Author: admin

Trains, Planes, and ESAs – by ntavares

By admin on Uncategorized
On May 10, 1869, rail workers drove a golden spike into the ground of Promontory Point, Utah. They were celebrating the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines, which created America’s first transcontinental railroad. Soon after, there were four transcontinental lines, and by 1890, over 125,000 miles of track, and more than 1,000 different railroads blanketed th...

Religion and Student Motivation – by Education Next

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My former students, Dan Bowen and Albert Cheng, have a new study that was just published in the Journal of Catholic Education on how religious priming may affect student character or non-cognitive skills.  They find that priming students to think about religion increases students’ willingness to delay gratification as well as their political tolerance.  No effects are observed ...

Hey, Claude, Should I Go To College?

By admin on Uncategorized
One of the more promising developments of recent decades in education has been the pendulum swing away from the “college for all” mindset. That focus, which many of us ed-reformers embraced wholeheartedly, turned out to be both bad advice for young people and poisonous politics, sending the unintentional but unmistakable message that people who don’t gr...

The False Dichotomy Between Memorization and Conceptual Understanding – by Frederick Hess

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Last week I talked about the nature of short-term, or working memory and how it helps it build expertise. This week, I want to talk a bit more about how that short-term memory builds long-term memory, and what that means for the age-old debate between proponents of “rote memorization” and those of “conceptual understanding.” If you’re interested in...