I want to talk to you this month about an educational project that’s been running for some years here in New Zealand. The Project on Learning spent three years (1998-2000) studying, in excruciating detail, the classroom experiences of 9-11 year olds. The study used miniature videocameras, individually worn microphones, as well as trained observers, to record every detail of the experiences of individual students during the course of particular science, maths, or social studies units.
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If you have a numbered list to memorize, the best mnemonic strategy is the pegword mnemonic. This mnemonic uses numbers which have been transformed into visual images. Here's the standard 1-10 set.
I add two more:
I was listening on my walk today to an interview with Edward Tufte, the celebrated guru of data visualization. He said something I took particular note of, concerning the benefits of concentrating on what you’re seeing, without any other distractions, external or internal. He spoke of his experience of being out walking one day with a friend, in a natural environment, and what it was like to just sit down for some minutes, not talking, in a very quiet place, just looking at the scene.
Are you right-brained or left-brained?
One of the dumber questions around.
I think it’s safe to say that if you only had one hemisphere of your brain, you wouldn’t be functioning.
Of course, that’s not the point. But the real point is little more sensible. The whole idea of right brain vs left brain did come out of scientific research, but as is so often the case, the myth that developed is light years away from the considerably duller scientific truths that spawned it.
Alzheimer's disease currently affects one in 10 people over age 65 and nearly half of those over age 85.
More than 19 million Americans say they have a family member with the disease, and 37 million say they know somebody affected with Alzheimer's.
In the United States, the average lifetime cost per Alzheimer patient is US$174,000. (These figures are from the U.S. Alzheimer's Association).
A Scientific American article talks about a finding that refines a widely-reported association between self-regulation and academic achievement. This association relates to the famous ‘marshmallow test’, in which young children were left alone with a marshmallow, having been told that if they could hold off eating it until the researcher returns, they would get two marshmallows.
The use of worked examples
We're all familiar, I'm sure, with the use of worked-out examples in mathematics teaching. Worked-out examples are often used to demonstrate problem-solving processes. They generally specify the steps needed to solve a problem in some detail. After working through such examples, students are usually given the same kind of problems to work through on their own. The strategy is generally helpful in teaching students to solve problems that are the same as the examples.
A very common situation today, which is probably responsible for a great deal of modern anxiety about failing memory, is that where we're required to “multitask”, that trendy modern word for trying to do more than one thing at a time. It is a situation for which both the normal consequences of aging and low working memory capacity has serious implications.
You may have heard of “g”. It’s the closest we’ve come to that elusive attribute known as “intelligence”, but it is in fact a psychometric construct, that is, we surmise its presence from the way in which scores on various cognitive tests positively correlate.
In other words, we don’t really know what it is (hence the fact it is called “g”, rather than something more intelligible), and in fact, it is wrong to think of it as a thing. What it is, is a manifestation of some property or properties of the brain — and we don’t know what these are.
As I said in my discussion of different scripts, the Hellenic languages use the Greek alphabet. Here it is. I’m afraid the table is a little complicated, because (a) each letter has a name, which it’s useful to know, and (b) there are some differences in pronunciation between Ancient Greek (which is still a language that people want to learn today), and Modern Greek.