Items to Share: 24 May 2015

Education Focus

• How should I revisit past content? | Bodil's blog The three part lesson; the 5 minute lesson plan; the 7 Es lesson structure; the countless other lesson planning proformas I’ve encountered. What do they all have in common? Despite being wildly popular, they place no emphasis on recalling and revisiting prior learning. Memory deserves far more love and attention than this. [ ] Recaps should be a nonnegotiable part of practically every lesson.

• No, Smartphones Aren't Making Children Autistic | Big Think

• What's the best, most effective way to take notes? [theconversation.com] 'If it feels like you forget new information almost as quickly as you hear it, even if you write it down, that’s because we tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of first reading or hearing it. If we take notes effectively, however, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information we receive.'

• The Literacy Blog: i.t.a: a great idea but a dismal failure 'Talk to anyone today who was taught to read through i.t.a. (Initial Teaching Alphabet) and they will almost invariably tell you how they’ve never been able to spell correctly since. [ ] As i.t.a. was more or less abandoned in the sixties/early seventies (though it did cling on for much longer in some places), many of today’s generation of teachers will never even have heard of it except from their parents or grandparents! So why write a blog posting about it?'

• Feedback from teachers doesn't always help pupils improve [theconversation.com] 'What looks feasible in controlled experiments or in theory may not work so well in practice. Once the researchers with their extra funding have gone away, and the intervention moves away from the enthusiastic schools volunteering to take part in the study, perhaps the “effect” of feedback on attainment drops. When rolled out across the board to all pupils and all schools, any advantage may be reduced or even lost because of the challenges, such as time pressure, that teachers face in implementing feedback strategies in the classroom. Some teachers may also exhibit sullen resentment at being told how to do something that seems so basic.'

Other Business

• Competence, Performance, and Climate – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education [Geoff Pullum] 'Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance has been controversial in linguistics and psycholinguistics for 50 years. The proponents of generative grammar presuppose it and rely on it, and have tried explaining the distinction many times, often unsuccessfully. I recently came across a neat way to encapsulate it that comes not from a linguist but from a mathematical meteorologist.'

• How One Psychologist Is Tackling Human Biases in Science [nautil.us] 'Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.” Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, it didn’t actually show that any particular result was wrong. Instead, it showed that the statistics of reported positive findings was not consistent with how often one should expect to find them. As Ioannidis concluded more recently, “many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of research resources are wasted.”'

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): The shortest scientific paper ever published  

• Most people want to know risk of overdiagnosis, but aren't told [theconversation.com] 'An Australian survey released today has found a large majority of people report they’ve never been told by doctors about the danger of being overdiagnosed – and an equally large majority say they want to be informed. [ ] This is the first time anywhere in the world the general community has been asked about their knowledge and views on the “modern epidemic” of overdiagnosis, which happens when someone is diagnosed with a disease that won’t actually harm them. Being overdiagnosed means you’re likely to be over-treated, and potentially suffer the harms of that treatment without getting any of its benefits.'