Getty Launches Virtual Library

 

Getty Publications has introduced a virtual library that will provide free online access to more than 250 backlist titles, available online or as PDF downloads. The library includes titles published by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Research Institute, with new titles added on an ongoing basis.

“Last year we made freely available thousands of images of works in our collections that were in the public domain or to which we held all the rights,” said Getty president and CEO James Cuno. “As a next step in our increasing digital engagement, we are now making hundreds of publications—many of which are out of print—freely available to scholars and the interested public around the world.”

How teaching assistants can give a boost to struggling pupils

More maths anyone? David Jones/PA Archive/Press Association Images

Teaching assistants can help children improve literacy and numeracy skills if they work in small groups with specific pupils known to have low attainment levels, new reports indicate.

The findings appear to contradict previous research on teaching assistants, which had suggested that they did little to help struggling children.

Some of the research shows pupils with already low attainment levels, or those eligible from free school meals, are particularly likely to benefit from working with teaching assistants.

The six reports are the first to be published by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a UK charity set up in partnership with the Sutton Trust which has received funding from the department of education. Another 66 studies involving 450,000 children are ongoing at one in ten schools in England.

Is it a wasp or a parasite?

The emerald jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) is definitely a wasp - as its name suggests - but it lives the first stage of its life as a parasite, growing literally, inside the body of a living cockroach!

Read more: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/27/crawling-through-the-brain-without-getting-lost/

How to teach … World Book Day

As World Book Day approaches, here are some great ideas, lesson plans and teaching resources to get your students excited about reading

Celebrate World Book Day 2014 with a selection of teaching resources to inspire children to read. Photograph: VisitBritain/Pawel Libera/Getty Images.

  World Book Day is a fabulous opportunity to get young people excited about reading.

This year's event takes place on Thursday 6 March, and the aim – as always – is to celebrate the power of storytelling and inspire a lifelong love of books.

If you are wondering how to get involved, look no further than the Guardian Teacher Network where you will find a range of resources to get your classroom buzzing.

Jump right in with a set of activity packs for nursery, primary and secondary schools. Created by the organisers of World Book Day, they are full of reading-themed ideas. For pre-school children, try acting out a favourite story or making a picture book of children's drawings. Primary students might enjoy organising a book swap or holding a pyjama party to discuss their favourite bedtime books. Secondary pupils could have a book election to find their year group's three favourite books of all time, or they could organise a sponsored "read-a-thon".

How to teach… reading for pleasure

The link between reading for fun and educational success is well established, but how can teachers get reluctant readers into books? These teaching resources will help

  
Studies have found that reading for pleasure is more important to a child's educational achievement than their family's wealth or social class. But how to inspire children to ditch the tech (e-readers excepted) and get into reading for fun?

Having a couple of nice books in the book corner won't necessarily cut it anymore, especially if your students' parents/carers don't have a reading habit. So, here are some great teaching resources and ideas which will help you to encourage all your students to become lifelong readers and turn your school into a reading school.

We start with some inspiring resources from the Scottish Book Trust. For fabulous ideas on creating a reading culture check out The big book bash. It's full of ideas from holding a whole school celebration to setting up blind dates with a book.

If you want to give parents some quick guidance on how to encourage their children to read these top tips sheets are really handy; this sheet is for three-to-seven year-olds and this one for eight-to-11-year-olds. Don't give up on the teens, here are some tips for helping young people aged 12-16. The books don't have to be too wordy, here are some great ideas for picture books for older readers – and their breadth and depth might take you by surprise.

Failure can be productive for teaching children maths

Try, try and try again. GlobalPartnership for Education

Learning from mistakes, errors, and failure seems intuitive and compelling. Everyone can relate to it. But if failure is a powerful learning mechanism, why do we wait for it to happen? Why can’t we design for it, understand how and when it works? What if designing for failure while learning a new concept or skill could result in more robust learning?

Let me frame the question more concretely in the context of learning maths. When learning a new concept, should learners be first taught the concept and then solve problems, or solve problems first and then be taught the concept?

The first option is relatively straightforward and one that most of us can relate to: teach students the concept first, show them how it is applied to solve problems, and then get them to solve problems on their own. This method is commonly known as direct instruction, and is highly prevalent in schools all over the world.

Finland puts flexible holidays ahead of longer school days

The length of the school year and school days, as well as the timing of holidays, is always a controversial topic. While the debate rages in the UK about whether children should spend more time at school…

 

The length of the school year and school days, as well as the timing of holidays, is always a controversial topic. While the debate rages in the UK about whether children should spend more time at school, in Finland – which has both one of the shortest school years in the OECD and some of the best results in international education rankings – there is a push to improve learning by developing novel ways of learning, rather than increasing school days and lesson time.

Winter holidays in Finland are staggered depending on where you live. At the moment pupils in southern Finland are enjoying their last days of the winter holidays. They will be followed by the middle part of the country, and finally northern Finland.

Study of jazz players shows common brain circuitry processes music and language

Researchers scanned brains while musicians 'traded fours'

 

  

The brains of jazz musicians engrossed in spontaneous, improvisational musical conversation showed robust activation of brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax, which are used to interpret the structure of phrases and sentences. But this musical conversation shut down brain areas linked to semantics — those that process the meaning of spoken language, according to results of a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of jazz musicians in the act of "trading fours," a process in which musicians participate in spontaneous back and forth instrumental exchanges, usually four bars in duration. The musicians introduce new melodies in response to each other's musical ideas, elaborating and modifying them over the course of a performance.

Children’s attention spans at risk from too much screen time

From iPads to Xboxes, the modern child has a vast array of electronic media to help alleviate boredom, pass the time and play online games. Parents may often wonder about the impact such activities can have on their children’s brain development, behaviour and learning.

Now Labour’s shadow education minister Tristram Hunt has suggested that children need lessons in how to concentrate, because of their increased use of social media.

As always these issues are complex, have been discussed emotively in the press and can be easily misunderstood. Television viewing is an excellent example of this. Most studies find a small but negative link between total numbers of hours of television viewing and academic achievement.

But when research studies control for characteristics of the child such as IQ and socioeconomic status those differences usually disappear.

French Revolution Digital Archive – web site launched -

Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) have just released a vast trove of documents and images from the French Revolution on their new French Revolution Digital Archive website (FRDA).

The site contains both resources for the dedicated scholar and fascinating material for the everyday history buff, from prints depicting the events of 1789 to records of parliamentary deliberations and private letters.

Why is Singapore’s school system so successful, and is it a model for the West?

Stick to the textbook. Ray Chua/AP/Press Association Images

For more than a decade, Singapore, along with South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Finland, has been at or near the top of international leagues tables that measure children’s ability in reading, maths and science. This has led to a considerable sense of achievement in Finland and East Asia and endless hand-wringing and head-scratching in the West.

What then do Singaporean teachers do in classrooms that is so special, bearing in mind that there are substantial differences in classroom practices between – as well as within – the top-performing countries? What are the particular strengths of Singapore’s instructional regime that helps it perform so well? What are its limits and constraints?

Is it the right model for countries seeking to prepare students properly for the complex demands of 21st century knowledge economies and institutional environments more generally? Is Singapore’s teaching system transferable to other countries? Or is its success so dependent on very specific institutional and cultural factors unique to Singapore that it is folly to imagine that it might be reproduced elsewhere?

The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates

Semir Zeki^1*, John Paul Romaya¹, Dionigi M. T. Benincasa² and Michael F. Atiyah³

• ¹Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology, University College London, London, UK
• ²Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London, UK
• ³School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Many have written of the experience of mathematical beauty as being comparable to that derived from the greatest art. 

This makes it interesting to learn whether the experience of beauty derived from such a highly intellectual and abstract source as mathematics correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain as that derived from more sensory, perceptually based, sources.

Why climate change is very bad for your health

Alastair Mackie’s Mosquito Coast. Noodlefish

It is beyond doubt that our emissions contribute to climate change. And climate change is making us sick.

Sea–level rises, changes to the severity of monsoon seasons and rainfall, flooding, droughts and heatwaves are all predicted to have an increasing impact on our health.

The World Health Organisation estimates that between 1970 and 2004, the environmental effects of climate change caused more than 140,000 deaths each year. And the direct financial cost of the damage it will have on our health is estimated to come in at around US$2-4 billion in just over 15 years time.

Extreme weather events

We tend to think of large-scale weather events as “natural” disasters, but the case is increasingly being made for a man-made cause and effect for some of these. While it is difficult to attribute single events such as Hurricane Katrina to climate change, climatologists have suggested a possible role in contributing to the intensity of these kinds of events. And flooding, droughts, heatwaves, and the spread of disease have all been linked to climate change.

Twins show success at school is not just down to genes

How many A*s does one family need? Andrew Milligan/PA

There is a common misconception that genes are deterministic and that human potential is fixed at birth. This could not be further from the truth. We, as behavioural geneticists, see no evidence whatsoever for genetic determinism in how, what and why children learn.
In the recent debate about genetics and education, and whether those two words even belong in the same sentence, the influence of a child’s “non-shared environment” has largely been overlooked.

To elaborate, if you cloned one child 30 times and sent them into the same class at the same school with the same teacher, the chances are you would see 30 outcomes, all at least slightly different from each other.

We see this in cloned animal litters and in identical twins. The question that behavioural geneticists ask is why. How it is possible for genetically identical organisms to develop differently? And we try to find an answer by looking at experiences which differ between identical twins.

Your memory rewrites the past and edits it with new experiences, study finds

Memory editing happens in the hippocampus, updating recollections with fragments from current experiences

Our memory is a poor way of recording events, a study has found, as it rewrites the past with current information, updating recollections with new experiences.

In the study, How your Memory Rewrites the Past, researchers looked at the exact point in time when incorrectly recalled information was implanted into an existing memory.

The team found that memory rewrites the past with current information, updating recollections with new experiences. This form of editing happens in the hippocampus, working as the memory’s version of a film editor or special effects team.

How to Close the Learning Gap for Children at All Socioeconomic Levels

The Unstoppable Power of Applying Maslow’s Laws Today

“Those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it,” said George Santayana nearly a century ago.Yet our public school system continues to operate on the myth that what teachers do in classrooms is enough to close the gap on learning between children at all socioeconomic levels.Government policy-makers have not learned from the past or experts on children, behavior, learning, or teaching and continue down a road that leaves EVERY child behind, some much farther than others.

 In 1943, Abraham Maslow published “A Theory of Human Motivation”, the lessons of which are more critical today than at the time. Maslow taught that at any age, until a person’s basic, primal needs are met, he/she is motivated to do little more than survive.Thus, it is clear why children that do not have proper nutrition, food security, shelter, clothing, medical/dental care, support, and safety, do not arrive at school ready to learn. Bottom line: closing the gap on learning for children at risk requires commitment to whatever is necessary to ensure the fulfillment of every basic need for children AND their families.It’s a simple, elegant, highly challenging solution and one about which every responsible U.S. citizen should be concerned.

Gloomy vocabulary in books reflects poor economic climate

Economic hardship makes for blue books. Nerissa's Ring

Literature has mirrored the shifting economic climate over the past century, according to a study published today by researchers in Bristol and London. When times are tough financially, it seems, books gets miserable.

Mood expressed in English language books was measured by recording the frequency of words expressing unhappiness across a database of more than eight million digitised books published in the past 100 years.

This “literary misery index” was found to have a strong correlation to the annual US economic misery index, which is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates.

The researchers found that some periods, particularly the years following World War I, the aftermath of the Great Depression and the 1975 energy crisis, were clearly marked by “literary misery”. The results seemed to follow a pattern of Western economic history, shifted forward by a decade.

Can You Name That Smell?

Niclas Burenhult

Smell that? A native Jahai speaker describing the odor of a local plant.

Ask a group of people to describe the color of a sheet of paper, a cloud, or a glass of milk, and chances are they’ll all say “white.” But ask the same group to describe the smell of cinnamon, and you’ll likely get a potpourri of answers, ranging from “spicy” to “smoky” to “sweet,” and sometimes all three. When it comes to naming smells, humans struggle to find concise, universal terms. Indeed, scientists have long thought the ability was out of our reach. But a new study indicates that the inhabitants of a remote peninsula in Southeast Asia can depict smells as easily as the rest of us pick colors.

Reception children to face compulsory tests from 2016

Four and five-year-olds to face basic literacy and reasoning tests within weeks of starting school

 

A Whitehall source said the tests for young children would give schools a clearer idea of pupils' progress. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

 
Compulsory national testing for four- and five-year-olds in England from 2016 is to be introduced as part of sweeping changes being proposed to early years and primary education.

The tests will take place in the first weeks of reception class, when most children will be aged four, and will be designed to give teachers and schools a clearer idea of each child's abilities at the start of their formal schooling.

The tests are to be carefully crafted to estimate a child's "baseline" abilities in very basic literacy, reasoning and cognition, rather than testing their knowledge as in a traditional examination.
A Whitehall source said: "This has been mooted for some time and is a logical step. It will help teachers identify where each child starts from, and which children are likely to need the most help.

Carbon as a commodity: a trade in pollution could help clean up dirty economies

We pay for the product, but not the carbon cost. Kin Cheung/AP

Is it fair that China is blamed for the carbon dioxide emissions it generates to manufacture products destined for the West? Would the West do more to reduce greenhouse gases if it had to pay for the emissions caused in producing the products it imports? Welcome to the world of carbon accounting, where changes to the way the books are kept could improve our chances of driving down greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas have soared. In 2013 they were more than 60% higher than in 1990. This is despite significant progress in global climate policy, with numerous international agreements promising emission cutbacks.

This contradiction reflects the structure of most international agreements: industrialised countries are allotted emissions targets while developing countries are not. Unsurprisingly, emissions have largely stabilised in the countries with targets to meet, and more than doubled in countries without them. China has seen the largest amount of emissions growth and now emits more carbon dioxide per person than the entire European Union.

Autistic Brains Create 42 Percent More Information During Rest

New research from Case Western Reserve University and University of Toronto neuroscientists finds that the brains of autistic children generate more information at rest -- a 42% increase on average. The study offers a scientific explanation for the most typical characteristic of autism -- withdrawal into one's own inner world. The excess production of information may explain a child's detachment from their environment.

Published at the end of December in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, this study is a follow-up to the authors' prior finding that brain connections are different in autistic children. This paper determined that the differences account for the increased complexity within their brains.

How Do Spiders Walk Upside Down? Mystery Solved

Spiders can crawl pretty much anywhere: Glass, walls, and even ceilings are all equally accessible to the arachnids.

Now scientists have solved the long-standing mystery of their sticky success: Their secret is small hairs at the end of their legs. (See pictures of spiders up close.)

A female banana spider on her web. Photograph by Michael Hare/Alamy

 

These thousands of tiny hairs create multiple contact points between the spider and the surface that increase the spider’s ability to hang on, scientists have found.

The hairs are both small and flexible. At the molecular level, even the smoothest surfaces are rough, so if the spider’s hairs were rigid, the arachnid could make contact only with certain parts of the surface. But because the hairs are malleable, they can make contact with more of the surface, which provides additional stickiness, said Jonas Wolff, a biologist at the University of Kiel in Germany. (Also see “Watery Gecko Grip Could Lead to Stickier Tape.”)

Teachers' pay must be at the heart of global education reform

If the development community is serious about improving teaching and learning, it must address the recruitment, reward and retention of teachers

 

If current trends continue, it will take until 2072 for all the poorest young women in developing countries to become literate. Photograph: Dan Chung/The Guardian

 

Progress in global education – especially in the poorest regions of the world – remains painfully slow. The latest Unesco Education for All global monitoring report, published Wednesday, underlines how far we still are from guaranteeing a good quality education for every child. While many pupils are now attending school, the quality of the education is often so poor that they are failing to learn the most elementary skills. Around 175 million young people in poor countries – equivalent to one quarter of the youth population – cannot read all or part of a sentence.

The situation for girls is particularly dire. If current trends continue, it will take until 2072 for all the poorest young women in developing countries to become literate. In other words, it will only be the grandchildren of today's pupils in sub-Saharan Africa that can expect to learn the skills that the developed world takes for granted.