“Naive practice is practice where someone simply does an activity repeatedly, with the assumed belief that repetition leads to mastery but otherwise with no real trajectory, goals, or outside help in mind.”
“Sound thinkers are not primarily characterised by their capacity to correct intuitive errors through deliberation. Rather, they appear to be distinguished by their ability to intuit correctly in the first place… What makes some people better intuitive thinkers than others? …Using a verbal fluency task to map participants’ semantic networks, the researchers found that individuals […]
“Our world has changed so quickly and profoundly that our biology couldn’t keep up. Stress is still the same it was fifty thousand years ago: Sense a stressor. React immediately and with full force. Prioritize present moment survival, make sacrifices if necessary. That works well when you have to jump out of the way of […]
“Marshall Memory sends automatic, spaced retrieval prompts to commit items like these to long-term memory – while giving you cognitive “strength training.””
““I think most cognitive aspects of mind — the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, and the creative mind — will be done so well by large language machines and mechanisms that whether we do them as humans will be optional,” he said. “On the other hand, I don’t believe for a minute that aspects of […]
“Many of the strategies students gravitate toward are among the least effective. These include rereading, highlighting, reviewing notes, and summarizing. While these approaches feel productive, research paints a different picture of how study time should be spent. Two separate, large-scale studies identified five common, high-yield study strategies for teachers and students to utilize: practice testing, […]
“The four essential cognitive processes support lasting learning: Attention. What we focus on and notice. Encoding. How we process and make sense of it. Storage. How we keep that information in our brains. Retrieval. How we access and use stored information when we need it.”
“While visual redundancy (image + text) supported learning, verbal redundancy (spoken + written text) actually increased cognitive load and hurt performance. The best outcomes came when visual support was used without overloading the same modality.”
“The mentor’s mindset shatters the idea that influential adults must be either tough guys or a soft touch. “Neither approach is good,” Yeager told me. What adolescents need are corrections with encouragement. “Keep high standards and give more support,” he said. Honest feedback works when it is accompanied by moral support and clarity on how […]
“Gamified technologies can significantly enhance students’ intrinsic motivation and academic well-being, but their effectiveness depends on how activities are framed. Gamified technologies should therefore be carefully combined with motivational strategies that support students’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness – such as providing choice, promoting teamwork, and encouraging friendly competition.”
“You probably know that zombies have a fondness for brains. What you may not know is that zombies also like theories about how the brain works. Zombie Learning Theories, as researcher Bryan Goodwin has explained, are ideas about how we learn that have been killed (i.e., thoroughly debunked by research) yet still roam our classrooms… […]
“Ambient overload doesn’t involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. We keep clicking links, keep refreshing screens, keep opening tabs, […]
“Americans aren’t facing an addiction crisis because we get too much dopamine from overabundant cheap thrills. Our problem, instead, is a lack of connection, community and purpose.”
“Neuroimaging found girls experienced cortical thinning far faster than boys did during the first year of Covid lockdowns.”
“Teachers are the linchpin in helping students develop intellectual humility, both in how they respond to being wrong or challenge themselves and in the tone and structure they set for classroom discussions. Students develop more openness and resilience in classes where teachers readily admit to their own mistakes and maintain a class climate encouraging students […]
“Yes, with research we can identify potentially positive practices. What we can’t do is tell teachers how best to implement these insights in real classrooms. Having everyone mindlessly read a purpose-setting script at the start of a lesson may be a no-brainer. Noticing that some kids are neglecting that purpose, seems more in the realm […]
“The 2024 Student Voice Report presents a comprehensive analysis of high school students’ emotional and physical health, sense of connection and belonging in school, and engagement with learning, based on data collected from over 375,000 students from 2010 to 2023. On average, high school students report receiving only 6.6 hours of sleep per night, far […]
“There was a clear benefit on performance for handwritten notes compared to typed notes. The researchers calculated how the strength of the benefit would translate to grades in a hypothetical scenario and suggested that 9.5% of the students who take their notes by hand would achieve an A whereas only 6% of the students who […]
“When we experience a stressful event our memory is improved for whatever was stressing us out. So in this way our memory is improved. However, we are less able to pay attention to and remember other aspects of the event, and have difficulty with critical thinking and learning new thought patterns. So, our learning for […]
“The Transformational Learning Principles (TLPs) are a set of evidence-based guidelines highlighting the most essential elements of effective learning. Bringing together core ASCD and ISTE concepts and informed by learning science, they are a key part of our organizational mission and vision. They also bring focus and a common language to our collaborative efforts with […]
“Learning, getting better, happens successfully when our brains, through repeated experiences, engage in a good struggle to a) create or extend an existing neuronal chain b) make a neuronal constellation more complex or c) hardwire an existing chain so that it fires automatically and becomes sticky. When this happens we acquire knowledge, develop our skills […]
“They concluded instead that it didn’t matter whether the time people felt they naturally wanted to sleep corresponded to when they actually did. Instead, regardless of preference, people who stayed up late at night had higher rates of behavioral and mental disorders than those who did not.”
“Your language system is basically silent when you do all sorts of thinking.”
“Humanity’s relationship to AI is characterised by similar cycles of underestimation and surprise, followed by exploration, understanding and explanation, and a subsequent downgrading of our belief that intelligence is currently at play… This is sometimes called the ‘AI effect’, explained by the computer scientist Larry Tesler as our tendency to believe that ‘Intelligence is whatever […]
“In a survey of nearly 75,000 adults, researchers compared the participants’ preferred sleep timing, known as chronotype, with their actual sleep behavior. They determined that regardless of one’s preferred bedtime, everyone benefits from turning in early. Morning larks and night owls alike tended to have higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders if they stayed […]
“For every utopian-styled use case we imagine for this technology and its impact on student learning, we must balance it with the ways these tools are increasingly marketed on social media to students not as a learning aid, but as another method to disengage and check out of the learning process.”
“One thing that unites these varied researchers is a dedication to developing abstracted, idealised, value-free models of learning. What predictable patterns does memory follow? What function does attention play in perception? How does motivation influence social engagement?”
“In the conditions where the experimenters had participants do 5 practice tests, they scored higher than in the comparable multiple choice conditions where they dropped questions after getting them right.”
“While advocates may not agree on the terminology used to describe what it means to have a learning difference, there does seem to be strong consensus on how to approach teaching these students. “For me, it’s rooted in the idea: Can we educate children to focus first on their strengths, to make education a strength-based […]
“We ascribe meaning too readily to the clustering that randomness produces, and, consequently, we deduce that there is some generative force behind the pattern. We are hardwired to do this.”
“What the science of embodied cognition shows is that the more we can sort of externalize our thoughts and our thinking processes, get them out of our head and express them through our bodies or learn through our bodies and our senses, the better our learning will be. So I think we need to bring […]
“We really like this paper because the authors, Josh Cuevas and Bryan Dawson, compare learning styles and dual coding directly. On the surface the two are really similar. But, if you’ve been following our work for a while and/or engage with the literature, you know that the two are not the same and do not […]
“Neuroscientists have long had an explanation for our somnolent twitches. During rem sleep, they say, our bodies are paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams; the twitches are the movements that slip through the cracks. They’re dream debris—outward hints of an inner drama… Increasingly, these facts struck Blumberg as odd… Blumberg decided to […]
“Thus, while fast, “automatic” thinking is adequate for making decisions about easy tasks, a slower and more effortful mode of cognition, which supports the prolonged integration of relevant information, may be better for solving more difficult problems.”
“These findings pose a challenge for theories of learning to explain the odd combination of large variation in student initial performance and striking regularity in student learning rate.”
“Even the smallest differences can have an outsized effect. In one study, researchers moved items from the front to the back of a salad bar—a change of just 10 inches—and the slight inconvenience prompted people to eat less of these items.”
“This highlights one of the difficulties with determining why students do well (or do not do well) with certain material. Is it because they are more interested? More motivated? More curious? Or is it because they happen to have the background knowledge to help them make enough sense of the material in order to become […]
“Reading success requires much more than foundational skills. There are other factors critical for literacy development, including those that address language, meaning, and communication. Among the most important is knowledge. Knowledge is necessary to comprehend what we read. Foundational skills are literally meaningless unless readers can make sense of words and texts. This sense-making requires […]
“These findings suggest that, in addition to being dispersed, motor memories are highly redundant. The researchers say that as we repeat learned skills, we are continually reinforcing the motor engrams by building new connections — refining the skill. It’s what is meant by the term muscle memory — a refined, highly redundant network of motor […]
“Joint UCI and UC Riverside study shows ‘near transfer’ predicts ‘far transfer’”
“Teen sleep deprivation affects grades, attendance, and graduation rates. It leads to greater risk of injury for adolescent athletes, and more drowsy-driving crashes. And it worsens mental-health issues—including anxiety and suicidality.
“Direct-to-student, computer-delivered growth mindset interventions have shown promise as a way to improve achievement for those at risk of failing in school; however, these interventions only benefit students who happen to be in classrooms that support growth mindset beliefs.”
“Social and affective neuroscience are revealing more clearly than ever before the interdependence between cognition and emotion in the brain, the importance of emotion in guiding successful learning, and the critical role of teachers in managing the social environment of the classroom so that optimal emotional and cognitive learning can take place.”
“In my research, I’ve found that “temptation bundling”—linking something you enjoy with pursuing a valuable goal that might be a bit of a drag—can be a powerful way to achieve more without exerting much self-control.
“Extrapolating from our results, one can argue that limited access to video may promote better communication and social interaction during collaborative problem solving, as there are fewer stimuli to distract collaborators. Consequently, we may achieve greater problem solving if new technologies offer fewer distractions and less visual stimuli.”
“The fields of neuroscience and psychology, when paired, offer new insights on the principles of effective instruction.”
“Why haven’t I joined the throng of folks making charts, maps, dashboards, trackers, and models of COVID19? Two reasons: (1) I dislike reporting breaking news, and (2) I believe this is a case of “the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know” (a.k.a. the Dunning-Kruger effect, see chart below). So, I decided […]
“Teens who have a decent night’s sleep are better equipped to deal with stress the next day, including seeking out support from friends and engaging in active problem solving rather than brooding.”
“Alpha manipulation really was controlling people’s attention, even though they didn’t have any clear understanding of how they were doing it.. After the neurofeedback training session ended, the researchers asked subjects to perform two additional tasks that involve attention, and found that the enhanced attention persisted.”
“A German study published in January 2019 found that both fidget spinners and doodling impaired memory. But stress balls didn’t negatively affect memory. Still, they didn’t help.”
“Eyal shares specific, actionable techniques for making “indistractability” a habit — by prioritizing the right activities, staying focused on completing goals, and staying accountable and motivated over time.”
“In a study published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, researchers found that people are less likely to remember things they photograph than things they only observe… This constant connection to a device is doing our brains a disservice. Every time our smartphone diverts us from reality we pay a switch cost: an interruption in […]
“Those are among the conclusions from an experiment in which 100 students in an MIT engineering class were given Fitbits, the popular wrist-worn devices that track a person’s activity 24/7, in exchange for the researchers’ access to a semester’s worth of their activity data. The findings — some unsurprising, but some quite unexpected — are […]
“The cost of shuffling goals and mental rules is harmless if there’s predictable downtime during one or both tasks. As a conference call turns to an agenda item irrelevant to you, go ahead and answer email. Multitasking while driving is so dangerous because driving requires all of your attention at unpredictable times. People sense this, […]
Fake news often relies on misattribution — instances in which we can retrieve things from memory but can’t remember their source.”
“If you’re trying to be more productive, don’t analyze how you spend your time. Pay attention to what consumes your attention.”
“People engage in this irrational cycle of chronic procrastination because of an inability to manage negative moods around a task… To rewire any habit… In the case of procrastination, we have to find a better reward than avoidance — one that can relieve our challenging feelings in the present moment without causing harm to our […]
Put simply: sleep – a consistent seven- to nine-hour opportunity each night – is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day.”
“For tens of thousands of years, as we fanned out across the globe, we adapted to radically different niches, and created new types of societies; in the process, we developed new practices, frameworks, technologies and conceptual systems. But then, some time in the past few centuries, we reached an inflection point. A peculiar cognitive toolkit […]
“There are various components to the process of drawing a picture of a word or concept, each of which seem to cumulatively aid memory. Getting people to trace over an existing drawing (so getting them to make relevant arm and hand movements, but not allowing personal elaboration), or to create a drawing which they were […]
“Sleep deprivation is the invisible ceiling to how good life can be.”
“People who frequently use many types of media at once, or heavy media multitaskers, performed significantly worse on simple memory tasks.”
“This week, the journal Pediatrics featured a clarion call to encourage play as a way to reduce stress, promote social skills, and to embolden cognitive growth in young children.”
Routine practice and drilling—especially when coupled with corrective feedback and ambitious but attainable goal-setting—should help students learn better. Such distributed practice is “necessary if not sufficient for acquiring expertise.” Procedural fluency and conceptual understanding influence each other bidirectionally over time.”
“Survey studies provide evidence suggesting that receiving retrospective awards may demotivate the behavior being awarded by inadvertently signaling (a) that recipients have performed the behavior more than their peers have; and (b) that recipients have performed the behavior to a greater degree than was organizationally expected. A school leaders survey shows that awards for attendance […]
“When one connection, called a synapse, strengthens, immediately neighboring synapses weaken.”
“Students are more successful when they space out their study sessions over time, experience the material in multiple modalities, test themselves on the material as part of their study practices, and elaborate on material to make meaningful connections rather than engaging in activities that involve simple repetition of information (e.g., making flashcards or recopying notes). These effective strategies were identified decades ago […]
The brain is particularly influenced by the environment during the teenage years and might be particularly amenable to learning certain skills. It’s a sensitive period for social information, meaning that the brain is set up during adolescence to understand other people and to find out about other people’s minds, their emotions. Brains at this time […]
“Most proposals for emotion in robots involve the addition of a separate ‘emotion module’ – some sort of bolted-on affective architecture that can influence other abilities such as perception and cognition… But research from the behavioural and brain sciences suggests that emotion is not just an ‘added feature’ layered on top of ‘standard’ cognition. Instead, it’s an […]
“There were many kinds of thinking that weren’t possible without a pen and paper, or the digital equivalent — complex mathematical calculations, for instance. Writing prose was usually a matter of looping back and forth between screen or paper and mind: writing something down, reading it over, thinking again, writing again.”
“Our results suggest that writing about a previous failure may allow an individual to experience a new stressor as less stressful, reducing its physiological and behavioral effects.”
While “constructivists” foreground the evidence for real-world projects to create rich emotional and social learning experiences, “cognitivists” worry about learners getting lost in the task and point to evidence for core knowledge curricula and explicit instruction. Opportunities for integration often deteriorate in the face disagreements around progressive and traditionalist goals.”
“For young saplings in a deeply shaded part of the forest, the network is literally a lifeline. Lacking the sunlight to photosynthesize, they survive because big trees, including their parents, pump sugar into their roots through the network… To communicate through the network, trees send chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals, which scientists are just […]
Ideological leanings and viewing choices are conscious, downstream factors that come into play only after automatic cognitive biases have already had their way, abetted by the algorithms and social nature of digital interactions.”
We have both a “ventral” visual system that processes information such as shape and color and a “dorsal” spatial system that processes things like location and distance. When these two systems are prompted to work in concert—as the animated features of Prezi prompt them to do—it enhances our memory and comprehension.”
The study found that ads highlighting more distal sensory experiences like sight and sound lead people to delay purchasing, while those that emphasize more proximal sensory experiences like touch or taste lead to earlier purchases.”
The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag. The findings suggest that the mere presence of one’s smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive functioning, […]
“It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”
Results reveal that practice tests are more beneficial for learning than restudying and all other comparison conditions.”
The survey then asked the students to reflect on what kinds of questions the exam might include, and to identify which of 15 available class resources they would use to study… They were asked to write down why each resource would be useful and how they would use it, effectively mapping out a study plan.”
For years, studies upon studies have shown how bad sleep weakens the immune system, impairs learning and memory, contributes to depression and other mood and mental disorders, as well as obesity, diabetes, cancer and an early death. (Sedated sleep — hello Ambien — has been shown to be as deleterious as poor sleep.)”
“It could be that the whole idea of learning-styles research is misguided because its basic assumption—that the purpose of instructional design is to make learning easy—may just be incorrect… If students do not have to work hard to make sense of what they are learning, then they are less likely to remember it in six […]
There seems to be a never-ending stream of research reports about attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD — the most commonly diagnosed neuro-behavioral disorder in U.S. children — and how it affects young people…. Yet while ADHD is a popular subject for the research community, many teachers and parents still do not understand the condition and […]
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“‘Our model lets us establish a memory that has not been used before,’ Hampson says… If that could be replicated in humans, a chip could come with ready made code that could give people a head start on relearning general skills such as brushing your teeth or driving a car.”
“‘Memory erasure remains a possible but unproven hypothesis,’ Joseph LeDoux has written, adding that editing memories ‘is definitely possible and has broad implications.’”
“Exercisers outperformed couch potatoes in long term memory, reasoning, attention, problem solving, abstract thinking, and more.”
“When instruction occurs under conditions that are constrained and predictable, learning tends to become contextualized… In contrast, varying conditions of practice—even varying the environmental setting in which study sessions take place—can enhance recall on a later test.