Science as Collective Sensemaking

What is Science?

Science as Collective Sensemaking

What is Science?

Wait… whats a Community of Practice?

“Learning is not merely the acquisition of knowledge by individuals. It is a process of social participation.” A slightly bastardised…

Math Academy

The Math Academy curriculum and pedagogy leverage cutting-edge cognitive learning theory. Why? Because it’s been studied extensively, backed up and proven to work. We aren’t providing edu-tainment. This isn’t enrichment. We teach math as if we were training a professional athlete or musician, or anyone looking to acquire a skill to the highest degree possible. This is real work for a student who is serious about learning math. We expect every student using our system to actually master the material, and do it efficiently and effectively.

In pursuit of Cognitive Solidarity

Guest post by Pip Sanderson, National Institute of Teaching (England)

How Learning Happens | Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and Wha

How Learning Happens introduces 28 giants of educational research and their findings on how we learn and what we need to learn effectively, efficiently, and

The Math Academy Way

The Math Academy Way Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning – Working Draft – Note: If you are reading this as a PDF, consider switching to the Google Doc which may contain new updates. Authored by Justin Skycak, advised by Jason Roberts. Ma...

Why Some Students Learn Faster

A hypothesis about teaching and learning

Why Some Students Learn Faster

A hypothesis about teaching and learning

A Beginner's Guide to Culture Science

Also known as "memetics", it's the study of the narratives that shape human behavior, and how they propagate & evolve

I was born and raised in South Jersey. As a kid, I was passionately interested in music, science and nature. Within a year of entering college, I discovered neuroscience and quickly became enamored by the prospect of understanding human cognition in the context of experiment and data-driven analysis.

E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)

The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the first part of this talk, in which we shall furthermore supply evidence in support of our assumption.

The Problem With Promoting ‘Gold Standard Science’

Opinion | Branding scientific research with a simplified label risks misleading the public and harming scientific literacy.

Model of educational reconstruction

A key feature of theEducational Reconstructionapproach is that in planning instruction – by teachers or curriculum developers – the science content to be learnedandstudents’ cognitive and affective variables, including their learning processes, should be given equal attention. In addition, the science content is not viewed as “given” but has to undergo certainreconstructionprocesses. Thescience content structure(e.g., for the concept of evolution) has to be transformed into acontent structure for instruction. The two structures are fundamentally different. The first step in this reconstruction, called “elementarization” (in German, Elementarisierung), is to identify the elementary ideas that relate to the aims of instruction, taking into account student perspectives (e.g., their pre-instructional conceptions). Then the content structure for instruction has to be developed. Finally, teaching and learning settings have to be designed. [This is an excerpt from the content].

Social learning preserves both useful and useless theories by canalizing learners’ exploration

In many domains, learning from others is crucial for leveraging cumulative cultural knowledge, which encapsulates the efforts of successive generations of innovators. However, anecdotal and experimental evidence suggests that reliance on social information can reduce the exploration of the problem space. Here, we experimentally investigate the extent to which cultural transmission fosters the persistence of arbitrary solutions in a context where participants are incentivized to improve a physical system across multiple trials. Participants were exposed to various theories about the system, ranging from accurate to misleading. Our findings indicate that even under conditions conducive to exploration, the transmission of cultural knowledge canalizes learners’ focus, limiting their consideration of alternative solutions. This effect was observed in both the theories produced and the solutions attempted by participants, irrespective of the accuracy of the provided theories. These results challenge the notion that arbitrary solutions persist only when they are efficient or intuitive and underscore the significant role of cultural transmission in shaping human knowledge and technologies.