform better than non-gamers on tests of attention, speed, accuracy, and multi-tasking.
  • Scientists have found a wide variety of cognitive, emotional and social benefits to gaming
  • Is gameplay good for us?
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    Based on research not just opinion. What is it about games that is transcendent? Perhaps it's the fact that games are optional, they are obstacles that we volunteer to overcome. Games are what we choose to do. They are what we are drawn to when we have a choice about how to spend our time and energy.  Games are freedom.
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    Article with lots of links to research around the subject of games being good for us.
Sean McHugh

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | WIRED - 1 views

  • he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think.
  • In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”
  • That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.
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  • “So,” Juárez Correa said, “what do you want to learn?”
  • human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum.
  • inland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.
  • n Finland, teachers underwent years of training to learn how to orchestrate this new style of learning; he was winging it. He began experimenting with different ways of posing open-ended questions on subjects ranging from the volume of cubes to multiplying fractions.
  • Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”
  • They do it by emphasizing student-led learning and collaboration
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    In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills." That's why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn't a commodity that's delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students' own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion-and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.
Katie Day

The Case for Play - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

  • "It's amazing what you can do with boxes and junk," he says. That could almost be the slogan of the New York Coalition for Play, which provided the boxes and junk. The nonprofit association ran one of the two dozen booths at the Ultimate Block Party, an event last fall that brought together companies like Disney, Crayola, and Lego, along with researchers from Columbia and MIT, and attracted thousands of parents and children. The goal was to "celebrate the science of play" and to push back against the notion that education happens only when students are seated at their desks, staring at chalkboards, and scribbling furiously in their notebooks.
  • Within the world of those who take play seriously, there are multiple camps, each with its own dearly held tenets. There are the Free Players, who argue that play is a human right and that adults should more or less leave kids alone. There are the Play Skeptics, who see play as useful for blowing off steam but are dubious about its cognitive upside. And there are Play Moderates, who advocate a mix of free play, adult-guided play, and traditional classroom instruction.
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    "How a handful of researchers are trying to save childhood" by Tom Barlett.... Interesting article on the range of research on the importance of play.... I will be buying some of the books mentioned in the article for the PD collection of the library.
Keri-Lee Beasley

Music Makes You a Better Reader, Says Neuroscience - 0 views

  • “We’ve added a critical new chapter to the story about music and education,” says Kraus. “Due to the overlap between neural circuits dedicated to speech and music, and the distributed network of cognitive, sensorimotor, and reward circuits engaged during music making, it would appear that music training is a particularly potent driver of experience-dependent plasticity in the brain that influences processing of sound related to academics.”
David Caleb

Children benefit from the right sort of screen time - life - 26 March 2014 - New Scientist - 2 views

    • David Caleb
       
      Great quote - no effect on those that played video games.
  • For instance, a recent longitudinal study of 11,000 British children found that those who watched TV for 3 hours or more a day at age 5 had a small increase in behavioural problems two years later compared with those who watched for under an hour. But they found no effects at all for those who played computer games.
  • "It doesn't say anything about what you're using that time for."
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  • When you separate the different types of screen out, the effects start to vary.
  • Passively watching TV is not the same as learning to read on a touchscreen, which is not the same as killing monsters on a console
  • First of all, lumping all screens into one category is not helpful. "Screen time is a really enticing measure because it's simple – it's usually described as the number of hours a day using screen-based technology. But it's completely meaningless,"
  • "Children will learn from what they watch, whether that means learning letters and numbers, slapstick humour or aggressive behaviour,
  • But they found no effects at all for those who played computer games.
  • "The best research suggests that the content children view is the best predictor of cognitive effects,"
  • The study found that all the children enjoy reading more when they look at stories using books and a touchscreen compared to just books.
  • But they found no effects at all for those who played computer games
  • rise in BMI
  • hard to tease apart whether screen time actually causes the effects or whether they are linked in some other way
  • "It is impossible to determine with certainty that TV is causing obesity, and it is likely that other factors are involved in the complex problem of childhood obesity,
  • Her own studies have shown that children who struggle to learn using books often made more progress with iPads.
  • research in schools also found that iPads made children more cooperative and helped quieter kids to speak up
  • children receive immediate feedback
  • children who watch age-appropriate, educational TV programmes often do better on tests of school readiness.
  • What is becoming clear is that it's not the technologies themselves we should be worried out but how they are used and how people interact with them
  • A lot of it is common sense. Don't unthinkingly hand over your device. There are educational apps whose benefits are backed up by research, says Flewitt.
  • Five hours sitting in front of the TV is not the same as 5 hours of some TV, a couple of hours playing on Dance Dance Revolution or some other kind of active game, followed by a Skype session with a grandparent.
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