The High Price of Multitasking
(The New York Times)
A 2015 survey showed that a majority of students who use social media, text or watch TV while studying think that they can still comprehend the material they’re studying.
Does Listening to Music Stimulate Creative Thinking, or Stifle It?
(Time)
Listening to music while you work “significantly impairs” creativity. That was the conclusion of a study published earlier this year in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology that examined the effect of different types of background music on creative problem solving.
How Making Music Can Help Students Cope with Trauma
(KQED – Mind/Shift)
“Writing lyrics feels safer than directly speaking about what she’s been through,” says Tabitha Wheeler, a social worker at the school describing a teen who composed a song about her psychological pain and childhood trauma.
Q&A Collections: Student Motivation & Social-Emotional Learning
(Education Week’s Classroom Q&A – Subscription Required, Free Trial)
Comprehensive list on the topic of Student Motivation & Social-Emotional Learning.
New “All About Grants” Podcast on Writing a Fellowship Application
(NIH – Extramural Nexus – Transcript available)
Shoshana Kahana, Ph.D., NIH Research Training Policy Officer, discusses the F application process, sharing tips and best practices for developing a strong application.
Making Our Schools Safe for Learning
(AFT’s Our News)
What’s the single most important thing affecting student outcomes? Emotions. And not necessarily students’ own emotions but ours—those of the adults around them. So says Marc Brackett, a professor at Yale University and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
Cyberbullying Is on the Rise Among Middle and High School Students, Report Finds
(ABC News)
While overall rates of bullying in schools across the country have not changed, a new federal report released Tuesday revealed that online bullying has increased among middle and high school students.
More Students Are Being Bullied Online, Federal Report Says
(The Washington Post – Subscription Required, Free Trail)
Twenty percent of students between the ages of 12 and 18 were bullied during the 2016-2017 school year, according to the report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the U.S. Education Department. Among those students who faced bullying, 15 percent said they were bullied online or by text, a 3.5 percentage point jump from the 2014-2015 school year.
Shelf Control? Largest Textbook Publisher Is Ditching Books and Going ‘Digital First’
(NBC News)
Patricia Alexander, an educational psychologist and professor at the University of Maryland, has worked on seven studies, comparing how students learn using e-books with how they learn using traditional print books. In all seven studies, she said, students retain more information and ultimately comprehend and learn more using textbooks.
Higher Ed Groups Ask Lawmakers to Prioritize Graduate Education
(Inside Higher Education)
A coalition of higher ed groups asked key Senate and House lawmakers in a letter Monday to make graduate students a priority in a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
How One College Went ‘All In’ in Its Neighborhood
(The Chronicle of Higher Education)
That geography led the university and local school system to come together with several companies and foundations to plan a new school. The idea was to put — under one roof — students in kindergarten through eighth grade, the university’s college of education, an early-childhood center, a medical and dental clinic, a low-cost food club, and other services for students and their families.
Teachers Support Social-Emotional Learning, But Say Students in Distress Strain Their Skills
(Education Week- Subscription Required, Free Trial)
Some research has linked focusing on these social-emotional competencies to higher academic performance and better outcomes outside of school. But while most teachers say it’s important for them to teach these skills, many still don’t feel equipped to help students manage their emotions—especially when it comes to the children who are facing the greatest hurdles, according to a new nationally representative survey from the Education Week Research Center.
GUEST POST: Who Benefits More From Peer Feedback: The Giver or the Receiver?
(The Learning Scientists)
Dylan Wiliam advises that “feedback should be more work for the recipient,” advice that not only helps ensure feedback has an impact, but is also conscious of teacher time and workload.
Netflix Cuts Controversial Suicide Scene From ’13 Reasons Why’
(NPR)
Two years after it released the first season of the show 13 Reasons Why with a graphic suicide scene, Netflix has announced that it has edited it out. The show is centered on the suicide of fictional teen Hannah Baker, and the first season’s finale shows her taking her own life. Several organizations, including the National Association of School Psychologists, raised concerns that it could romanticize suicide for vulnerable teens.
‘For-Now Parents’ and ‘Big Feelings’: How Sesame Street Talks About Trauma
(The Atlantic)
“The Muppets can often do what humans can’t. They’ve got this special power.”
New Pathways for Sensory Learning in the Brain
(Science Daily)
Researchers have developed an automated, robotic training device that allows mice to learn at their leisure. The technology stands to further neuroscience research by allowing researchers to train animals under more natural conditions and identify mechanisms of circuit rewiring that occur during learning.
Surface Structure, Deep Structure and Pseudo-Deep Structure
(Filling the Pail)
We may have a bias for attending to surface structure. After all, deep structure is a layer of abstraction. Such a bias may account for the stories people tell about how they were only ever taught procedures in maths or names and dates in history when at school. Once we are aware of this as teachers, we can build programmes that carefully cycle students through surface structure and deep structure, perhaps by presenting different examples that have the same deep structure and drawing attention to this.
Contemplative Practice
(Inside Higher Ed’s Academic Minute – transcript available)
Patti Owen-Smith, professor of psychology at Emory University, discusses how more time for thought could benefit students.
Kindergarten Behavior Predicts Adult Earning Power
(The Hechinger Report)
New research draws a direct link between kids’ attentiveness, aggression and friendliness in kindergarten and their adult income
Grades Can Hinder Learning. What Should Professors Use Instead?
(The Chronicle of Higher Education)
So Blum has stopped grading. She has joined the ranks of college professors and schoolteachers experimenting with “ungrading,” a set of practices meant to redirect time and attention to more important things. Like most professors, Blum can’t discard grades completely — she still has to hand them in at the end of the term. But that leaves the rest of the semester to help students question the premise of those grades and encourage them to focus instead on their learning.
5 Things Parents Need to Know About ‘Summer Loss’
(The Conversation)
Despite the seeming consensus that children lose learning during the summer, a 2017 report from the Brookings Institute showed that the research on summer learning is actually quite mixed.
