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ADHD adolescence attention bilingual education boundary conditions classroom advice conference speakers constructivism/direct instruction creativity critical thinking desirable difficulty development elementary school embodied cognition emotion evolution executive function exercise experts and novices gender high school homework intelligence long-term memory math metacognition methodology middle school mindfulness Mindset motivation neuromyths neuroscience online learning parents psychology reading retrieval practice self-control skepticism sleep STEM stress technology working memoryRecent Comments
- Andrew Watson on Have I Been Spectacularly Wrong for Years? Part 1
- Cher Chong on Have I Been Spectacularly Wrong for Years? Part 1
- Andrew Watson on Practical Advice for Students: How to Make Good Flashcards
- Beth Hawks on Practical Advice for Students: How to Make Good Flashcards
- Max on ChatGPT and Beyond: The Best Online Resources for Evaluating Research Claims
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Monthly Archives: May 2017

Home News
Exciting news: my book was published at the beginning of April. (I’m resisting the temptation to put in an exclamation point.) Learning Begins explores the science of working memory and attention, and offers practical strategies for putting this research to work in our
Posted in L&B Blog
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The Potential Benefits of High School Music Classes
Should 9th graders start music classes–even if they’ve never played an instrument before? Are there academic benefits to studying music? Is 9th grade too late a start to get those benefits? Should my school’s STEM program become a STEAM program? A

The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman
As an easy-to-read and engaging textbook or as a scientifically accurate and detailed popular psychology book, David Eagleman’s The Brain: The Story of You is an ideal book for people seeking to teach themselves an introduction to cognitive neuroscience and
Posted in Book Reviews
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School, Self-Regulation, and the Brain
The Study A just-published study asks about the effect of schooling on the brain. (A chatty, readable summary by one of the authors can be found here.) More specifically, it looks at a young child’s ability to self-regulate: a skill

Understanding Racial Imbalances in Special Education
As another April has come and gone, so has another World Autism Month. The Light It Up Blue campaign celebrates each spring with a renewed push for greater understanding and acceptance of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. And with greater

What He Said
In recent weeks, this blog has written about the dangerous assumption that students can just get all their information from The Google, and the implication that they therefore don’t need to know much factual knowledge. (Those posts are here and

Good News ! (?) College Profs Don’t Use the Untrue Learning Styles Theory That They Nonetheless Believe
This story offers both good and bad news: I’ll let you sort out whether there’s more good than bad… The bad news: according to a just-published study, 58% of college professors in Britain believe in learning styles theory. This belief persists

Classroom Data to Enhance STEM Teaching
Regular readers of this blog remember Scott MacClintic’s post about “data informed instruction”; quoting W. Edwards Deming, Scott notes that “without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” Of course, gathering the right kind of data can be very

A Future Without Grades?
You think grades interfere with learning? You’d like to do away with them? And yet, you’d like some consistent way to measure students’ academic development? And to communicate that development to others? You’re not alone. The Mastery Transcript Consortium seeks to accomplish

Once Upon a Digital Time…
A recent study suggests that 3- and 4-year old children understand as much, and learn as much vocabulary from, digital books as from read-alouds with adults. This study hasn’t been published–it was presented at a recent conference–so we can’t look