What and how students learn can have toxic effects on how well they learn thereafter. It’s vitally important that educators understand this.
What does it mean that most of our children are CHRONICALLY IMPROFICIENT in the skill areas most critically important for success in school?
Pedagogically-strategically, leading learners into confusion means we can meet them in the confusion – we can arrange to be together in the confusion. For both their learning and ours, feedback, from their experience of confusion, is the best possible source of intelligence from which to tune/improve instructional design.
Higher Vocabulary ~ Higher Intelligence ~ Higher Income = Reading Matters It must be added that the differences in vocabulary here are not differences learned in oral conversation. After grade 4 vocabulary growth is largely driven through literacy not speech. Because most of the difference in adult vocabulary is a result of reading, using vocabulary as […]
Working Memory: IQ is not fixed. For better and worse, learning changes IQ. Because intelligence both shapes and is shaped by learning our conversation about the plasticity of IQ is another case in point for: “I” become the “me” I learn to be.
In response to a Harvard University release summarized by Brain Mysteries: Re: Wiring the brain, through experience Whether our brain’s ‘wiring’ starts minimal and extends through learning or starts maximal and is pruned by learning is less important to our common understanding than ‘getting’ that (to a profoundly significantly degree) our brain’s wiring is learned.
This is in response to David Roberts’ article: “Getting used to being in charge of the planet” David Roberts (DR): “the decisions made by people alive today will determine the fate of life on Earth for centuries to come” Yes. And, it’s always been true that what each generation profoundly affects the generations that follow. The […]
From “Brain Mysteries” 5-2-2012: Tape measures. Rulers. Graphs. The gas gauge in your car, and the icon on your favorite digital device showing battery power. The number line and its cousins – notations that map numbers onto space and often represent magnitude – are everywhere. Most adults in industrialized societies are so fluent at using […]
More great evidence for the vastly under appreciated role of learning in brain health and development – another example that not only do “I” learn, “I am learned” – we become who we learn to become. Highly recommended reading. Wall Street Journal: 4-30-2012 The Bilingual Brain Is Sharper and More Focused, Study Says
From Brain Mysteries 4-20-12: “We’re seeing that there are a lot of effects of social status on genes, including our own, but we are also seeing that many of the changes aren’t permanent …” Tung said [ lead author Jenny Tung, a visiting assistant professor in Duke University’s evolutionary anthropology department]. This study is “just the tip of […]
