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#thingsweshouldavoid

Academics and students alike should be making better use of Wikipedia, a major study of digital technology use in Higher Education has recommended.

Scientists have long known that sleep, memory and learning are deeply connected but how has remained a mystery. The question is, does the mechanism that promotes sleep also consolidate memory, or do two distinct processes work together? In other words, is memory consolidated during sleep because the brain is quiet or are memory neurons actually putting us to sleep? In a recent paper, researchers make a case for the latter.

Brain-training games require the user to perform certain tasks on a computer. The games may make the user more skilled at narrow tasks, but there's little evidence they make the user smarter overall or less likely to experience cognitive decline, Dr. Beristain said.

No surprise--don't believe claims by marketing companies. It's not easy to change broad brain functioning.

"It is an accepted belief now that our students are all homo sapiens digitalis. They grew up with computers and therefore are naturally adept at using them, right? By the same logic, we could say that anyone born in the West after about 1850 is a "textual native," with the rise of mass media meaning everyone over the last 150 years has been surrounded by the written word. (A moment’s consideration of the persistence of illiteracy should put that concept to bed.) If the existence of technology prior to one’s birth conferred a particular affinity for it, there wouldn’t be so many lousy drivers on the road. After all, everyone alive today was born after the advent of the Model T."

#DigitalNativeMyth #EdPsych

"The truth is we live here because we know a different Alabama. It is a place that trained astronauts for the moon and supplied marble for the steps of the U.S. Capitol. It sends doctors to fight AIDS in the prisons of Africa, and gathers researchers from across the globe to fight cancer and diabetes and obesity and other ailments that affect all the world. It builds cars and airplanes and skyscrapers.

...Why, you'd live here for the same reasons you'd live anywhere. Because of a job. Or family. Or love. Or circumstance. Or simply because it is home, whether the weather is fair or foul.

A new study, which may have implications for approaches to education, finds that brain mechanisms engaged when people allow their minds to rest and reflect on things they've learned before may boost later learning.

It is claimed one in five students have taken the ‘smart’ drug Modafinil to boost their ability to study and improve their chances of exam success. But new research into the effects of Modafinil has shown that healthy students could find their performance impaired by the drug.

Good example of why it's important to look for interactions of treatment effects with other participant characteristics

#Intelligence

An educational approach focused on the development of children’s executive functions – the ability to avoid distractions, focus attention, hold relevant information in working memory, and regulate impulsive behavior – improved academic learning in and beyond kindergarten, according to a new study.

There's a lot to be wary about in studying programs that claim to modify important aspects of cognition (breadth of transfer [e.g., are you just training one narrow skill? I'm looking at you, "brain" game sites], persistence in effects). But this study sounds promising in terms of looking for effects on a broad array of tasks and long-term effects for a training program.

#Intelligence #EdPsyc

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.

See also Steve Novella's summary: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/lessons-from-dunning-kruger/

From New York to California, parents are taking lessons to learn how to help their kids with homework.

10 common pitfalls in reading research

#Researchmethods #EdResearch

Every 20 years the MCAT undergoes a comprehensive review and overhaul. The latest changes in the test, which take effect next April, will include a new section that reflects a growing sense within the medical profession that doctors who are conscious of important issues in the humanities – including the social sciences – may be better physicians than those who are not, especially with a patient population that is ever more diverse.

My take: MCAT is taking advantage of efforts to "teach to the test" (and students' efforts to tailor their own undergrad experience) to try to create more well-rounded doctors.

#EdMeasurement #AdmissionsTests

A new study looks at how teachers and students use technology inside and outside the classroom. It turns out that members of today's younger Net Generation aren't more tech savvy than their teachers just because they were born into a world full of computers. In fact, if it weren't for the coaxing and support of their educators, many students would never use their electronic devices for more than playing games or listening to music, say experts.

My take: Students can be very fluent with technology, but they still have to be taught and helped to identify/pursue learning goals. I think the biggest thing kids have over teachers in using tech is just a willingness to click around and figure things out (and not expecting to know how to do something immediately). In other words, an "approach-orientation" to new technology.

#EdTech #DigitalNativeFallacy

Myths about the brain are common among teachers worldwide and are hampering teaching, according to new research. The report highlights several areas where new findings from neuroscience are becoming misinterpreted by education, including brain-related ideas regarding early educational investment, adolescent brain development and learning disorders such as dyslexia and ADHD.

It's amazing how incorrect ideas (the 10% myth!) take on a life of their own. So much of the brain-based educational suggestions are bogus right now. There's usually a huge gap between the artificial tasks you can do in an MRI machine and the complexity of learning and child development. Hopefully this gap will narrow with better research collaborations between educational and neuroscience researchers.

#Neuroscience #ResearchFails

Dr. Lai explores how cognitive labs improve test item quality. High-quality assessments enable test users to make valid interpretations about what learners know and can do, which implies that assessments need to measure the things they set out to measure.

#EdMeasurement #CognitiveLabs

Telling youths who are juggling multiple electronic devices to 'focus on the task at hand' may not always be good advice, according to research. Contrary to popular belief that multitasking leads to poor performance, researchers found the opposite is true for adolescents who spend a lot of time switching between media devices and tasks. "Maybe practice really does make perfect," one investigator said.

My take: The classic finding is that those that think they are better at multitasking actually perform worse. So this result is really surprising! Possible explanations: (1) these researchers' tasks did not really require in-depth processing (playing to the strength in shallow processing for multitaskers); (2) a generation multi-tasking from an early age actually can develop more capacity for deep processing of multiple tasks; (3) something else. Recent work with brain scans and multi-tasking indicate there may be other costs to multi-tasking.

#MediaMultiTasking

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