IAE Blog

How do you rate yourself in terms of your general knowledge of science? Compared to other people, do you think you are below average, about average, or above average?

The Pew Research Center developed a list of a dozen multiple-choice science questions and used them with a nationally representative group of 3,278 randomly selected U.S. adults. The adults were surveyed online and by mail between Aug. 11 and Sept. 3, 2014 (Pew Research Center, 2015).

Ann Lathrop, guest author

Information Age Education works to improve the informal and
formal education of people of all ages throughout the world.

Many people working to improve our educational system appear to be backward looking. They fix on measures of success that were deemed worthy in the past, and strive to have our schools perform still better in meeting these measures.

However, the world is changing, and many of these past measures of success are becoming less important for today’s children. Tony Wagner is one of my favorite authors currently writing about needed changes. Quoting from a 2010 IAE Newsletter (Moursund & Sylwester, June, 2010):

My colleague Bob Albrecht says that he appreciates my recent free book on Brain Science for Educators and Parents (Moursund, August, 2015). However, he notes the book would be strengthened by the addition of practical, down-to-earth brain science content that teachers can teach to students and/or use at various grade levels and in various disciplines.

He is certainly correct. I don’t know what typical first graders know about their brains. Nor do I know what typical first grade teachers know about the brains of first graders and what they want first graders to know about their own brains. Furthermore, there appears to be little published literature on effective uses of brain science in the teaching and learning of the various disciplines taught at PreK-12 grade levels. For example, do teachers of social studies need and use the same brain science knowledge as teachers of mathematics or music?

I recently published a free online book, Brain Science for Educators and Parents (Moursund, August, 2015). Chapter 10 in this book focuses on brain science applications to math education, while chapter 8 focuses on a variety of currently available types of brain scans used both in research and diagnosis.

Today I encountered an article on the use of MRI and fMRI to try to forecast how well a child will do in math education (Fox, 8/19/2015). The article reports on Stanford University researchers who used a combination of MRI and fMRI to provide a picture of various regions of the brain and their activity as the brain works on a variety of tasks. Quoting from the first part of the article:

Please answer to yourself the following two questions:

1. Are you satisfied with your current knowledge of the capabilities, limitations, and functioning of your brain?

Guest IAE Blog Post

This “guest” IAE Blog entry was written by Madeline Ahearn (administrator of kindergarten through 12th grade mathematics for the Eugene, Oregon 4J School District) and Dev Sinha (associate professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon). It was originally published on May 24, 2015, by the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper, and is reproduced here with the permission of the authors and the Eugene Register-Guard.

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