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.
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The Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence has followed a group of more than 5000 people for well over four decades. The program began in 1956 and participants have been tested across a whole gamut of mental and physical abilities at seven year intervals since that date.
The study has found:
Does photographic memory exist?
"Photographic" or eidetic memory is said to occur in some 8% of children, but almost all of these grow out of it. The phenomenon is extremely rare in adults, and indeed the very existence of photographic memory is still somewhat contentious. However, it may be that particular brain abnormalities can lead to ways of processing information that are dramatically different from the normal (see the case of Kim Peek).
Knowing a number of effective strategies for reading and note-taking, practicing and memorizing, is vital, but it's not the whole story. There is also a category of strategies we might term 'support' strategies. These include strategies aimed at setting goals, managing time and effort, and monitoring your performance and progress. In study, these come under the concept of self-regulation, which is related to the more general concept of metamemory.
A perennial topic in the arena of memory improvement is the question of “food for the brain”, and in particular, whether there are dietary supplements that can improve your mental abilities. While my own emphasis is improvement through development and practice of skills, I don’t dismiss the possibility of improvement through more physical means. I myself am a great fan of the “you are what you eat” principle. This is mainly because I suffer from multiple food sensitivities, so the consequences of food are very much a reality for me.
Children learn. It’s what they do. And they build themselves over the years from wide-eyed baby to a person that walks and talks and can maybe fix your computer, so it’s no wonder that we have this idea that learning comes so much more easily to them than it does to us. But is it true?
There are two particular areas where children are said to excel: learning language, and learning skills.
While parents and teachers have always strongly supported small class sizes, their belief has not always been supported by evidence. Part of the problem lies in that word “small” — what constitutes a small class? Different interventions have looked at reducing class sizes from 40 to 30, or 30 to 25. It may well be that such reductions are not sufficient to show clear benefits.
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.
Distributed practice more effective than massed practice
It has long been known that spacing practice (reviewing learning or practicing a skill at spaced intervals) is far more effective than massed practice (in one heavy session). An interesting example of this comes from a study that aimed to find the best way of teaching postmen to type (this was at the request of the British Post Office). The researchers put postmen on one of four schedules:
Consider our facts about blood:
- arteries are thick and elastic and carry blood that is rich in oxygen from the heart.
- veins are thinner, less elastic, and carry blood rich in carbon dioxide back to the heart.
We could, as is often advised, simply turn these into why questions. And we can answer these on the basis of the connections we’ve already made:
Why are arteries elastic?
Because they need to accommodate changes in pressure
Why are arteries thick?
Because they need to accommodate high pressure