For Teachers

1. To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand by Robinson Meyer via The Atlantic Why should you take notes by hand? If you can’t imagine going without your laptop, or asking your students to go without theirs, then this interview with Mueller and Oppenheimer may change your mind. Mueller and Oppenheimer tell the…

By Yana Weinstein Imagine if I asked you this question: “Are there large parts of your childhood after age 5 that you cannot remember?”. How would you answer: Yes, or no? Are you sure? And what might influence your answer? (Note that the “after age 5” part is important, because most of us do not…

So, what does this mean? First of all, although the benefits of testing have been extensively reported, it appears that not all participants, at least among college students, do benefit directly from testing. In fact, for about 1/3 of our participants, retrieval practice made them worse. Does this mean we should stop incorporating testing as…

Grading (marking in the UK context) can be a time-consuming and, at times, annoying task that teachers face on a regular basis. How can we make grading more efficient and less burdensome, but at the same time provide students with the important feedback that helps them improve their performance in the future? We dedicated a…

One big issue related to sample size requires us to talk about what the word significance means in a scientific context. In “the real world,” significant means noteworthy, or worthy of attention. However, this is not what scientists typically mean when they say significant. Often, we are talking about statistical significance, and this is a…

Another explanation for how and why we forget has been in terms of disuse or decay (2, 3). Sometimes we forget things simply because we haven’t remembered it in awhile. For example, you can probably remember what you had for lunch yesterday. How about last week? Last month? Unless there was a reason for you…

4) Ask A Sleep Doctor: The Questions That Keep You Up At Night, a podcast with W. Christopher Winter, author of The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It  Science Friday Q&A with neurologist and sleep expert. Listeners call in to ask their questions about sleep. 5) I Fixed My Terrible…

We're right in the middle of a season where a lot of us are giving thanks and reflecting on the year we have had. For some of us it is because of American or Canadian Thanksgiving, Japanese Labour Thanksgiving, or Turkish National Day of Thanks, or upcoming holidays such as Hanukkah, Christmas, or Kwanzaa. For…

Josh has created a number of free mathematics lesson apps for middle school based on the science of learning. Guzinta Math lesson apps can be used at school, at home, or both. They include video instruction, interactive modules, worked examples, instructor notes, and--the key--a design which provides retrieval practice, and monitors students' practice so that…

By Cindy Nebel Psychologists often breakdown memory into different types. Long-term memory can be divided into two different types: explicit memories and implicit memories. Explicit memories are memories for events and facts. They are memories that we can easily think and talk about. Implicit memories are a bit different. Implicit memories include procedural (muscle) memories…