This is a bit of a different kind of study for this blog, although many may have noticed that I do like the history of education. In this study, the researchers see a link between the evolution of teaching and the rise of the complexity of the tools we use as a species. From the… Read More The human ability to teach and our use of complex tools may have evolved together
I have been fascinated by the effects of the collective in education – e.g. group composition – for a while now. No wonder this study also caught my attention as it shows that a student’s experience with math is affected by the composition of the group they are in. Weak students in high-performing math classes,… Read More The effect of the group on learning math, or the “Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect”
One of the most-read posts on this blog the past few weeks was on the effect the pandemic has had on education. Bottom-line of the 3 studies I mentioned in that post: the online learning didn’t have the same effect for most of the pupils and students and inequality has been on the rise. This… Read More New data on COVID and education confirm trends, but there is also some hope
I debunked this myth – made popular by Ken Robinson – a long time on this blog, and also more extensively in our first Urban Myths book. This new video uses new research to further debunk this idea. Link to the mentioned study under this video. The summary of the study by Tamara Paulin et… Read More Do schools kill creativity? New research debunks this myth again!
This talk Martin and I had, was inspired by this post and this post.
It’s something I’ve head over and over again but that is corrected in this preprint by Cesario, Johnsson & Eisthen from which this is the abstract: A widespread misconception in much of psychology holds that (1) as vertebrate animals evolved, “newer” brain structures were added over existing “older” brain structures and (2) these newer, more… Read More A popular but incorrect idea: our brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside
We’ve known the important impact of positive student-teacher relationships on learning for a long time, but this study adds an important other reason to invest in this kind of relationship: health. Do note that this study is also correlational in nature, although the researchers tried to bypass this by looking at siblings in a large… Read More Positive student-teacher relationships, not so much peer relationships, benefit students’ long-term health
My previous post on what the effect on learning has been of the different school closures around the globe has gone a bit viral. A reaction I’ve heard before is that while the schools were closed and while teachers were doing their best to have a kind of distance education, children were probably learning other… Read More For the people who think that children have learned something else valuable during lockdown, you are probably wrong.
With a second wave hurting Europe and the numbers getting worse again in the US, this is not a post I wanted to write. During the first wave many schools closed and a lot of teachers had to move online. This was a gigantic effort, but now the first studies are coming in and the… Read More Some really bad news about learning during this pandemic, based on actual data from 3 different countries
This is the kind of research that always makes me feel a bit itchy. For the research, the scientists used machine learning to analyze over 7 million social media posts and were able to predict the academic success of Russian high school students with an accuracy of 94%. The model generates its predictions based on… Read More Show me your tweets and this computer tells you if you will succeed in school?
