In Multimedia Learning by Richard Mayer discusses five kinds of knowledge: facts, concepts, procedures, strategies, and beliefs (page 31). We as educators instinctively consider the first four types of knowledge when we…
Category: Cognitive Science
Thinking Classrooms
Peter Liljedahl, a professor of mathematics education at Simon Fraser University, has spent twenty years observing classrooms in pursuit of effective teaching (mostly in K12 classrooms). He has concluded that…
More “Multitasking”
Ask people if they are good at multitasking and chances are they’ll say “yes”. Two things to note about this: Any time multiple demands compete for attention (interference) we have…
Reading in the Brain as a Machine Learning Model
In the book Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, Stanislas Dehaene takes us on a tour of the brain that drills down to the neuron-level of…
The Pen Was mightier than the Keyboard
In 2013, researchers designed an experiment to determine if taking notes by hand made things “stick” more than taking notes on a computer. Mueller and Oppenheimer had participants watch an…
Crossing the Threshold
From my very first days teaching a C++ programming class, it was evident that I was in over my head. I had a solid understanding of the fundamentals, but the…
The Peak-End Rule
In 1993 an interesting study run by Daniel Kahneman and other researchers investigated discomfort. Participants submerged one hand in water at 14°C (57.2°F) for sixty seconds and rated the discomfort….
You are cursed
When I was at SUNY Geneseo as a Math major, I took a course designed for high school math teachers. In addition to having to complete a New York State…
Polls as a way to increase learning?
I often drive to my father’s house in Penn Yan. As I approach the town of Gorham – right before the Old Gorham Cemetery on Country Road 18, there is…
Toilets, Helicopters, and Punnett Squares
Do you know how a ballpoint pen works? If you’re immediate answer was “yes”, you are in a majority that includes people who think they know how a ballpoint works (though in…
Low-Stakes/High-Stakes
Low-stakes testing and high-stakes testing are two different types of assessments that serve different purposes and have different implications. Low-stakes testing, also known as formative assessment, is typically used to…
Cognitive Endurance
Schooling may build human capital not only by teaching academic skills, but by expanding the capacity for cognition itself” claims the study published June, 2022. The researchers recognized the need to combat cognitive…
The Myth of Learning Styles
When I was in college (in the nineteen hundreds), one of my education classes explored Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I was enamored with the idea. As a doe-eyed…
Constructivism vs. Constructionism
In the book What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain shares the results of a study he conducted of sixty five teachers across twenty-four institutions. He’s organized his findings across…
Inga and Otto and the EMT
Imagine Inga and Otto live in the city and are independently walking to the museum. Inga has a fabulous memory and knows the precise location of the museum on 53rd street….
Minimizing Distractions, Minimizing “Multitasking”
We know multitasking isn’t possible. We know distractions compete for attention, and failure to attend to learning completely derails any hope of future retrieval. In fact, as Michelle Miller states in…
Myths of Multitasking
More news in the department of “People are Notoriously Wrong about Themselves”, this time under the subheading of distraction and multitasking. Distractions are not the same as multitasking, but they do…
What Questions do you Have?
I had the luxurious experience of being at a conference in person last week. You know, with people. You know, with people not on a screen. It was exhilarating. One of the presenters had everybody…
Cognitive Intrigue
In The Importance of Average: Playing the Game of School to Increase Success and Achievement by Stephen Farenga et al., one of the authors tells a story about a birthday party his five year old son…
Heutagogy, Generative Learning, and Drive
In 2009, Daniel Pink wrote Drive – a book that interrogated what we know about motivation and challenged the world with a reframing of what makes us tick. In 1949,…
Spaced Out
In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus introduced the world to the forgetting curve. In an impressive-but-limited study, he attempted to memorize nonsensical words and then recall them at different intervals (immediately, a few…
Show Your Work
In the domain of computer nerds, there is a prophetic maxim that states: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar Dubbed “Linus’s Law”,…
Messy and Wicked Students
Every computer science student has had to program HelloWorld, TowersOfHanoi, and Nim. They are canonical problems that most students are likely to encounter and study in the classroom. Similarly, most math students will…
Power of Prediction
We predict things all the time (usually based on prior knowledge, context, and experience). Have you ever attempted to complete someone’s sentence? But did you know predicting in a novel context can be a potent learning…
Teach by Example(s)?
Consider this story: A general wishes to capture a fortress located in the center of a country. There are many roads radiating outward from the fortress. All have been mined…
Worth the Wait
Feedback. If you’re like me, you probably believe two things. One, that feedback is essential to student learning. And two, the more immediate the feedback, the better. I’ve always suspected…
Multimedia for your Students
Check out this passage from Multimedia Learning by Richard Mayer: Lightning can be defined as the discharge of electricity resulting from the difference in electrical charges between the cloud and the ground….
Neuromyths – Part II
In 2018, Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa published Neuromyths: Debunking False Ideas About The Brain, a book that interrogates roughly sixty myths about learning and teaching. She frames each myth by explaining the…
Neuromyths – Part I
In 2018, Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa published Neuromyths: Debunking False Ideas About The Brain, a book that interrogates roughly sixty myths about learning and teaching. She frames each myth by explaining the myth, discussing the…
Three Types of Knowledge
We all know about Bloom’s taxonomy – the eponymous hierarchy for classifying learning objectives and a guide for designing scaffolded learning experiences. I use Bloom’s as a guideposts as I craft lessons; “Is…
Surprising Thoughts About Multimedia
Dr. Richard Mayer published a wonderful book in 2001 called Multimedia Learning. The third edition was released last year and masterfully builds on his initial premises through the lens of modern technology. The…
Why we Sleep
Dr. Matthew Walker published a book in 2017 called Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. In the book he warns of the serious long term dangers…
Developing a Classroom Technology Policy
James Lang, author of Small Teaching and Small Teaching Online has published a new book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. While reading this…
Chance Favors the Prepared Mind
Massed practice is how I learned math growing up; that is, focusing on specific problems. On Monday, my teacher gave me 20 addition problems. The next night she gave me 20 subtraction…
Quiz Early, Quiz Often
In the book Make it Stick, the authors discuss a number of research-based strategies to help instructors create meaningful learning experiences for their students. One of the strategies – retrieval practice…
Creative Commons for Educators
There have been times when (and I’m embarrassed to admit this because I’m married to a librarian) that I’ve stolen a picture from a website for something I wanted to use…