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Monthly Archives: July 2017

How to Lie with Graphs
A handy video from Ted Education gives some pointers on spotting misleading graphs. Pay close attention to their warnings about meddling with the y-axis. Believe it or not, this sort of thing happens frequently in the world of science publishing.

“One Size Fits All” Rarely Fits
If you attend Learning and the Brain conferences, or read this blog regularly, you know all about the well-researched benefits of retrieval practice. (You can read earlier articles on this subject here and here.) The short version of the story: if

Rates of ADHD Diagnosis: Age, Gender, and Race
Dr. David Rabiner offers a helpful summary of trends in ADHD diagnoses. The short version: rates of diagnosis continue to increase. The longer version: depending how you analyze the categories, you get very different results. For children younger than 5,

Chocolate and Cocoa Help You Learn, Right?
What’s not to love? The photo shows a mug of cocoa, with an already-nibbled chocolate bar in the background. Even better, the headline alerts us that both the cocoa and the chocolate “enhance cognitive abilities and memory.” For once, this headline

Memory Training That Really (Sort of) Works
Imagine yourself following a route that you know quite well: perhaps your morning commute. You take your car out of your garage; drive past the Dunkin’ Donuts, past the old movie theater, past the grocery store; you park in your

Bold Moves for Schools: How We Create Remarkable Learning Environments by Heidi Hayes Jacob and Marie Hubley Alcock
Today’s learners have different needs than those of yesterday. Educators and policy makers, therefore, need to rethink optimal learning environments. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, founder and president of Curriculum Designers, and Marie Hubley Alcock, president of the education consulting company Learning
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Interrupting Skilled Students
Here’s a sentence that won’t surprise you: practice typically makes us more skilled at the activity we’re practicing. Here’s a sentence that might surprise you: practice makes us more vulnerable to mistakes after an interruption. So, for example, if my

A Tale of Two Analyses
For researchers and research-readers alike, the data analysis portion of a study is many things: complex, exciting, frustrating, intriguing, and sometimes even befuddling. And, analytics are always on the move. With each new study, researchers are developing increasingly intricate and

Dangerous Authenticity?
Here’s an odd question: is it ever a bad idea for teachers to be authentic? In a recent study, Johnson and LaBelle surveyed students to discover the teacher behaviors that struck them as “authentic.” By closely analyzing the students’ descriptions of