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Study Skills

Consider our facts about blood:

  • arteries are thick and elastic and carry blood that is rich in oxygen from the heart.
  • veins are thinner, less elastic, and carry blood rich in carbon dioxide back to the heart.

We could, as is often advised, simply turn…

This post is the fourth and last part in a four-part series on how education delivery is changing, and the set of literacies required in today’s world. Part 1 looked at textbooks; Part 2 at direct instruction/lecturing; Part 3 at computer learning.. This post looks at learning models and types…

Here are some notes on the water cycle:

Hydrological (water) cycle

Precipitation & flow: “whether they are typhoons or Scotch mists, mountain torrents or field ditches or city sewers, they are simply water sinking back to base level, the sea.”

Evaporation = the act of…

In a 1987 experiment (1), readers were presented with a text that included one or other of these sentences:

After doing a few warm-up exercises, John put on his sweatshirt and began jogging.

or

After doing a few warm-up exercises, John took off his sweatshirt and began…

Elaborative interrogation is a strategy to help you remember meaningful information. The idea behind the strategy is that relevant prior knowledge is not always readily activated when you are trying to learn new information, and sometimes help is needed to make the right connections. The…

In general, the weight of the research evidence suggests that college students tend to have a poor sense of how prepared they are for testing, and having been tested, they have a poor sense of how well they did! (This, of course, is even more true of younger students).

Does it matter?…

There are many memory strategies that can be effective in improving your recall of text. However, recent research shows that it is simplistic to think that you can improve your remembering by applying any of these strategies to any text. Different strategies are effective with different types of…

Broadly speaking, a concept map is a graphic display that attempts to show how concepts are connected to each other. A concept map is a diagram in which labeled nodes represent concepts, and lines connecting them show the relationships between concepts.

There is one type of concept map…

The use of worked examples

We're all familiar, I'm sure, with the use of worked-out examples in mathematics teaching. Worked-out examples are often used to demonstrate problem-solving processes. They generally specify the steps needed to solve a problem in some detail. After working through…

As we all know, we are living in a time of great changes in education and (in its broadest sense) information technology. In order to swim in these new seas, we and our children need to master new forms of literacy. In this and the next three posts, I want to explore some of the concepts,…