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



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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



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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



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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



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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



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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



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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



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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



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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



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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



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