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the “learning paradox”: the more you struggle and even fail while you’re trying to master new information, the better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later.

let the neophytes wrestle with the material on their own for a while, refraining from giving them any assistance at the start.

These students weren’t able to complete the problems correctly. But in the course of trying to do so, they generated a lot of ideas about the nature of the problems and about what potential solutions would look like. And when the two groups were tested on what they’d learned, the second group “significantly outperformed” the first.

Replacing written text with artwork, photographs, or illustrations offers a number of advantages, especially early in the school year.  Visual imagery is very accessible and a lot less intimidating to a wide range of learners including non-readers, struggling readers, and English language learners. This enables these students a greater chance to practice some of the forms of complex thinking that they will need as the year progresses such as using text evidence, identifying theme, and making connections.

Another advantage the visual imagery has over written text is that it is very fast to decode.

Artworks can and should be treated just as a written text. By doing so, students can get their academic thinking started early, laying a foundation for them to build on throughout their school year.

By focusing on a range of issues — sexual predation, teenage suicide, bullying, sexting, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual trafficking — Dr. Boyd has shown, often to the dismay of those in the tech community who believe that the Internet is the ultimate equalizer, that issues of race, class and gender persist in the virtual world just as in the real world. The children in families characterized by alcohol and drug abuse, financial stress, divorce and sexual abuse reveal their struggles online just as they do off. “She was the first to say that the teenagers at risk off line are the same ones who are at risk online,” said Alice Marwick, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft who works closely with Dr. Boyd. “It’s not that the Internet is doing something bad to these kids, it’s that these bad things are in kids’ lives and the Internet is just a component of that.” Most broadly, with troubled teenagers and model youth alike, adolescent online behavior is a reflection of what teenagers’ social lives have always been: friendship, gossip, flirting, transgressing and keeping it all — good and bad — from parents.

Unfortunately, the system of reading we inherited from the ancient scribes —the method of reading you are most likely using right now — has been fundamentally shaped by engineering constraints that were relevant in centuries past, but no longer appropriate in our information age.

search for innovative engineering solutions aimed at making reading more efficient and effective for more people

But then, by chance, I discovered that when I used the small screen of a smartphone to read my scientific papers required for work, I was able to read with much greater facility and ease.

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."