“The researchers found that high school athletic trainers reported 15,531 injuries over 6,778,209 athletic exposures (AEs; practice or competition), yielding an estimated 5.2 million injuries nationally. Football (3.96 per AE), girls' soccer (2.65), and boys' wrestling (2.36) had the highest injury rates, with injury rates overall higher in boys' sports (2.52) versus girls' sports (1.56). Furthermore, the injury rate was higher in competition versus practice (rate ratio, 3.39). The head and face (24.2 percent), ankle (17.6 percent), and knee (14.1 percent) were the most commonly injured body sites, while sprains/strains (36.8 percent) and concussions (21.6 percent) were the most common diagnoses.”
“I was expecting children in the question training to ask a lot more questions in the follow-up task and was hoping they might show some improvement of knowledge and some improvement of generalized curiosity/interest in science content as measured by the “willingness-to-pay” task. We did not see strong evidence that the question asking training taught children to simply ask more questions: Children in the question-asking condition did not ask more questions about a novel animal than children in the listening condition. However, we found a whopping effect on “willingness-to-pay.” Children in the question-asking training were willing to pay many more stickers for new science content than children in the careful listening condition. We also found that children in the question-asking condition gained marginally more science knowledge than the careful listeners. Furthermore, practice with question-asking was more beneficial for children with lower baseline knowledge, suggesting that question-asking shows promise for enhancing children’s motivation to learn and equalizing academic disparities.”
“Not only will you have to persevere for many years, if your wildest dreams come true and your project is a huge hit, you have to be ready to talk for years — if not decades! — about it. So at the very least, it better be something you were passionate about at the time of its making.”
“The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition… … economic growth since 1970 has been simultaneously dazzling and disappointing. This paradox is resolved when we recognize that advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information.”
“While concrete language is great for increasing understanding, or for making complex topics easier to comprehend, when it comes to things like such as describing a company’s growth potential, abstract language is better, because while concrete language focuses on the tangible here and now, abstract language gets into the bigger picture.”
“One thing that is not changing is the best way for people to learn. We have made large advances in recent years in understanding pedagogy – the science of learning. We know some of the most effective techniques for making sure material sticks and that it can be retrieved and used when needed most. Unfortunately, many of these advanced pedagogical techniques are time-consuming to prepare, and many instructors are often overworked and do not have the resources and time to add them to their teaching repertoire. But AI can help.”
“Students in the passive group reported enjoying the lecture more and felt that the instructor was more effective at teaching. Yet in the test of learning, those in the active group did better.”
“This technical report presents GPT-4, a large multimodal model capable of processing image and text inputs and producing text outputs. Such models are an important area of study as they have the potential to be used in a wide range of applications, such as dialogue systems, text summarization, and machine translation… One of the main goals of developing such models is to improve their ability to understand and generate natural language text, particularly in more complex and nuanced scenarios. To test its capabilities in such scenarios, GPT-4 was evaluated on a variety of exams originally designed for humans… This report also discusses a key challenge of the project, developing deep learning infrastructure and optimization methods that behave predictably across a wide range of scales… Despite its capabilities, GPT-4 has similar limitations to earlier GPT models [1, 37, 38]: it is not fully reliable (e.g. can suffer from “hallucinations”), has a limited context window, and does not learn from experience. Care should be taken when using the outputs of GPT-4, particularly in contexts where reliability is important.”
“On the positive side of the ledger, GPT-4 is a powerful engine for creativity, and there is no telling the new kinds of scientific, cultural and educational production it may enable. We already know that A.I. can help scientists develop new drugs, increase the productivity of programmers and detect certain types of cancer… But there are reasons to fear GPT-4, too. Here’s one: We don’t yet know everything it can do.”
“It is developing a sense of humor. Sort of… Tell me a novel joke about the singer Madonna… Why did Madonna study geometry? Because she wanted to learn how to strike a pose in every angle!”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson