Mistakes: A key to learning

Scientists discover that we remember our errors, which is a good thing.

 

Attempting a new task almost always involves trial and error. We pay attention to those errors, a new study shows. Our brains store memories of past blunders. We then use those memories to improve how well we do in future attempts, a new study finds. 
 

David Herzfeld discovered this newly identified type of memory. As a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md., he combines engineering and technology to aid public health.

In the new study, Herzfeld recruited people to play a simple video game. Participants were asked to move a cursor across a screen by manipulating a robotic arm. Critically, the robotic arm and the person’s hand were shielded from the player’s view. Participants instead had to focus on a computer screen. There, they saw a dot and a target. Their goal was to move the dot to the target.

That sounds easy enough. But the researchers could impose some challenges along the way. For instance, in one trial, participants had to move the robotic arm straight forward. But in some cases, the cursor moved a little more than the arm did. Other times, the cursor moved a little less. When those errors occurred in the same direction each time, participants remembered them. With each new attempt, the test participants corrected their movements a bit. And this slowly improved their ability to hit the target. But when those errors kept switching direction — being a little too far, then not far enough — participants ignored them.

Why Finland, Korea and Czech Republic get the most bang for their educational buck

There are around 1.3 billion children enrolled in primary and secondary schools worldwide. Each year, governments spend trillions of dollars on their education systems with the objective of educating children to the highest possible standard.

Some governments use available budgets more efficiently than others. A new report which I co-authored called the Efficiency Index, published by London-based education consultancy GEMS Education Solutions, has highlighted which countries are using these most effectively to produce the best educational outcomes for their young people. Finland, Korea and the Czech Republic come out on top of the 30-country list.

The Efficiency Index is particularly relevant in the context of economic recession. In most countries, public expenditure on school education represents a significant share of total government budget.

The global proportion of government spending on education has, on average, risen for the past 20 years despite competition with other public sectors such as health, transport and defence. Yet there are potentially large financial savings to be made if we can better understand the underlying relationship between resource inputs and pupil performance.

Best scores per buck

Using econometric methods, our report examined data from 30 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries to ascertain which inputs funded by governments really do make a difference. It also looked at which countries are combining these inputs most effectively to produce the best educational outcomes for each dollar invested. The results are based on internationally comparable data collected over the last 15 years, using standardised scores from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Children’s brains shaped by music training

Two years of enrichment program better than one.

 

 


Musical training tunes the developing brain, scientists report in the Sept. 3 Journal of Neuroscience. After two years in a music enrichment program, children in Los Angeles had more sophisticated brain responses to spoken syllables than kids who had only a year of training.
Researchers led by neuroscientist Nina Kraus of Northwestern University studied 44 children enrolled with the Harmony Project, an organization that brings music training to kids in low-income communities. The children began music lessons when they were on average 8 years old. After two years of lessons, but not one, kids’ brains showed distinct responses to the rapidly spoken sounds “ba” and “ga.”

Electrodes placed on the kids’ scalps revealed millisecond-scale differences in brain activity in response to the syllables, suggesting that the more musically trained brains were better at distinguishing between the sounds. This neural distinction has been linked to real-life skills such as reading and the ability to pick out speech from a noisy din, says Kraus.

She and her colleagues hope to expand their research and bring musical training to more children. “We’ve opened the window a crack, but I’m hoping it can be thrown wide open,” she says. 

 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/children%E2%80%99s-brains-shaped-music-training 

Top 5 Ways to Get to Know Your Students

Help your students get to know each other, too!

Here are several great ways to build connections with and among your new students! These icebreakers and community-building activities double as assessment opportunities, skill-building lessons, or projects that result in a unique, inspiring classroom decoration. 

Getting Acquainted: Create a Class Slideshow

On the first day of school, I begin by reading Miss Malarkey Doesn't Live in Room 10. We discuss the fact that teachers are "real people" and have normal lives. Next, I share a PowerPoint slideshow with my students. I include pictures of my family, my home (and all of the rooms in it), pets, what I did over the summer, things I do for fun, etc. After I share, the students are to write an introduction of themselves. When they finish writing their draft and editing, they type what they have written. I make a slideshow of their introductions and include their picture on the slide. On parent orientation night, I have their PowerPoint showing on my television. The images of each student and their writing rotate automatically as I am giving my orientation "speech." It's a relief to look at 22 sets of parents and not have their eyes fixed on me. Instead, they are reading what my students have written. I also leave the slideshow opened on all of my computers for the first couple of weeks of school so that students can read what their peers have written. --Angie Kelly, Grade 3 teacher, Main Street Elementary, Shelbyville, IL 

Everyone Is Unique: Spin a Classroom Web

At the beginning of the year, I focus on the idea of everyone being unique. On the first day of school, we get in a circle on the reading carpet. I begin by saying that I am going to say something about myself that is unique or something that is special and no one else in the room shares that quality with me (I tell them that it is ok if some people have the same ideas, but that we want to try to find ideas that make us different). I tell them that unique is another word for different. I ask them, what do you think about when you hear the word different? Often, they name things with a negative connotation. I tell them that I like the word unique, because it means the same thing, but that negative connotation hasn't ruined the word.

Pedal power: why cycling to school is good for learning and the planet

Schools are starting cycle- or walk-to-school schemes to nurture green thinking and encourage children to be healthy. Matthew Jenkin meets the teachers making a difference.

 

Every time a child is driven to primary school and back their car releases about 84 balloons worth of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to the charity Sustrans, which promotes sustainable transport in the UK. That’s a lot of hot air. The amount of damaging greenhouse gasses produced on the daily school run could be reduced dramatically, however, if parents left their cars at home and students simply walked, cycled or scooted in.

Schools across the UK are starting bike- or walk-to-school schemes to not only do their bit for the environment but also to teach the curriculum in a fun, active way.

Winton Primary School in Bournemouth started a cycle to school scheme to combat traffic on nearby streets following a surge in pupil population after the school decided to go from two to four classes per year group. After a small child was hit by a car last year, headteacher Neil Tarchetti decided it was time to take action.

As well as holding competitions to incentivise students, with prizes for children who brought their bikes to school every day of the week, the school worked with Bournemouth borough council to set up designated park and walk areas.

It’s helping to ease traffic in the area, claims Tarchetti, but most importantly it also keeps children fit and helps them learn more about why we need to protect the health of our planet.

“Cycling and walking to school has become part of our efforts to build children’s awareness of environmental issues,” the headteacher explains. “Many students didn’t previously know what to do to lower their carbon footprint so we are bringing that into the curriculum more and developing their understanding.”

Building Community in the Classroom

It’s the beginning of the new school year! Now is the time to create a secure, nurturing, supportive environment.

The beginning of the year is a time for creating a sense of community, and your room is the gathering place. Here, all children can feel secure, nurtured and supported by the environment, each other, and YOU. This new group of individuals bring with them divergent interests, abilities, cultures, and families. Each child arrives at your door with a fertile background of experience that enriches your program. By demonstrating your loving acceptance of all children's backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints, you create an environment that says, "All are welcome here." At the same time you are modeling just how you want children to be with one another. The goal is to celebrate individuals while creating a sense of community.

We know from recent studies that children who feel a sense of identity within a group are the most well-adjusted and successful in school. As children progress developmentally, their group interaction skills become more finely tuned as well. Children's "world view" expands to add a greater understanding of the relationship between self and other. Studies also tell us that some of the most important skills children need for school readiness and success are the "people skills" of social interaction, communication, collaboration, and problem solving. They are the fertile ground that supports the academics of learning ABCs and 123s! That is what you are doing in the first month of school — creating an emotionally secure "home base" for children to learn in. So don't worry if you are not teaching many specific academic skills in your first month. By focusing on establishing a safe, secure, and nurturing environment, you are teaching children how to learn and are setting the stage for the entire year.

How can you help a child feel secure in a new community? Let's look at a few elements that allow children to feel known and supported.

Creating Classrooms We Need: 8 Ways Into Inquiry Learning

If kids can access information from sources other than school, and if school is no longer the only place where information lives, what, then happens to the role of this institution?

“Our whole reason for showing up for school has changed, but infrastructure has stayed behind,” said Diana Laufenberg, who taught history at the progressive public school Science Leadership Academy for many years. Laufenberg provided some insight into how she guided students to find their own learning paths at school, and enumerated some of these ideas at SXSWEdu last week.

1. BE FLEXIBLE.

The less educators try to control what kids learn, the more students’ voices will be heard and, eventually, their ability to drive their own learning. But that requires a flexible mindset on the part of the teacher. “That’s a scary proposition for teachers,” Laufenberg said. “‘What do you mean I’m going to have 60 kids doing 60 different projects,’ teachers might say. But that’s exactly the way for kids to do interesting, high-end work that they’re invested in.”

Laufenberg recalled a group of tenacious students who continued to ask permission to focus their video project on the subject of drugs, despite her repeated objections. She finally relented — with the caveat that they not resort to cliches. In turn, the students turned in one of the best video projects she’d ever seen: a well-produced, polished video about Americans’ dependence on pharmaceutical drugs that was dense with facts backed up by students’ research. “And I almost killed this project,” she said. “There are vastly creative minds that are capable of doing intensely wonderful things with their learning but often we don’t let that live and breathe. Thankfully I got out of their way and let them do the work they were capable of.”

2. FOSTER INQUIRY BY SCAFFOLDING CURIOSITY.

Teachers always come up to Laufenberg wanting to learn more about her progressive pedagogy — and they invariably ask, “But when do you just tell them things? Don’t you have to just tell them sometimes?”

Why replacing teachers with automated education lacks imagination

The belief that technology can automate education and replace teachers is pervasive. Framed in calls for greater efficiency, this belief is present in today’s educational innovations, reform endeavours, and technology products. We can do better than adopting this insipid perspective and aspire instead for a better future where innovations imagine creative new ways to organise education.

In the 1920s and 1930s, American psychologist Sidney Pressey worked to create a future in which machines would eliminate “the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education,” freeing teachers from routine tasks, to be “real teachers” instead of “clerical workers”.

 
Pressey created the “Automatic Teacher” to realise this vision. This was a teaching machine that presented information, accepted a response, and returned pre-recorded feedback. Since then, numerous educational technology initiatives have sought to automate the delivery of instruction and assessment.

For example, during World War II, filmstrips were used to train large numbers of civilians and military personnel in the United States. The radio, television, computer, and internet have been used in a similar fashion.

These historical examples illustrate the belief that education can be standardised, neatly packaged, and efficiently delivered to large numbers of people, and replace teachers in the process. 

Four Skills to Teach Students In the First Five Days of School

The first few days of school are a vital time to set the right tone for the rest of the year. Many teachers focus on important things like getting to know their students, building relationships and making sure students know what the classroom procedures will be. While those things are important, Alan November, a former teacher-turned-author and lecturer says the most important ideas to hammer home will help students learn on their own for the rest of the year.

POWER RESEARCHING

“The name of the game is to find the right information with the right question,” said November during a workshop at the 2014 gathering of the International Society of Technology in Education in Atlanta. “My job used to be to give you the information, now my job is to teach you how to find the information.” November firmly believes this dynamic needs to be made very clear in the first five days of school.

Kids think they know how to use the internet to search and find the information they need, but November has found through many interviews and school visits that often students have no idea why Google or any other search provider works the way it does. And they don’t know how to phrase questions to get the answers they seek.

“Kids literally take their teachers assignment and Google it,” November said. “They don’t understand that Google doesn’t speak English or any other language.” He’s tested his theory in classrooms, asking students to research the Iran Hostage Crisis. Students inevitably Googled the event and cited the first few pages that came up. But every resource was written from a U.S. perspective on an event that affected two very different countries.

Tiny implanted sensor and your smartphone could help prevent blindness

Scientists have proposed a way to monitor glaucoma using a tiny device implanted in the eye. Readings from the device could be monitored by a smartphone. The technology could help prevent some people from going blind.

Glaucoma describes a group of eye diseases in which there is progressive damage to the optic nerve. This nerve connects the retina to the brain, and damage to it causes a person to lose peripheral vision.

What makes glaucoma a dangerous disease, however, is that this sort of vision loss is asymptomatic. So people often do not know they are suffering from loss of peripheral vision. This is because the brain does an incredible job of filling in the missing parts of vision and also one eye compensates for the damage in the other.

Unfortunately, as glaucoma worsens, these compensatory perceptive mechanisms unravel leading to noticeable sight loss, visual impairment and in some cases blindness. The condition is irreversible.

This age-related disease affects more than 65m people worldwide. About half a million people in the UK are undiagnosed, and about one in ten of all blindness registrations in the UK are caused by glaucoma. For those with the disease, there are about a million NHS appointments a year.