We live in an age of screens, from smartphones and tablets to video instruction and other forms of eLearning. Our attention span has gotten shorter as we move from one tweet to the next, and short, in-your-face videos as opposed to pages and pages of written text. But does that mean text as a medium … Continue reading “The Importance of Text in an Online World”
Tag: memory
Poverty and the Educational Process – Part 3: Vocabulary and Cognition
[Editor’s note: This is part three of a four-part series on poverty and the educational process. Links to the previous blog posts are included below.] Poverty has a multifaceted impact on both student engagement and student success in the classroom. Last time we looked at Effort and the Growth Mindset. In this post, we are … Continue reading “Poverty and the Educational Process – Part 3: Vocabulary and Cognition”
Poverty and the Educational Process – Part 1: Health and Nutrition
[Editor’s note: This is part one of a four-part series on poverty and the educational process. Links to the previous blog posts will be included in each succeeding part.] In 2015, approximately about 20 percent of children under the age of 18 (about 14.7 million) came from families living in poverty, and 10 percent lived … Continue reading “Poverty and the Educational Process – Part 1: Health and Nutrition”
Forgetting Information and Learning How to Remember
According to a paper published in the June 21, 2017 issue of the scientific journal Neuron, the brain is hard-wired to forget information. Neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland, the authors of the study, challenge what has become the dominant theory of memory, which holds that forgetting involves the gradual loss of critical information. According … Continue reading “Forgetting Information and Learning How to Remember”
Visualization and its Role in Reading
Visualization is a large part of the learning process. We picture how a word looks or mentally “see” how a character looks as he is described by the author. But what if you weren’t able to visualize? Some people can’t. The condition is called “aphantasia,” and we’re only beginning to understand how this affects the … Continue reading “Visualization and its Role in Reading”
Sleep’s Role in Memory Formation and Its Effect on Reading
Sleep plays a crucial role in learning in general and reading in specific. WebMD reports that researchers believe sleep affects both learning and memory formation in two ways: 1) An individual’s ability to focus on reading material or lecture presentations to learn efficiently depends on adequate sleep, and 2) Cementing a memory so that it … Continue reading “Sleep’s Role in Memory Formation and Its Effect on Reading”