Items to Share; 13 September 2015

Education Focus

• Text Savvy: Concept Mapping vs. Retrieval Practice

• 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:

• Donald Clark Plan B: 10 essential rules on use of GRAPHICS in online learning 'Bad graphics abound on the web and in online learning. In practice, it’s often an awkward affair with iteration after iteration and lots of comms problems, but get the art direction and graphics right and your programme will be lauded and be a better learning experience.'

• 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.

• How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition .pdf of updated and expanded edition of Bransford et al (2000)

• 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

• Rising Strong: Brené Brown on the Physics of Vulnerability and What Resilient People Have in Common | Brain Pickings

• Is it OK for psychologists to deceive? – Antonio Melechi – Aeon Psychologists used to manipulate and deceive their subjects with impunity. Did the end justify the means?

• What's the point of efficiency if you're in a rush to finish something trivial? | Oliver Burkeman | Comment is free | The Guardian 'The growing use of games to motivate people to accomplish the meaningless is putting our ability to just ‘be’ at risk '

• xkcd: I Could Care Less ...or couldn't I?

• 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.'