IAE Blog

A new Research Center has been established at Queensland University in Australia. It combines the efforts of researchers in Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, and Education. The goal is to improve the education of both non-indigenous and indigenous (aboriginal) students.

In brief summary, three types of research are being integrated:

I have a large number of Facebook friends located throughout the world. I am very interested in hearing from some of you about how educational systems outside the United States are being affected by major change agents such as:

1. Information and Communication Technology including the Web, Internet, Smartphones, tablet computers, laptop computers, computer games, computer-assisted learning, artificial intelligence, and so on.
2. Research on brain science, especially cognitive neuroscience.
3. Past and current research on learning theory, effective methods of teaching, student assessment, and teacher assessment.
4. Pressures for more equal treatment of all students regardless of gender, ethnicity, race, religion, and level of income.
5. Attempts to deal with education-related problems unique to a specific country. (What are some of the major educational problems in your country?)

Please consider submitting an article to Information Age Education. I am looking for articles that address the questions given above, ones that will help people from outside your country to understand both how well your educational system is doing and any major problems it is addressing. I am interested in three specific types of articles:

My 7/31/2014 IAE Blog entry was titled A Successful Community Project for Improving Science Education (Moursund, 7/31/2014). The project was started by two retired scientists, Robert Collins and Cal Allen, who happened to meet in Sisters, Oregon. Sisters is a farming and resort community located in the Cascade Mountain Range, and has a population of about 2,100.

I was amazed at the popularity of my blog entry about this science education project. To date, it has had over 24,000 hits.

Recently I bought a Kindle Fire tablet computer  on a special sale for about $40. (Currently it retails for about $50.) What a bargain! I have a large, personal library on my Kindle.

Wouldn’t be nice if a parent or teacher could go to one or a very few websites and find many thousands of free books they could download to build a personal library for their children and students? Significant progress has occurred in this endeavor. My 5/11/2016 Google search of the expression free downloadable children's books online produced over 13 million results. While it requires Web connectivity to download such books, once they are downloaded they can be read without connectivity.

Watch a first grade student playing a game that involves rolling dice. Probably you can look at the outcome of rolling a pair of dice and immediately say the total. The first grader may need to carefully count one die and then keep going with the second. The transition to the level of expertise you have comes from practice. People who advocate use of games in math education want the practice to be fun and to include additional learning activities.

For example, suppose only one die is rolled, and it comes out 4. Is it likely that, when a second die is rolled and added to the first, the total will be 11 or higher? (This is a tricky question—you want to challenge the child.) That is certainly a challenging question to most first graders. Answering it takes some understanding of the number line and some practice at doing mental arithmetic.