Learning - Pacific Standard

Your Child’s Brain on Math

May 3, 2013 • By Sharon Begley • Leave a Comment

$brain-on-math$

Parents whose children are struggling with math often view intense tutoring as the best way to help them master crucial skills, but a new study released on Monday suggests that for some kids even that is a lost cause. According to the research, the size of one key brain structure and the connections between it and other regions can help identify the eight- and nine-year-olds who will hardly benefit from one-on-one math instruction. "We could predict how much a child learned from the tutoring based on measures of brain structure and connectivity," said Vinod Menon, a professor of ... Read More

More like this: Education
Tags: Arithmetic, Behavior, Children, IQ, Learning, Mathematics, Memory, MRI, Tutoring

Put Down the iPad, Lace Up the Hiking Boots

December 31, 2012 • By Kevin Charles Redmon • Leave a Comment

Have you been staring cow-eyed at a computer all morning? Fiddling with your iPhone in line at Starbucks? Checking Twitter and ESPN every four minutes on your tablet? Good. Here’s a little quiz. What one word ties these three ideas together: water + tobacco + stove? How about widow + bite + monkey? Or, envy + golf + beans? Psychologists call such wordplay the “remote associates test,” or RAT, and use it to study creativity and intuition. The idea is that it requires a nimble, open mind to find the connection between seemingly unrelated ideas—in this case pipe, spider, and ... Read More

More like this: Environment
Tags: Hiking, Learning, Outdoors

Take a Tablet and Wake Up Smarter?

December 10, 2012 • By Michael Todd • Leave a Comment

Over the years we’ve taken occasional peeks at the fate of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, an intuitively positive-sounding program that reasons giving every young students in the world a key to the digital future has just gotta be a great idea. Perhaps not all that surprisingly, it hasn’t turned out that way, at least not on the scale that visionaries like Nicholas Negroponte have suggested. The seven-year effort retooled itself (again) a year ago, as Jeff Shear reported on this site, with a third version of a cheap (i.e. inexpensive) laptop that would be handed out to children in ... Read More

More like this: The 101
Tags: Computers, Learning, One Laptop Per Child, Technology

Linguistic Myths and Adventures in Etymology

March 22, 2012 • By Peter M. Nardi • Leave a Comment

The alarm went off. What does that mean? Recently, a friend who is learning English couldn’t quite figure it out. Isn’t the alarm going on, not off, he asked. Comprehending such phrases is often one of the more difficult steps in learning a language. These idiomatic expressions are collections of words that mean something different than each word’s dictionary definition. For example, “that barking dog next door is driving me up the wall,” if taken literally, could mean that the neighbor’s poodle has recently earned a driver’s license and is using a car to accelerate up the ... Read More

More like this: Education, Skeptic's Café
Tags: Critical Thinking, Language, Learning, Skepticism, Words

Library Parks Foster Community in Colombia

February 28, 2012 • By Greg Nichols • Leave a Comment

Three teenagers are break-dancing in the courtyard of a government building in Medellín, Colombia. A boom box blares hip-hop — pure bass against the concrete walls. A dozen other teens sit cross-legged or lean against backpacks. Johana Pabon stands near the building’s glass entryway staring at the break-dancers, arms crossed, hips thrust sideways, eyes narrowed. Her tight smile, though, shows unmistakable pride. “They have this space,” she says. “They can use it whenever they want.” Pabon is a docent at the Parque Biblioteca San Javier, which opened in 2006 — one of nine ... Read More

More like this: Culture, March-April 2012, News and Options
Tags: Learning, Library, Poverty, Urban Planning

Learning to Read When a School System Falters

February 3, 2012 • By Ben Preston • Leave a Comment

On a hot, sunny September afternoon — the sticky kind so common in New York City that time of year — a tall, dark-haired young man with his shoulders hunched slightly forward padded into Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School’s back entrance and into a small courtyard. Moustafa Elhanafi sought the school’s principal. He needed her help. Not being a student there, he didn’t know what she looked like or where he would find her inside the massive, unfamiliar building. In the courtyard beneath the shade of a wide-leafed tree, looking for crafty students cutting class, stood Principal ... Read More

More like this: Education
Tags: Learning, Literacy, Schools, Students

No Debate: Kids Can Learn By Arguing

January 19, 2012 • By Melinda Burns • Leave a Comment

Let’s not “agree to disagree,” says Deanna Kuhn. The Columbia University professor of psychology and education wants to bring back serious debate in America — in sixth grade, if not sooner. Kuhn is tired of hearing that people have a right to their own opinion. It’s too easy to fall into thinking that all opinions are equal, she says, and “so why bother?” The country needs citizens who can make logical arguments “based on substantive claims, sound reasoning, and relevant evidence,” she writes. That’s language from the new educational standards for middle school, adopted ... Read More

More like this: Education, January-February 2012
Tags: Critical Thinking, Learning, Schools, Students

For Better Grades, Try Bach in the Background

January 2, 2012 • By Tom Jacobs • Leave a Comment

As every teacher knows, it is one thing to impart information; it’s quite another for students to absorb it, process it, and be able to regurgitate it. New research suggests educators can help this to occur by turning to some old friends: Beethoven, Bach, and Tchaikovsky. In the journal Learning and Individual Differences, a research team led by Fabrice Dosseville of the Universite de Caen Basse-Normandie describes an experiment featuring 249 university students. All were enrolled in an introductory course in sports psychology. The students were divided into two groups “that were ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings
Tags: Learning, Music, Psychology

One Laptop Per Child Redux

December 23, 2011 • By Jeff Shear • Leave a Comment

The New York Times called it, “The Laptop That Will Save the World,” while the renowned Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University referred to it as “a monumental feat of engineering and design.” Dressed up like a toy in a Kermit-the-Frog green and white plastic shell, this durable little computer was the progeny of the nonprofit organization, One Laptop Per Child. When the laptops went into mass production in November 2007, OLPC’s ambitious plan aimed to place a free computer into the hands of the world's 1 billion impoverished children. Education is the exit ramp ... Read More

More like this: Education
Tags: Charity, Computers, Learning, Philanthropy, Poverty

Another Cognitive Benefit for Musicians, Athletes

December 5, 2011 • By Tom Jacobs • Leave a Comment

Can you mentally rotate a three-dimensional object, getting a clear sense of how it looks it from a variety of angles? It’s a specific cognitive skill that has been the subject of much study in recent years, since it’s a key component of processing spatial information. Professionals ranging from auto mechanics to brain surgeons rely on this ability. A newly published study suggests there may be a way to enhance this important skill, and it does not involve spending hours in front of a computer screen. Rather, it suggests students might want to put down their laptops and pick up a ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings
Tags: Athletics, Cognition, Learning, Music, Psychology