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Downfall of Science
One of the real challenges I face in trying to convince people that there are better ways to approach education is an attitude towards evidence that I don’t understand. I was talking to one educator about the evidence from psychology about how to motivate students to engage in their academic studies. Her…
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Alternatives to Conformity
Is there an alternative to conformity in a system of mass education? This is a big question. Certainly not under the current mindset. Before something can be done about conformity, it needs to be recognized as a problem. First, we have to believe that there is a solution and that we can…
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The Immense Cost of Conformity
This article is the most difficult Science of Learning article that I will write. Considering the cost of conformity at an individual and societal level. The cost of conformity at a societal level is high, but the cost borne by an individual is even higher. I informally surveyed some clinical psychologists to…
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Conformity in the Classroom
How has conformity become the norm in education, and what methods are used to foster absolute conformity? Where do we start? As I have mentioned previously, it is generally well accepted that education today owes its roots, at least in part, to Prussian military developments in the C17/C18 and the efficiency gains…
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Conformity
Creativity and conformity are polar opposites in learning. If you are conforming, you are not creating, and if you are being creative, you are not conforming. Education is all about conformity. Even the parts that are about creativity (visual arts, performing arts etc) are constrained and learners are taught to conform to…
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Subjective Judgments of Learning
Subjective judgments about learning are somewhat problematic. One of the aspects of metacognition (a future article) is the ability to assess your own learning. Metacognitive abilities are difficult to develop, and it is unusual to find students with highly developed metacognitive skills. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that people consistently overestimate what…
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Organization Effect – Desirable Difficulties
The organization effect is the desirable difficulty that asks about who does the organization of the material. Teaching today usually has the teacher doing the reading for the students, organizing the material into nice little bullet-points, reading the bullet-points to the students, and finally, handing the bullet-points out to the students in…
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Disfluency Effect – Desirable Difficulties
Among the desirable difficulties that can be introduced into a classroom to enhance memorization, disfluency stands out as being particularly unintuitive. Disfluency is the process of making items to be learned more difficult to process which means that the student, in using more processing, processes the material to a deeper level. This…
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The Spacing Effect – Desirable Difficulties
The spacing Effect is a desirable difficulty for learning (along with the testing effect) that helps produce long lasting, durable memory traces, but has also been ignored in education. The spacing effect is when the learning of material takes place over long periods of time. Usually, when we teach something, we concentrate…
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Cramming – Episodic Memory
Actually cramming works to pass a test, and for millions of students that is the only goal for their education. Eighty-five percent of the students entering university in 2016 were doing so in order to get a qualification that would lead to a better job. For them, cramming works, because they have no intention…
