Education Conferences

EduTwitter Can Be Great. No, Really…

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: January 19, 2021

Twitter has a terrible reputation, and EduTwitter isn’t an exception. The misinformation. The name-calling. The “team” rivalries: all heat and little light. Did I mention the misinformation? You might wonder: why bother? Honestly, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. I

How Can We Help Students Study Better?

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: January 12, 2021

This story might sound familiar: You attend a Learning and the Brain conference (like, say, our upcoming conference about Teaching During a Pandemic) and come away with FANTASTIC ideas. You go back to your classrooms — in person, online, asynchronous

Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive by Stephen Kosslyn

Rebecca Gotlieb
by: Rebecca Gotlieb
Posted on: January 11, 2021

The COVID-19 global pandemic has spurred a massive and rapid increase in online education. Although it is possible to design effective learning experiences in online classrooms, often online education fails to take advantage of the strengths of recent technologies and

Does Online Learning Work? Framing the Debate to Come…

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: January 5, 2021

With news that several very effective vaccines will be increasingly available over the upcoming months, we teachers can now start thinking about “a return to normal”: that is — in person teaching as we (mostly) worked before February of 2020.

Seriously: What Motivates Teachers to Be Funny?

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: December 29, 2020

To start 2021 in the right spirit, let’s think about humor in the classroom. It seems that, obviously, humor might be a good classroom strategy. When the lesson slows down, a joke or two might brighten the mood. Once we

The Best Teaching Advice We’ve Got

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: December 22, 2020

You want to improve your teaching with psychology research? We’ve got good news, and bad news. And more good news. Good News: we have lots and LOTS of research. We can talk about attention, or working memory, or the spacing

James Flynn Changed the Way We Think about Intelligence

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: December 18, 2020

In 1950, the average score on an IQ test was ~100. In 2020, the average score on an IQ test was ~100. Nothing, it seems, had changed. Those facts, however, disguise a surprising truth. IQ tests are based on scaled scores.

December Book-a-Palooza

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: December 15, 2020

When I started in this field, back in 2008, teachers really didn’t have many helpful books to draw on. Books about teaching? Sure. Books about psychology and neuroscience research? Absolutely. Books bringing those topics together? Not so much… What a

How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice by Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick

Rebecca Gotlieb
by: Rebecca Gotlieb
Posted on: December 11, 2020

Bridging the research-practice divide is a perennial issue in education. Fortunately, Paul A. Kirschner and Carl Hendrick’s book— How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice — helps address this issue by presenting time-tested,

Possible Selves in STEM: Helping Students See Themselves as Scientists

Andrew Watson
by: Andrew Watson
Posted on: December 8, 2020

Why don’t more students sign up for STEM classes, and enter STEM careers? Could we increase the number, and the diversity within that group? Researchers in California came up with a simple strategy: one that offered powerful results. Here’s the