Blurts

I came across a Time piece on best and worst study strategies (based on a summary developed by several educational psychologists). The one caution I would offer in considering this list is to carefully consider the role the strategy plays in learning.

For example, one of the worst study strategies according to the list is highlighting. Just to make my point in how recommendations such as this must be considered carefully, I would predict that few people ever highlight a newspaper, but many have highlighted a textbook. Is it that you do not care if you remember what you might discover in a newspaper? Perhaps, but it is also likely you do not highlight a newspaper because you intend to throw it away. Your textbook you probably intended to look at again before your examinations.

When I teach study strategies, I suggest to my students that certain activities may serve a mathemagenic function (generative) and also an external storage function. In other words, do you learn from the activity itself and/or does the record generated by the original activity serve a secondary function. Highlighting when you do not review is not particularly productive (I agree with the Time article). In fact, I propose to my students that highlighting may serve an anti-generative function if the content is never reviewed – we can damage learning by highlighting content we know is important but difficult to understand if we do so in place of struggling to understand. In other words, we replace an active cognitive behavior with a passive one.

Taking notes could work the same way (copying comments from a PowerPoint display) rather than thinking about what was said or attempting to paraphrase.

However, even a passive activity may serve a later need. We may highlight in order to make the review of 200 pages of text more efficient during the time frame immediately before an exam.  We may take notes without understanding providing ourselves a record to consider more carefully later.

So, it is important to carefully consider analyses as exemplified by the Times summary. It is possible to offer a good summary of research that misses the multiple roles a given behavior might serve. I think a better approach is to examine the situation as faced by the student. For example, if the instructor offers students the PowerPoint used to organize a presentation, then copying down the text into a notebook would be a waste of time. If the instructor does not, the passive act of recording information for later study might be useful.

Google wants to improve search skills and offers lesson plans, challenges, and instructional videos at this dedicated site.

Great piece from the Atlantic explaining the widening income and education gap.

Across the country, a Stanford University study found last year, the achievement gap between rich and poor students on standardized tests is 30 to 40 percent wider than it was a quarter-century ago. Because excellent students are more likely to grow rich, the authors argued, income inequality risks becoming more entrenched.

Ironically (because of some of the rhetoric in the past election), this article focuses on issues in Massachusetts.

This piece from the Wall Street Journal using Univ of Colorado as an examples summarizes issues in the rising cost of public higher education.