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  A Scientific Approach to Science Education - Research On Learning
• To the novice, scientific problem-solving is just matching the pattern of the problem to certain memorized recipes.
• Expert problem-solving involves employing systematic, concept-based, and widely applicable strategies
• Since this includes being applicable in completely new situations, this strategy is much more useful than the novice problem-solving approach.
• What you would expect, or at least hope, is that students would begin their college physics course somewhere on the novice side of the scale and that after completing the course they would have become more expert-like in their beliefs.
  
   What the data say is just the opposite.
• This instruction is explicitly built around teaching concepts and is being provided by instructors who, at least at the college level, are unquestionably experts in the subject. And yet their students are not learning concepts, and they are acquiring novice beliefs about the subject. How can this be?

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• Visual Learners Convert Words To Pictures In The Brain And Vice Versa, Says Psychology Study
• The more strongly an individual identified with the visual cognitive style, the more that individual activated the visual cortex when reading words
• participants who considered themselves verbal learners were found under fMRI to have brain activity in a region associated with phonological cognition when faced with a picture, suggesting they have a tendency to convert pictorial information into linguistic representations.
• visual and verbal cognitive styles were measured in 18 subjects by a self-report exam called the Verbalizer–Visualizer Questionnaire. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, a standard intelligence test used here to grade visual against verbal learning styles, then measured cognitive abilities. Participants subsequently participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment.

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• the brain cannot detect images when brainwave activity is in a trough.
• “When the brain is in a state of readiness, you see; when it is not, you don’t see.
• Brainwave activity has peaks and troughs that can occur around 10 times a second, he explained.  In their research, Professor Ro and his colleagues demonstrated how the phase of the brainwave or alpha wave can reliably predict visual detection

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• Curriculum-based achievement tests are the fairest and most effective assessments for college admissions and have important incentive or “signaling “ effects for our K-12 schools as well: They help reinforce a rigorous academic curriculum and create better alignment of teaching, learning and assessment all along the pathway from high school to college,
• perception of the SAT as a test of basic intellectual ability had an adverse effect on many students from low-performing schools, tending to diminish academic aspiration and self-esteem

• Of all nationally administered tests used in college admissions, the College Board’s subject tests and AP exams are the best examples of achievement tests currently available. The College Board subject tests are offered in about 20 subject areas and the AP exams in over 30. AP exam scores were second only to high-school grades in predicting student performance at UC.

   

  In conclusion Atkinson says, “Without question, the College Board SAT subject tests and AP exams have the strongest curricular foundations of any college-entrance tests now available, and more colleges and universities should find them attractive.”

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• The results showed that simply imagining a posture may have effects that are similar to actually assuming the pose.  The participants spent more time searching the display when they imagined themselves holding the monitor, compared to when they imagined themselves with their hands behind their backs. The researchers suggest that the slower rate of searching indicates a more thorough analysis of items closer to the hands. Previous research has shown that we spend more time looking at items close to our hands (items close to us are usually more important than those further away), but this is the first study suggesting that merely imagining something close to our hands will cause us to pay more attention to it.

• The team found a marked difference in average student performance, with those  seeing the non-animated lecture performing much better in the tests than those  who watched the animated lecture. Students were able to recall details of the  static graphics much better. Animated slides meant to present information  incrementally actually require greater concentration, which makes it harder to  remember content as well as reducing overall exposure time to the "complete"  slide, the researchers found.

• Although students appear to like the use of animations in lectures delivered using PowerPoint, there is now strong evidence that animation is nothing more than an entertaining distraction.

   

  The team points out that their study was applied only to the teaching of new concepts. It is possible that teaching a technique might work more effectively with animated, rather than static, slides. Follow-up work will investigate that possibility.

• Songbirds Reveal How Practice Improves Performance

     

   

  ScienceDaily (July 6, 2009) — Learning complex skills like playing an instrument requires a sequence of movements that can take years to master. Last year, MIT neuroscientists reported that by studying the chirps of tiny songbirds, they were able to identify how two distinct brain circuits contribute to this type of trial-and-error learning in different stages of life.
• the brain initially stores improvements in one brain pathway before transferring this learned information to the motor pathway for long-term storage.
• The basal ganglia are also linked to disorders like Parkinson's disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder and drug addiction.

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• "A major role we play as parents is teaching children where the important things are for them to learn," he said. "One way we do this is through joint visual attention or eye-gaze. This is a social mechanism and children can find what's important – we call them informational 'hot spots' – by following the gaze of another person. By being connected to others we also learn by example and imitation."
• We can learn what to do by watching others, and we also can come to understand other people through our own actions," Meltzoff said. "Learning is bi-directional."
• Educators know children spend 80 percent of their waking time away from school and children are learning deeply and enthusiastically in museums, in community centers, from online games and in all sorts of venues. A lot of this learning is highly social and clues from informal learning may be applied to school to enhance learning. Why is it that a kid who is so good at figuring out baseball batting averages is failing math in school?"

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• the eyes scan an image the fastest when it is shaped as a golden-ratio rectangle.
• The natural design that connects vision and cognition is a theory that flowing systems -- from airways in the lungs to the formation of river deltas -- evolve in time so that they flow more and more easily
• "It is the oneness of vision, cognition and locomotion as the design of the movement of all animals on earth," he said. "The phenomenon of the golden ratio contributes to this understanding the idea that pattern and diversity coexist as integral and necessary features of the evolutionary design of nature."

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• First, games provide information when it is needed
• They have you do stuff, and then as you need to know information, they tell it to you,
• If I had to mod science -- that is, I had to make some of my own curriculum or my own experiments -- then I'd have an understanding at a deep level of what the rules are,"
• integrating assessment and learning
• Situated learning can be done with or without a game. Good teachers have always done it."

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