Hi Everyone,
Australia's ABC has recently broadcast a new series called 'Redesign my Brain' with Todd Sampson.
The series seeks to explore how much the brain can be improved in areas like memory and recognition. After just one month of training Todd found himself performing considerably better on tests then he had prior.
He also competed in the World Memorization Championships, and watched a bloke in Germany play 12 games of chess simultaneously without seeing any of the boards.
So other than being a fun show to watch, it got me thinking about the advantages of brain training.
I've had a look at some stuff like dual-n-back, luminosity, and other brain training programs, but I've failed to really explore how much utility such training has.
One of the memory champions was able to remember the order of 25 decks of cards in one hour. But it didn't seem like his ability didn't do much to improve his life beyond providing a fun and enjoyable hobby.
So I'd like to ask:
Which areas of cognitive training do you think would have the best returns in terms of life optimization?
And what do you think would be the best way to go about that training?
Would love to hear some success stories.
There are multiple issues with teaching to the test. Take an issue such as writing a political essay.
A student that writes a well argued text that provides other reasons than the ones that are covered in the curiculum will fail. Standardised testing doesn't lend itself for judging critical reflection of material.
If you want to standardised the text you can say, you teach a student knowledge X, Y and Z about the American revolution. Every student that can integrate X,Y and Z get's maximum marks. A student who integrates two passes. A student who only gets one or zero fails.
If you want to judge a text by a checklist where everyone who has the checklist gets a similar result it's hard to test whether someone can meaningfully think about politics and go beyond just reciting knowledge.
As far as feedback for writing goes I think peer feedback should be encouraged. If a student manages to convince his peers with a political essay the essay is good.
While we are at the topic of peer feedback, the ability to take feedback and revise your text based on the feedback is a very valuable skill that you can't effectively test in standardised testing.
Peer Feedback should also be good for teachers. I would suggest that every teacher spends one hour per week sitting in the classroom of another teacher. At best every week another teacher.
Human's learn best through feedback that doesn't come after a large time gap. I'm not sure that an individual teacher can learn much about improving his own teaching from the standardised test scores.
Instead of teaching to the test, a teacher could try to teach what his students find interesting.
The teacher who teaches to the test doesn't work with the natural curiosity of the children but pushes the children in the direction of the preset goals of a test.
At Sudbury Valley one child might be interested in learning reading at 6 years and another at 10 years. That doesn't mean that one child is smarter than the other. Both can graduate from college. The idea that every child has to learn the same thing at the same age is problematic. It wastes a lot of energy on trying to teach things to children for which they just aren't ready in the moment the curriculum thinks they should learn something.
For some kinds of students this would work beautifully, for other kinds of students this would fail horribly.
Also the "students find interesting" part may be impossible to evaluate if students of both kinds are present in the same classroom. Could possibly be solved by teachers announcing lectures on different subjects, and students choosing which lecture they will attend.
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