There is No "Pokemon Gap"

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 trading cards that were dense with specialized, technical, cross-referenced text. Gee would later call Pokemon "perhaps the best literacy curriculum ever conceived." He offered the o...

 Games Allow for Low-Cost Failure

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 designers had discovered the principles of deep and pleasurable learning that it had taken educators more than a century to apply in schools. Game studios had hit upon "profoundly good...

 Children's Attention Spans are Short, and Education Deman...

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 these observations. Not surprisingly, students went off task more frequently during whole-group instruction than during small group or individual work. Length of lesson matters...

 It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read

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 cultural (Americans focus on very different parts of a picture than the Japanese do), but much of our perception is also shaped by experience — and experience includes the book...

 Just-In-Time Learning

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 Education. In these multimedia presentations, students are introduced to characters that are faced with a mathematical dilemma that the students help the characters solve. Rather tha...

 Habituation and Novelty

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 would hear the loud humming sound begin, but within minutes you couldn’t even hear it if you tried. Habituation, a fundamental property of the nervous system, provides mechanis...

 Myths About Learning Quiz

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. False What is the best way to learn from some text? Read and reread the text. RIGHT! Explain key ideas of the text to yourself while reading. Restating the text in...

 Gamification Auction Mechanic

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 get chips worth 3 or 4; students who demonstrated greater critical-thinking skills get chips worth slightly less (2 or 3); and students who struggled a bit get chips worth m...