Posted on 09/15/2010 10:44:57 PM PDT by neverdem
Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).
And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.
Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.
Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.
The findings can help...
--snip--
“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Excellent topic.
Why don't we already know this?
For generations:
* Sit your butt down in a quiet place
* Open the book
* Read
* Do the exercises you have been assigned
* Repeat for all homework
I am thinking I can get a federal grant for exploring this whole new paradigm. In my Grant Proposal I shall call it:
"Application of pre-modernistic structured frameworks within rigorous individualistic disciplinary learning transfer modalities: sequential process instantiation."
(OMG I just scared myself with how authentic that sounds!)
bookmark.
As the article states I have found that taking frequent quizzes is a great way to learn and retain material.
I bet you will receive that grant. Just reading your description was enough to start my modalities sequentially transferring.
Home School.
>>I bet you will receive that grant. Just reading your description was enough to start my modalities sequentially transferring.<<
I always revel in winning the meeting! ;) :)
“* Sit your butt down in a quiet place”
“* Open the book”
“* Read”
“* Do the exercises you have been assigned”
“* Repeat for all homework”
I would change only one thing:
* Sit your butt down in a quiet place
* Open the book
* Find your assignment & review exercises
* Read assignment
* Do the exercises you have been assigned
* Repeat for all homework
I always did the exercises as I went along and had Dad review the answers afterwards. It worked really well!
bookmark
Wow. You can start a company, go to some education trade shows, pay to get a little media attention, maybe do a short form direct response commercial, and you are there! Now, for a product.
bump for later
First step:
Confiscate all electronic devices (cellphone, iPhone, iPod, video game, TV, etc.) until homework is finshed.
Bookmark
You wrote:
“”Application of pre-modernistic structured frameworks within rigorous individualistic disciplinary learning transfer modalities: sequential process instantiation.”
“(OMG I just scared myself with how authentic that sounds!)”
There’s probably a dissertation on that already!
Here are some real theses and dissertations:
doctorate from the department of physical education :
“The effect of basketball weight on basketball free-throw shooting”
MA thesis: Technical and Stylistic Changes in Type on National Geographic Maps, 1888-1988.
I also know someone wrote a dissertation on Precious Moments figurines and another wrote jewerly made of human hair in Kansas in the 19th century. Here’s that title: “A Token that Love Entwines”: Human Hair Work and the American White Middle-Class, 1780-1900.
Then, from the same university list I just found on the web, there’s:
Queering the Inferno: Space, Identity, and Kansas City’s Jazz Scene.
And this is a keeper:
B(l)ack to the World: Explorations in Race, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in Selected Vietnam War Films
Sexuality and Experience: Gay Male Publicity, Community and Meaning in 1960s San Francisco
“And Ears Don’t Count”: Body Piercing in America and Other Variations in the Theme of Belonging
A Model of Deviance in the Television News
Disciplining Men: Cultural Studies of the Men’s Movement
Hotbeds: Black-White Love and Its Representations in Selected Contemporary Novels from the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean
I am Homeschooling my youngest in English and Social Studies because she was scheduled to have the same English teacher as my oldest. I refuse to let that happen. My youngest is writing essays while her peers are looking for vocabulary words in a text two grade levels below what we are studying. I am integrating my study of classical History with classical literature (we are reading derivative works of The Iliad and the Odyssey while we study the Mycenaean Greeks). We will study Oedipus Rex when we study classical Greece. Finally to wrap the semester up we will study Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar while we study Rome. Her peers will be reading The Outsiders and its sequel (books my daughter read two years ago at the same time my oldest was reading them for class).
With a lot of work and fighting I was able to get my daughter into 8th Science and 8th Math as a 7th grader. She will be challenged in these classes, and we have excellent science and math teachers.
The funniest part of this whole process is that my daughter is not in the Talented and Gifted program - she was not asked to join it even though she is obviously doing above grade level work.
We do not have Junior ROTC at my daughter’s High School. It was one of my best experiences while I was in High School. While I ultimately did not pursue a military career, I learned a great deal and developed an appreciation for our Armed Forces.
In other words, the test was specifically tailored to the "style" of the way one group was taught, and not the other. Methinks this says more about the designers of the experiment than the students.
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