Monthly Archives: June 2017

This is Your Chess on Ritalin

In movies and on television, chess skill symbolizes “pure intelligence.” Characters who can outwit others on the chessboard are–obviously–just smarter than everyone else. (On The West Wing, President Bartlet routinely schools his staff on the nuances of the game.) By



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True or False: Fidget Spinners Benefit Students with ADHD?

The Learning Scientists are on the case…



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Montessori: The New Science behind the Century-Old Methodology (part II)

“Freedom in intellectual work is found to be the basis of internal discipline” (*Montessori, 1917/1965). This quote highlights a notion which goes completely against our conventional wisdom. Internal discipline is to be instilled externally. Students develop discipline through following top-down



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Out with the Old…

Articles about learning styles theory–including my own–typically focus on debunking the theory. This article, over at The Learning Scientists, takes a different approach: it chooses specific parts of learning styles theory, and shows how each small part derives from another–more



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Memorable Beauty?

Over at Psychology Today, Nate Kornell speculates about the potential memory benefits of taking beautiful notes. (Kornell is a thorough and thoughtful research, who studied with Robert Bjork, so I always look forward to his posts.) Enjoy!



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The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads by Daniel Willingham

Reading is a complex cognitive task. How is it that our minds are able to read? Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and acclaimed author, tackles that question in his book The Reading Mind:



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Lightening the Cognitive Load

How should we manage working memory limitations in the classroom? Furtheredogogy has a handy post about Cognitive Load Theory, which is basically a fancy way of saying “taking care of our students’ working memory capacity.” Notice, btw, that the author



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(Mis)Understanding Educational Stats

Over at The Anova, Freddie deBoer has a knack for writing about statistical questions and making them not just readable but interesting. Case in point: he recently explored the New York Times feature about school choice. Although careful to praise the



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Montessori: The New Science behind a Century-Old Methodology (part I)

Maria Montessori described observing children in a traditional classroom as being tantamount to an entomologist observing dead insects pinned to a board, “where the spontaneous expression of a child’s personality is so suppressed that he is almost like a corpse,



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Downside to Oxytocin

Oxytocin in Crisis

Oxytocin is often described as the “love hormone.” Apparently lots of oxtyocin is swirling around when mothers interact with their babies, and so its role in maternal affection is much trumpeted. You may well hear people say that, in schools,



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