Category Archives: L&B Blog

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

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!

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

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

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,

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,

Loyal blog readers know that Austin Matte is our local expert on Head Start. To follow up on his recent article, I want to highlight study published in Child Development. Studying records of nearly 3000 students, the authors find that attendance

It’s finals time! As the promise of spring and summer days rolls in, the increase in sunshine can mean only one thing for students: assignments, exams, papers, and projects are due. Not surprisingly, this time of year arrives with no

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

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