Learning and testing
dmunger | June 20, 2005Every parent wants his or her child to do well in school. They help the kids with their homework, volunteer in the classroom, do everything they can think of to help their children succeed. But what type of elementary school education actually leads to older kids who do better in school? Typically students are tested at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, and if they improve, their educational program is labeled as successful. This type of assessment, though valuable, sheds little light on what happens in the long run.
A team of researchers led by Gian Vittorio Caprara sought…
dmunger | June 3, 2005As every high-school senior knows, many colleges and universities take "racial diversity" into account when selecting students for admission. The practice is controversial, because it could mean that qualified students are denied admission, and those who are admitted must tolerate other students with a less rigorous academic background. The institutions often argue that their admissions practices are justified because increased diversity creates a more effective learning environment.
There is some research backing these claims: schools with greater racial diversity tend to have better…
dmunger | May 18, 2005Some people—even people who really know their stuff—just don't "test well." You can talk to them face to face, and they seem perfectly well informed and intelligent, but when the money's on the line, when they've sharpened their number 2 pencils and it's time to sit down for the big exam, they just crumble.
Of course, others simply use "not testing well" as an excuse for true slackerdom, but mere laziness can't explain the fact that many otherwise well-prepared students don't perform well under pressure. They score well on the practice SAT, but not on the official test that determines their…
dmunger | April 28, 2005I used to be a high school biology teacher, and I noticed that students often found it easier to learn irrelevant information than the information I was trying to teach. When learning the steps involved in the process of cell division, the students simply memorized the pictures in their textbook. If I tested them using a different set of diagrams depicting the same process, they had difficulty completing the task. They had memorized a set of pictures, instead of the concept of mitosis.
We can learn things even when we're not consciously trying to. For example, if we try to learn a set of…
dmunger | April 20, 2005There has been a great deal of reporting about the harmful impact of video games, including here at Cognitive Daily. Yet the simple act of playing a video game can require learning a great deal of information. We have discussed studies showing impressive perceptual gains after just a short time playing a game. Children are highly motivated to play video games (in fact, at times, it's difficult to get them to do anything else).
Yet, perhaps because of the perceived negative impact, there has been surprisingly little research on how to use games for teaching. One exception to this was a study…