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The Unlocking the World community is the perfect place to ask questions, discuss ideas and exchange information with other teachers and our program consultants.
Fresh approach pays off in the classroom
November 29, 2011
This newspaper article is about how one school in Melbourne has used a simple change in teachers' responses to misbehaviour in the classroom to improve overall student behaviour. Though not a new technique it has been applied consistently across the whole school and involves students in the process.
Read more at http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/fresh-approach-pays-off-in-the-classroom-20111127-1o1cs.html
Understanding Learning: Working out how students think and learn
August 05, 2011
Bernard Lane, The Australian, July 27, 2011
BRUNO is a barman. One night he works six hours and gets $66 in tips. If he takes home $81.90 in total, how much is he paid an hour?
This is a story problem: a routine device to test knowledge of maths in the classroom. Another tactic would be just to give students an equation: X x 6 + 66 = 81.90. Now, the question put to teachers in a study: which will their students find harder to solve?
Being fluent in equation-speak, most teachers think the story problem will prove difficult. But research shows them wrong. For school students, the familiar language of the story problem more readily unlocks the answer.
"We have this mantra: the student is not like me," said Kenneth Koedinger, a visiting US academic explaining this study at Australia's first meeting devoted to a field called the science of learning.
Koedinger and an impressive number of colleagues from US centres for science of learning joined Australian scientists and educators for the two-day meeting last week on the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland.
The premise of this new, multidisciplinary field is that we simply don't know enough about the innards of learning.
Sometimes, as in the equation study, educators are plain wrong about what works in learning.
Or, as education researcher Geoff Masters told the meeting at the Queensland Brain Institute: "We often know what works long before we know why it works."
One obvious question is where to look for the why.