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While educators debated whether children learn to read best through drill-and-practice phonics or "whole language" instruction, Nintendo was, quite informally, teaching a generation of children how to read. Pokemon also taught children how to analyze and classify more than 700 different types of creatures through…
What Prensky and Gee had realized early on was that game designers had lowered the cost of failure so players would take risks. They'd figured out that well-designed problem solving that gives players a second chance and a way to share their successes is almost irresistibly attractive. In just a few years, game…
The 2016 paper, “Off-task behavior in elementary school children,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Department of Education. The researchers also kept track of how the teachers were instructing students during…
What we get from books is not just a collection of names, dates and events stored in our minds like files in a computer. Books also change, via our mental models, the very reality that we perceive. You can think of mental models as psychological lenses that color and shape what we see. Some of this is genetic or…
Teachers should create situations where the students are required to locate the facts and information specifically related to the context of the question at hand, and then to utilize that information effectively. An example is the Jasper Mathematics series created by the Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of…
Beginning in infancy and throughout the life span, humans are motivated by newness, change, and excitement. Habituation, the tendency to lose interest in a repeated event and gain interest in a new one, is one of the most fundamental human reflexes. If the thermostat were to suddenly turn the air conditioning on, you…
True or false: When it comes to learning, metacognition (e.g., thinking about thinking) can be just as important as intelligence. RIGHT! True Research on growth mindset by Carol Dweck and others shows that people’s beliefs about the nature of intelligence affect their level of effort and in turn their performance…
On a previous assessment, Mrs. Tabor asked her students three different questions to assess their science-centered critical thinking. Based on the answers, she gives each student a chip with a different color and value (much like the suns in Ra). Students who demonstrated an “average” level of critical-thinking skills…
Jean Piaget’s work is the origin of Constructivism, which is the foundation of learning-centered classrooms (Bogost, 2007). Constructivism is a broad theory of learning that argues (quite unlike Essentialism) that what matters in learning is not the accumulation of facts, paradigms, and theories but rather the meaning…
Most theories of teaching and learning take a particular stance on the role of the teacher and the relative importance of the teaching act, in contrast to the role of the learner and the learning act. This fundamental division splits the world of educational theory into two clear schools of thought. In the first—more…
The greatest challenges facing parents stem from their own school experiences. Every adult has been educated in some way, and the methods their teachers used usually shape the values they carry with them and color their perceptions of how education “should be.” These learned values are very powerful and can be seen in…
A gamespace is a uniquely coded and constructed place where players are expected to act before being any good at what they’re doing; they’re spaces inherently founded on the notion of risk taking. The process of building a classroom that functions as a gamespace should start with the teacher being committed to…
Gamified instruction empowers students to own their learning. Students who learn in a gamified classroom have a better capacity for persistence. Gamified instruction helps students develop a capacity for selfdirection. Gamified classrooms impart critical social skills. Gamification of learning enables students to…
Healthy aging can lead to impairments in learning that affect many laboratory and real-life tasks. These tasks often involve the acquisition of dynamic contingencies, which requires adjusting the rate of learning to environmental statistics. For example, learning rate should increase when expectations are uncertain…
With funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, New York City-based Mindset Works developed SchoolKit, an app designed to strengthen academic and socialemotional success. Through animations, assessments, and classroom activities, students learn a growth…
Opportunity 1: Improving Mastery of Academic Skills Create apps to teach academic skills in more meaningful ways than traditional textbooks and lectures. Give learners an opportunity to practice in realistic settings. This might be done through interactive simulations (e.g., models of ancient cities that allow…
When I realized that I was unintentionally disengaging from some students, I developed a classroom management practice that ensures equal participation and on-the-fly formative assessments. I use a deck of playing cards, each of which is marked with a student's name, to determine who will answer the next question. The…
Every time you read aloud to students, you are modeling good reading skills. From fluency to voice inflection, it is important for students to hear good reading so that they can imitate it in their own reading. Specifically, reading aloud to students: Provides motivation for reading and learning. By listening to a…
Component 1: Reading Aloud Reading aloud can be done as a full class activity, in small groups, or on a one-to-one basis. It involves an adult reading a piece of text or a book out loud to students. However it is done, it is a teacher-directed activity that requires student participation, as Debra Morrison indicates…
The brain’s main job is prioritizing information relevant to our survival. Anything that suggests the possibility of danger, whether real or imagined, becomes a higher priority than anything else that is going on at that moment. This data is processed first, shifting our attention from cognitive processes down to the…