IAE Blog

Written language was invented more than 5,000 years ago. Reading and writing certainly changed the world. Taken together, they facilitate the accumulation and distribution of information. Paraphrasing Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and many other researchers, “I have been able to do the work I have done because I have stood on the shoulders of the researchers who have come before me.”

The process of writing does more than just record information stored in the writer’s head. It facilitates the writer in organizing and recording the information so that it both represents the information more clearly, and that it communicates effectively with potential readers. Most good writers find it is very necessary to revise, revise, and still do more revision as they try to clearly communicate their ideas.

Education serves many purposes. In much of my writing, I combine these purposes into the following short statement:

I believe that the overall and unifying goal of learning (via a lifetime of informal and formal education) is to develop and maintain cognitive, moral, physical, and spiritual knowledge and skills that help learners to solve or in other ways to cope with the problems they encounter.

The National Academies Press is an exceedingly good source of free books and reports about a very wide range of science and engineering topics (Moursund, 2016b). This IAE Blog discusses a recent report, Seeing Students Learn Science: Integrating Assessment and Instruction in the Classroom (Beatty & Schweingruber, 2017).

The following quote describes the book:

Since you are reading this short article, I assume that you are involved with and/or interested in math education. Can you name some of the people who have made important contributions to this area?

This Information Age Education Blog entry names two of my favorites, George Polya and Seymour Papert.

David Moursund
Professor Emeritus, College of Education
University of Oregon

Student homelessness in the United States is a major problem. In the 2013-2014 school year, approximately 1.3 million students were classified as homeless for some part of the school year (Layton & Brown, 9/14/2015). The eight-minute video, Fighting Student Homelessness (Stark 2/17/2017) tells about student homelessness in a Kansas school district.