In a post for Convergent Ed, John Romano makes a compelling case for being “with it” as an educator and communicator. He admits to watching TMZ – every night! Why? Because analogies and metaphors are only effective tools if the reference imagery is relevant to your audience.
On the front lines of education, there is no room for intellectual vanity.
For the last month, the science policy group I belong to has been discussing K-12 STEM education. The United States’ scoring on international achievement tests has been falling since the 70s. You can look over the data for the most recent evaluation by PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) here. For all of our posturing as the most powerful country in the world, we are failing to give our children a competitive education. How do we turn the ship around and teach our children to think critically and help them prepare for a life in a rapidly advancing society?
This study may be old news to many of you, but I don’t remember encountering it. From my university’s teaching newsletter:
The findings of the third, laboratory-based, study further illuminate the relationship between the use of devices and the potential for distraction. The researchers in this study set out to test whether undergraduates who are “heavy media multi-taskers” might have an improved ability, relative to peers who are “light media multi-taskers,” to filter out distracting information. The researchers defined “media multi-tasking” or simultaneously engaging with different media—including print, television, computer-based video, music, text messaging, instant messaging, web-surfing, email. Their findings were precisely the opposite of what they had expected to find: heavy media multi-tasking was related to a reduced ability to ignore distractions and focus on pertinent information—even after accounting for potential differences in academic aptitude, personality and performance on standard creativity and memory tasks. Continue reading “Study shows multi-taskers are fooling themselves”
The Finch and Pea 