Nonpartisan Education Group

A recent ‘Best Evidence in Brief’ reported on a study comparing listening with longhand note-taking, with photo-taking, and without note-taking. This is what they say:

With the usage of smart phones becoming increasingly pervasive, taking photos to record information in class allows students to store more information with less effort. Many studies have demonstrated that longhand note-taking facilitates deeper encoding of information and reduces mind-wandering, but little research has investigated the learning outcomes of the photo-taking strategy, so a recent study was conducted to compare their effectiveness.

The sample of this study included 100 college students between the ages of 18-32 who were divided into three subgroups to listen to two lectures in three different conditions: listening with longhand note-taking, with photo-taking, and without note-taking. After they completed both lectures, participants reviewed their hand-written notes, photos they took, and plain printouts respectively to prepare for a recall test. The results…

I recently received this email out of the blue from a math teacher in California. I think that it’s really important that others read what he comes up against trying to give teach math to his fourth-grade students so I asked the sender if I could put it – anonymized – in a short blog. The sender agreed.

Dear Dr. Kirschner,

This is XXXXX, fourth-grade teacher in XXXXXXXXX, California.

I read HLH and HTH and listened to the recent Chalk and Talk podcast interview. Armed with my new knowledge, I’ve started to look at things critically and ask questions.

I’m not the only teacher enlightened by your work and likely not the first one to begin to look at education differently as a result, so I’m sorry to report that it’s not going well.

Basically, my district-adopted math curriculum (iReady k-5 classroom mathematics) doesn’t appear to have many aspects from…

The corporate world is short on workers, sooo, let’s see what states will pass legislation to loosen restrictions on child labor.

This drive reminds me of the blindside on K12 education that is Common Core– the justification (and assumption) being that the chief purpose K12 education is to “prepare students for 21st century jobs.”

Well, its the 21st century, and it seems that business is short on boidies, and any warm body will do.

So, on this Easter as I think of Jesus, who brought to the attention of his male-centric cuture the importance of considering children as people valuable in their own right, I also think of the primarily-Republican push to feed children to the god of business and industry.

On March 14, 2023, journalist Jacob Knudsen published a piece in Axios, stunningly entitled, “Lawmakers Target Child Labor Laws to Ease Worker Shortage.”

Forget childhood. We must appease the…

Cross posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org.

A couple of weeks ago, Autism Science Foundation founder Alison Singer posted on Twitter a video of an exchange she had with Cure Autism Now founder Jonathan Shestack. The clip opens with a question from Singer:

You’ve been away from the autism advocacy world for some years, but what’s your feeling about how the definition of autism spectrum disorder has changed?

Singer was alluding to the expansion of the autism spectrum to include what was once called Asperger’s Syndrome. This expansion assigns people with a range of speaking and writing abilities—some fully fluent, others completely minimally verbal—to the same diagnostic category. Back in 1995, when Shestack and his wife, Portia Iversen, founded Cure Autism Now (now Autism Speaks), autism and Asperger’s were distinct diagnoses.

Shestack, answering Singer’s question, implicitly raises another:

I forgot about social pressure!

That is, how many people claim that they still believe something either because it’s embarrassing to admit they were wrong, or because doing so means weakening their ties to the social networks that nurtured and sustained their beliefs in the first place–and losing a lot of friends in the process?

Put another way, for any given difficult-to-sustain belief, how many apparent believers are merely pretending?

Brad DeLong is listening to the AI:

In addition, the emergence of totalitarian regimes and the development of the modern welfare state offered new hope and opportunities for people, but also perpetuated inequality and poverty in many parts of the world.

This, too:

Q: Who is the author of the book “Age of Empire“?

A: The author of the book “Age of Empire” is Eric Hobsbawm. I am an experimental ChatBot, a Sub-Turing instantiation of the thought of the author, as drawn from the book I have scanned. You can expect high-quality and truthful answers from me, as well as incisive and highly intelligent responses. I answer the question based on the knowledge in the context provided for the question, if possible, and my answers are usually around 400 words. If I cannot answer based on knowledge in the extended prompt with context, I end my answer…

Paul A. Kirschner & Mirjam Neelen

The first few years as a teacher are critical with respect to both their teaching as well as retention. According to the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), for example, “nearly half of new teachers leave the classroom in their first five years, including 9.5 percent in the first year alone.” With respect to their teaching and teacher knowledge, a teacher may have learned all kinds of things during their teacher education, but the reality of the classroom can be very different. Jan van Driel, Nico Verloop and Wobbe de Vos (1998) showed that, learning how to teach (they called it the acquisition of a teachers’ craft knowledge) actually takes place in the school where the novice teacher works, after completing teacher education.

The researchers defined teachers’ professional knowledge as

integrated knowledge that represents the accumulated wisdom of teachers in relation to…

In the Times today:

In games like chess, no human can hope to beat a computer. What happens when the same thing occurs in art, politics or religion?
You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills by Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin

I have a couple of thoughts about this.

Number one: while it’s true that no human can hope to beat a computer at chess, it’s equally true that computers have had massively more experience playing chess than any human has had or ever will have:

AIs are very slow learners, needing years’ or even centuries’ worth of practice at playing chess or riding bicycles or playing computer games.
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane, p161

Centuries.

How long…