14 September 2015

Items to Share; 13 September 2015

Education Focus

  • Donald Clark Plan B: Hattie: Visible learning - the naked teacher - a primer 'Almost every educational intervention has a positive effect, to a degree, but what matters is to select those evidence-based interventions that work well and can make a real difference. John Hattie set out to examine, over 15 years, a synthesis of 800 meta-analyses of over 50,000 pieces of evidence, categorise, then assess their impact, namely students achievement.' and:
  • As the baby boomers retire, will there be an education bonanza? 'The baby boom generation has developed a taste for learning, but satisfying it is likely to prove a messy process. Going by current trends, late life learning will benefit those who are already most advantaged, and so further entrench existing inequalities in the quality of life among older adults.
  • So much talk about 'the brain' in education is meaningless  'You may have noticed a steady increase in the use of brain-based language in education recently. You may also have noticed that, beyond the creation of some lucrative learning tools, this language hasn’t done much to meaningfully add to the teaching/learning discourse. The reason for this is simple: although impressive sounding, the majority of educational references to the brain are devoid of any original, unique or prescriptive value. They are what we have come to call “neurosophisms”. '
  • What Success Looks Like — The Synapse — Medium 'Students either pass or fail; when they do the former, they succeed. That is generally the notion of success in education. Does this happen in the real world? Think of any successful person in society. Did they become successful because in one fell swoop they either passed or failed? No. The entertainers, innovators and creators who are all household names are successful today only because they failed. Some failed more than others. But they had an intangible trait that is missing when we in education talk about success. What they all possessed was resilience. To be truly successful, in school and in the “real world”, one has to be resilient. In education, this trait is most often glossed over. Where we lack is teaching students that it is okay to fail.' (More on this to come: see also the next link...)
Other Business
  • Economists vs. Economics by Dani Rodrik - Project Syndicate 'Economics is not the kind of science in which there could ever be one true model that works best in all contexts. The point is not “to reach a consensus about which model is right,” as Romer puts it, but to figure out which model applies best in a given setting. And doing that will always remain a craft, not a science, especially when the choice has to be made in real time.'
  • BPS Research Digest: Mental effort is contagious 'If you're about to dive into a piece of work that requires intense mental focus, you might find it helps to sit next to someone else who is concentrating hard. According to an ingenious new study published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, mental exertion is contagious: if a person near you is straining their synapses in mental effort, their mindset will automatically intensify your own concentration levels.'  

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments welcome, but I am afraid I have had to turn moderation back on, because of inappropriate use. Even so, I shall process them as soon as I can.