IAE Blog

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.

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):

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:

The title of this IAE Blog entry is motivated by the following article:

Kamenetz, A. (11/8/2014). 5 Great Teachers On What Makes A Great Teacher. nprEd. Retrieved 11/13/2014 from http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/11/08/360426108/five-great-teachers-on-what-makes-a-great-teacher.

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