I enjoy browsing the Quora website https://www.quora.com/. A wide variety of questions are posed, answers are submitted, voting occurs to determine the most liked answers, and an answer is posted on the site. Readers can provide responses to the answer. Some of the topic areas covered include Wisdom, Intelligence, Education, and Psychology of Everyday Life.
The following question recently caught my attention:
Parkinson’s disease is devastating to the people who have it, and to their families and other loved ones. However, significant progress is occurring in the treatment of this disease.
Quoting from a Mayo Clinic Staff website (2015):
Imagine you are reading, viewing, or listening to information about some educational research that is relevant to your interests in education. The material seems to you to be both credible and valid. You think to yourself: “That seems reasonable to me.”
Now what? You might think, “They should do something about that.” The they in this case is someone other than yourself. It might be students, teachers, parents, schools, school districts, the state, the country, or the world.
Kindergarten is now well entrenched as a component of precollege education in the United States.
“Since 1977, the percentage of [U.S.] kindergartners enrolled in full-day (in contrast to half-day) programs has nearly tripled, increasing from 28 to 77 percent between 1977 and 2013” (Child Trends Data Bank, n.d.).
The MIT Review is one of my favorite sources of STEM information. This IAE Blog entry is based on an MIT Review article that discusses some of the difficulties encountered by Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist and educator, as he attempted to use computer technology to improve India’s educational system (Bergstein, 4/15/2015). You can learn more about Toyama and his Microsoft-funded research in educational uses of technology by viewing his TEDx-Tokyo Talks (Toyama, 5/15/2010).
Since his 2010 presentation, Toyama has joined the world of academia and devoted his research and teaching efforts to help inspire more research on effective educational uses of computer technology. Toyama is now an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
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:
