“ Your brain starts rotting away after just ten minutes of AI use,” Vice headlined this week. Similar interpretations of a new preprint on AI use and cognitive performance appeared elsewhere as well. When I discussed the research on Belgian National radio, I tried to present the study more accurately. The study itself, however, is more interesting than the headlines suggest. Researchers from Carnegie… Read More What remains when AI is gone?
This is a tip from one of my sons! Check here for more Funny on Sunday.
The article in The Athletic about Carl Hendrick and motivation is interesting precisely because it pushes against a very familiar idea: that motivation comes first and achievement follows naturally afterwards. Hendrick argues almost the opposite. Small experiences of success, he says, are often what create motivation in the first place. There is something valuable in… Read More What Carl Hendrick and The New York Times May Get Wrong About Motivation
This week, I gave a talk on well-being, motivation, and resilience. But as I drove home afterwards, I realised that there can be something uncomfortable about how we speak about student well-being today, with the focus on “resilience,” “grit,” or “coping,” As if the most important question becomes how students learn to deal better with… Read More Why student well-being isn’t just about resilience
The title of the study by Trinh and colleagues sounds almost like a gift for every speaker, teacher, or trainer who has ever given a mediocre session: Conversations About Boring Topics Are More Interesting Than We Think. Done. Case closed. Apparently, boring lessons are allowed again. Except the research doesn’t say that at all. The researchers… Read More Can boring subjects become fascinating after all?
Why does a child feel connected to a school, or not? It is a place where they spend many hours of their lives, yet they may click or not. Research into this question already exists, but remarkably, many of those studies focus on adolescents or older pupils. A new study in the British Educational Research Journal, therefore,… Read More What makes children feel connected to school?
One of the underlying things I keep returning to on this blog is how difficult humans are with uncertainty. We like certainty. Clear answers. Strong predictions. Education debates are full of them, too. Yet reality rarely cooperates that neatly. This short BBC Ideas video featuring statistician David Spiegelhalter offers a remarkably accessible introduction to Bayesian… Read More Why Bayesian Thinking Matters More Than Ever
I sometimes feel like I am repeating myself. But the effects of the smartphone ban debate in schools continue to make for interesting research. For instance, a new NBER working paper by Henry Saffer attempts to causally investigate, for the first time, the effects of school-wide smartphone bans in the United Statesfor the first time . Jonathan… Read More Smartphone bans and mental health: new study tempers major claims
Social-emotional learning, or SEL as it is often abbreviated, remains one of those topics where discussions veer off in all directions remarkably quickly. For some, it is almost the solution to everything that goes wrong in education: from bullying to learning deficits, and from well-being to citizenship. For others, it has become nothing more than… Read More Does social-emotional learning really work? A new meta-analysis on prosocial behavior adds nuance to the debate.
It’s Monday, I know, but this is too funny to wait for Sunday to share with you! View this post on Instagram