Articles

In the education world, fixed mind-set is usually contrasted with growth mind-set. In this context, fixed mind-set refers to students holding the idea that their cognitive abilities, including their intelligence, are set at birth, and they just have to accept their limitations. With a growth mind-set, however, the student recognizes that, although it might be difficult, they can grow their abilities.

A growth mind-set has been associated with a much better approach to learning and improved academic achievement, but new research suggests that this difference has been over-stated.

Elaborative interrogation is a strategy to help you remember meaningful information. The idea behind the strategy is that relevant prior knowledge is not always readily activated when you are trying to learn new information, and sometimes help is needed to make the right connections. The strategy requires you to go beyond the information given to you and to construct reasons for the relationships between bits of information.

What is neurogenesis?

Neurogenesis — the creation of new brain cells — occurs of course at a great rate in the very young. For a long time, it was not thought to occur in adult brains — once you were grown, it was thought, all you could do was watch your brain cells die!

Adult neurogenesis (the creation of new brain cells in adult brains) was first discovered in 1965, but only recently has it been accepted as a general phenomenon that occurs in many species, including humans (1998).

Most people believe that an adult learner can't hope to replicate the fluency of someone who learned another language in childhood. And certainly there is research to support this. However, people tend to confuse these findings - that the age of acquisition affects your representation of grammar - with the idea that children can learn words vastly quicker than adults. This is not true. Adults have a number of advantages over children:

Most mnemonic strategies are based on imagery. There is no doubt that imagery can be an effective tool, but there is nothing particularly special about imagery. The advantage of imagery is that it provides an easy way of connecting information that is not otherwise readily connected. However, providing verbal links can be equally effective.

Research with children has demonstrated that the ability to learn new words is greatly affected by working memory span - specifically, by how much information they can hold in that part of working memory called "phonological short-term memory". The constraining effect of working memory capacity on the ability to learn new words appears to continue into adolescence.

This post is the second part in a four-part series on how education delivery is changing, and the set of literacies required in today’s world. Part 1 looked at the changing world of textbooks. This post looks at the oral equivalent of textbooks: direct instruction or lecturing.

We must believe that groups produce better results than individuals — why else do we have so many “teams” in the workplace, and so many meetings. But many of us also, of course, hold the opposite belief: that most meetings are a waste of time; that teams might be better for some tasks (and for other people!), but not for all tasks. So what do we know about the circumstances that make groups better value?

To use a strategy effectively, you need to understand why it works, how it works, when it works and when it doesn’t.

For example, all students take notes — not everyone knows how to do it well. Research into the effectiveness of note-taking has found — surprise, surprise — that sometimes note-taking helps you remember information, and sometimes it doesn’t₁.

We don’t deliberately practice our memories of events — not as a rule, anyway. But we don’t need to — because just living our life is sufficient to bring about the practice. We remember happy, or unpleasant, events to ourselves, and we recount our memories to other people. Some will become familiar stories that we re-tell again and again. But facts, the sort of information we learn in formal settings such as school and university, these are not something we tend to repeatedly recount to ourselves or others — not for pleasure anyway!