Education Conferences

Student Doing Homework with Laptop

How To Make Sure Homework Really Helps (a.k.a.: “Retrieval Practice Fails”)

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: August 14, 2022

Most research focuses narrowly on just a few questions. For instance: “Does mindful meditation help 5th grade students reduce anxiety?” “How many instructions overwhelm college students’ working memory?” “Do quizzes improve attention when students learn from online videos?” Very occasionally,

The Best Book on Cognitive Load Theory: Ollie Lovell to the Rescue

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: August 7, 2022

Teaching ought to be easy. After all, we have a functionally infinite amount of long-term memory. You don’t have to forget one thing to learn another thing — really. So: I should be able to shovel information and skills into

The Bruce Willis Method: Catching Up Post-Covid [Reposted]

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: July 31, 2022

Because of Covid, our students have fallen behind. How can we help them “catch up”? As I argued back in June, Bruce Willis might (or might not) have helpful answers to that question. In the third Die Hard movie, Brue Willis

Do Classroom Decorations Distract Students? A Story in 4 Parts… [Reposted]

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: July 24, 2022

As we prepare for the upcoming school year, how should we think about decorating our classrooms? Can research give us any pointers? This story, initially posted in March of 2022, paints a helpfully rich research picture. Teacher training programs often

Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology by Michelle Miller

Erik Jahner, PhD
by: Erik Jahner, PhD
Posted on: July 19, 2022

The cognition of remembering and forgetting is central to our lives and our intellectual valuation of ourselves. Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World refreshes our knowledge and

Is “Cell Phone Addiction” Really a Thing? [Reposted]

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: July 17, 2022

A well-known Education Twitter personality claimed that “cell phones are as addictive as drugs.” Are they? What should we do when someone makes that claim? Reposted from November of 2021 I recently read a tweet asserting “the fact that cell

The Best Teaching Advice We’ve Got

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: July 10, 2022

I’m on my annual vacation during this month, so I’ll be posting some articles that got attention during the last year. This post, initially from December of 2021, looks at a proposed different way to “put all the research pieces

It’s All in the Timing: Improving Study Skills with Just-Right Reminders

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: July 7, 2022

Some research-based teaching advice requires complex rethinking of our work. For instance: We know that “desirable difficulties” like spacing and interleaving help students learn. At the same time, this strategy might require a fair amount of reorganization in our unit plans.

An Amazingly Simple Way to Help Struggling Students (with Potential Controversy)

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: July 3, 2022

Imagine that you work at a school where these students consistently struggle compared to those students. As teachers and school leaders, you’d like to help these students do better than they currently do; maybe do as well as those students. (Lower down in the post,

The Power of Us by Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel

Erik Jahner, PhD
by: Erik Jahner, PhD
Posted on: June 21, 2022

The broad use of social media, internet search engines, personalized news feeds, and other emerging information technologies have influenced the ways we have been constructing our identities. This has only accelerated during the ongoing pandemic as many of our social