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The Mind Hacks blog revisits an older study that restates why inductive learning, student autonomy, and choice works in the classroom.

The blog also has a useful chart. It’s worth checking-out but, in summary, it discusses findings that students will remember things far better if they bring their own meaning to in a way they choose:

What this research suggests is that, merely in terms of remembering, it would be more effective for students to come up with their own organisation for course material…..You’ll remember better (and understand much better) if you try and re-organise the material you’ve been given in your own way.

If you are a teacher, like me, then this research raises some distrurbing questions. At a University the main form of teaching we do is the lecture, which puts the student in a passive role and, essentially, asks them to “remember this” – an instruction we know to be ineffective. Instead, we should be thinking hard, always, about how to create teaching experiences in which students are more active, and about creating courses in which students are permitted and encouraged to come up with their own organisation of material, rather than just forced to regurgitate ours.

It’s nothing particularly new, but any research that backs up that kind of perspective certainly can’t hurt….

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The question is obviously silly, because the category is too broad to produce a useful answer. Yet the New York Times, in its big Sunday splash on education technology, makes fundamentally the same mistake – but then, fortunately, did much better in its story today about the Apollo reform effort in Houston.

Here’s the basic problem: If you were going out to eat tonight, you might be quite interested to know how a particular restaurant scores on the review site Yelp. But the average score for all restaurants isn’t helpful.

Yet that’s roughly what we get from The Sunday story, “In Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores.” The reporter behind it is Matt Richtel, whom I have liked and admired since we were colleagues at the Oakland Tribune in the 1990s. He comes by his interest in technology honestly; he was the first person I ever saw using Netscape (kids, that was an early web browser — and actually, it may have been the first time I ever saw anybody use the web at all). That Matt parlayed his understanding of the potential of technology into a position writing about it at the New York Times, and later a Pulitzer Prize, ought to set to rest any doubts about