The Cult of Homework
(The Atlantic)
America’s devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it’s what today’s parents and teachers grew up with themselves.
The Replication Crisis Is Good for Science
(The Conversation)
Is this bad for science? It’s certainly uncomfortable for many scientists whose work gets undercut, and the rate of failures may currently be unacceptably high. But, as a psychologist and a statistician, I believe confronting the replication crisis is good for science as a whole.
5 Research-Backed Studying Techniques
(Edutopia)
Teachers can guide students to avoid ineffective studying habits in favor of ones that will increase their learning outcomes.
Nine Ways To Ensure Your Mindfulness Teaching Practice Is Trauma-Informed
(KQED – Mind/Shift)
Students may have experienced trauma that makes sitting silently with their eyes closed feel threatening, and teachers can’t assume it will be an easy practice for every child. That awareness is important to create an inclusive environment, but it doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t cultivate their own mindfulness practice or use some techniques with students.
Purpose as Well as Paycheck
(Inside Higher Education)
A new report from Gallup and Bates College shows most students want to find a sense of purpose in their work, but they aren’t always succeeding.
The Biggest Hurdles Recent Graduates Face Entering the Workforce
(Harvard Business Review)
Exhausted.” “Lost.” “Anxious.” “Everything’s a struggle.” These are just some of the ways that 54 recent college grads we recently interviewed described their experience transitioning
from college to the professional world…We find in our research that this culture shift plays out along at least three key dimensions: feedback, relationships, and accountability.
Students Face Too Much Academic Pressure
(The Signal)
A study by psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill called “Perfectionism is Increasing Over Time,” which was published in The American Psychological Association, found that unhealthy perfectionism has surged among young adults, with the biggest increase seen in those who feel pressured by society’s expectations of their success.
Principals From Schools With Shootings Form Support Network
(MSN)
Schools typically have protocols for the immediate response, he said, but it can be much more complicated to figure out what follows — how to restore a focus on learning, address mental health needs for both students and employees, and navigate anniversaries and commemorations, for example.
3 Things a Faculty-Pay Survey Shows About Academic Jobs
(Chronicle of Higher Education)
The long and short of it: Pay raises were modest, faculty buying power has eroded, and many different factors are rolled into faculty pay. But the data, from nearly 1,000 two- and four-year colleges, also tell us three things about the academic workplace.
Making SEL More Relevant to Teens
(Edutopia)
Three social and emotional learning activities that are designed to address high school students’ need for status and respect.
Parkland Dad Says Student Activism ‘Eclipsed’ Mental Health Help For Shooting Survivors
(Huffington Post)
The father of a student killed in last year’s mass shooting at a Florida school argued Wednesday that the political activism embraced by survivors and the media attention those efforts attracted came at the cost of a needed focus on mental health problems caused by the massacre.
Guest Post: Self-Referencing as a Tool to Improve Learning
(The Learning Scientists)
One way that researchers can avoid adding to this overwhelming array is to take practices that teachers already use instinctively, and systematically test their effectiveness. We have taken this approach to examine the usefulness of a technique known to psychologists as ‘self-referencing’.
Screen Reading Worse for Comprehension, Leads to Overconfidence, New Meta-analysis Concludes
(Education Week’s Digital Education – Subscription Required, Free Trial)
More evidence is in: Reading from screens harms comprehension. According to a new meta-analysis of nearly three dozen research studies published over the past decade, reading from paper has a small, statistically significant benefit on reading performance. One likely reason: Readers using screens tend to think they’re processing and understanding texts better then [sic] they actually are.
Gender Gap in Spatial Reasoning Starts in Elementary School, Meta-Analysis Finds
(Medical Xpress)
It is well-established that, on average, men outperform women on a spatial reasoning task known as mental rotation—imagining multi-dimensional objects from different points of view. Men are not, however, born with this advantage, suggests a major meta-analysis by psychologists at Emory University.
Gen Z Takeover: As Demand for Mental Health Services Grows, Colleges Give Students New Tools
(Education Dive)
Streamlined counseling centers, de-stress stations and well-being initiatives are helping serve a broader range of student needs.
How Do We Know Pupils Are Making Progress? Part 4: Instruction
(David Didau’s The Learning Spy)
This is the final post in a series looking at how we can be sure that students are making progress through the curriculum. The whole purpose of knowing whether students are making progress is to be able to design appropriate instructional sequences. We may believe children are motoring through our wonderfully constructed curriculum but if empirical data reveals this not to be the case, we need to know.
What Social and Emotional Learning Needs to Succeed and Survive
(Education Next)
Seven suggestions for SEL advocates and funders as they seek to deliver on its promise and avoid its pitfalls.
EdNext Podcast: Supporting Social and Emotional Development to Boost Academic Success
(Education Next)
Some believe that growing interest in social and emotional learning is just a distraction from the academic mission of schools, but Robert Balfanz argues that only by educating the whole child can schools prepare students for adult success.
Explicit Teaching for All
(Greg Ashman’s Filling the Pail)
The evidence from education research and educational psychology strongly suggests that you could extend Snow and Juel’s statement to include explicit teaching of all academic content.
Positive Mind-Set Tied to Engagement, GPA
(Inside Higher Education)
Community college students perform better and are more engaged when they have a positive attitude, or “growth mind-set,” about learning and improving.
Want to Be an Insider? Here’s What the “Science of Learning” Really Means
(Retrieval Practice)
The “science of learning” is actually an umbrella term that spans many research fields including psychology, computer science, and neuroscience.
Child Experts Weigh Risks, Benefits of Tech for Kids
(Record Online – Times Herald-Record)
According to early results of a landmark study on brain development of more than 11,000 children, supported by the National Institutes of Health, as reported in the New York Times, children who spent more than two hours a day looking at a screen had lower scores on thinking and language tests.
To Boost Reading Comprehension, Show Students Thinking Strategies Good Readers Use
(KQED – Mind/Shift)
This process of questioning while reading is one of a number of “cognitive strategies” Stewart teaches her students. The strategies focus on what research has shown to be the thought processes of good readers. Others include planning and goal-setting, tapping prior knowledge, making connections, visualizing and forming interpretations.
How UPenn Cut Counseling Wait Times in Half Without Hiring More Counselors
(Chronicle of Higher Education)
A pilot program, begun in the fall of 2018, aimed to more efficiently connect students to mental-health services. The result was a significant reduction in average wait time to see a counselor.
