Matthew Daniel's List: Science magazine special issue

• Rising IQ performance is attributable to multiple factors: increased levels of formal education, urbanization, societal complexity, improved nutrition, smaller family size, and technological development
• The changing balance of media technologies has led to losses as well as gains. For example, as verbal IQ has risen, verbal SATs have fallen. Paradoxically, omnipresent television may be responsible for the spread of the basic vocabulary (11) that drives verbal IQ scores, while simultaneously the decline in recreational reading may have led to the loss of the more abstract vocabulary driving verbal SAT scores
• Technology and Visual Intelligence
  
• The understanding of pictures or icons develops at an earlier age than the ability to read words (
• Technology and Multitasking: Benefits and Costs

  • videogames & tech have shown to improve multi-tasking skills dramatically, however, studies show that when students multi-task they show significantly lower mindfulness and recall less information
• Implications for Education and Training
  

  • laptops in class show significantly less recall and poorer test performance, however, for specific skills such as laparoscopic surgery or flying where the videogames skills correlate with the task, multi-tasking skills and videogames experience yields higher performance.
• Violent Games: Are the Costs Worth the Benefits?
  

  • higher non-verbal skills but are generally 'desensitized' and show increased aggressive behavior.
• reflection, inductive analysis, critical thinking, mindful thought, and imagination. We start with reflection and inductive analysis
• Over a 6-week period, an experimental reduction in television watching in a group of 6-year-olds decreased intellectual impulsivity, increased reflection, and increased time spent reading (50).
• Reading is also key to the development of critical thinking. The amount of out-of-class reading done during the college years is a statistically significant predictor of critical thinking skills (51). One reason for this may be that books are perceived as a "hard" medium, requiring mental effort (52).
• Here there is evidence that visual technology inhibits imaginative response. In controlled experimental studies, the audiovisual (television) presentation of stories, as compared with audio or print presentation of the same stories, led to better story recall and inferences

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• A major advantage of egocentric perspectives is that they enable participants' actional immersion and motivation through embodied, concrete learning, whereas exocentric perspectives foster more abstract, symbolic insights gained from distancing oneself from the context (seeing the forest rather than the trees). Bicentric experiences that alternate these views combine these strengths.
• mmersive interfaces can foster educational experiences that draw on a powerful pedagogy: situated learning. Situated learning requires authentic contexts, activities, and assessment coupled with guidance from expert modeling, mentoring, and "legitimate peripheral participation"
• Our research results from River City show that a broader range of students gain substantial knowledge and skills in scientific inquiry through immersive simulation than through conventional instruction or equivalent learning experiences delivered via a board game. Our findings indicate that students are deeply engaged by this curriculum through actional and symbolic immersion and are developing sophisticated problem-finding skills (in a complex setting with many phenomena, problems must be identified and formulated before they can be solved). Compared with a similar, paper-based curriculum that included laboratory experiences, students overall (regardless of factors such as gender, ethnicity, or English language proficiency) were more engaged in the immersive interface and learned as much or more (11, 12).

  • evidence of success
• Many academically low-performing students do as well as their high-performing peers in River City, especially on performance-based measures (such as a letter to River City's mayor describing an intervention to help reduce illness and providing evidence to support this claim). Digital immersion allows these students to build confidence in their academic abilities by stepping out of their real-world identity of poor performer academically, which shifts their frame of self-reference to successful scientist in the virtual context. This suggests that immersive media may have the potential to release trapped intelligence and engagement in many learners, if we can understand how best to design instruction using this type of immersive, simulated experience.

  • low-performers can drastically improve by leaving that "outcast" stigma of the class and enter the body of a successful scientist, building confidence and unlocking trapped intelligence.
• Immersion may enhance transfer through simulation of the real world.
• Researchers differentiate between two ways of measuring transfer: sequestered problem-solving and preparations for future learning
• "learn how to learn
• One of the major criticisms of instruction today is the low rate of far-transfer generated by presentational instruction.
• As the students move around a physical location, such as their school playground or sports fields (Fig. 3B), a map on their handheld displays digital objects and virtual people who exist in a simulated world superimposed on real space (Fig. 4). When students come close to these digital artifacts, the augmented reality and GPS software triggers video-, audio-, and text files, which provide narrative, navigation and collaboration cues, as well as academic challenges to build math and literacy skills (SOM Text 3).

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• • Emerging writing programs provide formative assessment for students to improve writing and provide more time for teacher. Tested an app and it provides very generic feedback, still needs teacher oral and written assessment.

• • dope!!!

• • does it makes sense to test with such multimedia since this will likely be the media student will have to communicate with in the real world?
• Innovative applications of technology also provide rich, authentic tasks that challenge the sorts of integrated knowledge, critical thinking, and problem solving seldom well addressed in paper-based tests
• Online administration eliminates costs for shipping, tracking, and collecting print booklets while simultaneously introducing other logistical complexities related to equipment and security. Computer scoring provides rapid return of results and generation of reports tailored to multiple audiences. Flexible administration times and locales shift annual, on-demand testing to interim and just-in-time challenges
• Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) procedures, in which items are selected based on the examinee's prior response history and an underlying measurement model of proficiency, have been developed to reduce testing time and examinee burden. However, their use in high-stakes testing contexts has been confined largely to admission, professional certification, and credentialing exams. Despite requests to use CAT in state testing programs, regulations of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation have prohibited their implementation for assessment of student academic achievement in reading, mathematics, and science.
• Klein (8) recently reviewed the literature on automated scoring methods and presented results from a study comparing hand and machine scoring of college-level, open-ended items of the type found on the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Findings across studies using a variety of machine scoring methods consistently show comparability of human and machine scoring (0.85 score correspondence) at levels approximating the agreement between two human scorers (0.86) and sufficient to warrant using computerized scoring alone, or as an augmentation to human scoring.

  • this is encouraging, however this assessment may not produce formative information required for growth and further learning that currently only a teacher can provide with open ended response questions and essays
• Classroom instructional uses of assessments.

  • continuous formative assessment throughout the year provides feedback to teachers and students, alignment of assessment with state standards and opportunity to make adjustments to instruction base on assessment results.
• DIAGNOSER is an Internet-based tool that delivers continuous formative assessment and feedback to students and teachers (15, 16). The online assessment identifies problematic "facets" of students' thinking, then provides counterexamples and additional lessons.
• Moreover, because simulations use multiple modalities and representations, students with diverse learning styles and language backgrounds may have better opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge than are possible in text-laden print tests.
• A third important feature is going beyond annual, ondemand tests to multiple assessments distributed over time combined with timely reporting that offers teachers the opportunity to tailor instruction.

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• Research in many nations suggests that laptop programs will be most successful as part of balanced, comprehensive initiatives that address changes in education goals, curricula, teacher training, and assessment.
• The reasons given by policy-makers for investing in these programs vary. There are economic arguments, based on improving students' technology skills, creating a better educated work force, and attracting new jobs; equity concerns, to support students from low-income families whose access to technology and information is otherwise restricted; and education reform issues, as policy-makers try to make schools more effective and provide students an education that prepares them for life in the 21st century.
• For example, using a word processor has been shown to help students learn to write (13); certain drill-and-practice applications assist students in learning facts and skills (14); some science laboratory simulations can be more effective learning tools than actual laboratory equipment
• Teachers routinely make use of computer software called ExamView that provides instant feedback about how students have responded to assessment questions, and teachers may then assign students to groups on the basis of that information.
• Several times each year the teachers study assessment data, gathered using ExamView, to find out how well students are performing on education standards. The school's alignment of educational goals, instructional materials, student assignments, teacher practices, and assessment techniques illustrates that computers will be most effective when used as part of a thoughtfully coordinated, systemic approach
• A study underway in Texas is unusual because it is a 4-year longitudinal study, costs millions of dollars, and includes not only more than 20 experimental schools that use laptops but also a matched comparison group of schools that do not (12). After 3 years, the researchers found positive impacts of laptops on technology use and proficiency, increased interest among teachers in student-centered instruction, reduced student disciplinary actions, and greater teacher collaboration. However, there was generally no significant impact on students' test scores in reading and writing and only a weak impact in mathematics.
• It is clear is that simply providing computers to schools is not enough to increase student achievement or change the nature of instruction. At a minimum, learning goals, curricula, teaching strategies, and assessments must change as well.
• Regardless of the price of technology, the investments in creating effective laptop programs are large. The Australian government has recently committed Au$1.2 billion for its school technology program. In the U.S., one national program alone, the E-Rate program, has spent about US$20 billion since 1998 to help connect nearly all schools to the Internet
• Yet the cost of laptop programs consists of much more than the price of buying computers and connecting them to networks. Schools should consider the total cost of ownership (TCO), including training of teachers and administrators, technical support, software, replacement costs of aging equipment, and other items
• Computers are different than other technologies used in schools because they are all-purpose machines. They can be used as a library, a way to model invisible phenomena, a communication device, a link to other tools (such as telescopes or online databases), a device students use to create knowledge artifacts in many media, and so forth
• Computers' flexibility makes them uniquely powerful educational tools but also means that quality educational interventions or treatments cannot be realized simply by providing more computers.
• However, if the goal of laptop programs is to change educational goals; to improve patterns of teaching, learning, and assessment; and to help transform schools into more effective institutions; more needs to be done than acquire laptops and a corresponding technical infrastructure. Curricula need to be revised, better assessments developed, teachers must learn new approaches, and schools have to support teachers as they learn to teach in new ways

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• Students everywhere, enrolled or not, have free access to content and interactive instruction, as well as to networks of people with similar interests, enabling them to collaborate in the construction of knowledge and to learn at their own pace.
• Open high-quality content and instruction can set standards of practice and, because of their quality, transparency, and availability, help improve the practice of teaching and learning throughout the world.
• OER advocates believe that it will become a vibrant part of the educational and social fabric of the world. Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford University, argues for the Web to be an open commons; if some people are restricted from knowledge while others are not, creativity will be constrained and inequalities heightened
• The Internet will change dramatically over the next decade as it incorporates such emerging technologies as geo- and semantic mapping, speech recognition, artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, and techniques that immerse learners in virtual worlds that engage multiple senses. The opportunities for influencing learning and teaching will expand dramatically. The power of OER to increase access and to allow use and reuse should both enhance and be enhanced by these innovations.

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