“To smell again, perchance to learn better” would be a poetical way to speak of this study about teaching sleeping children in Germany how to read and write better English: “How Odor Cues Help to Optimize Learning During Sleep in a Real Life-Setting,” Franziska Neumann, Vitus Oberhauser, and Jürgen Kornmeier, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. […]
Tag: education
The scourge of ‘Alphabetism’ (new paper from professor Zax)
Professor Zax, who is (amongst other things) an anthroponomastician at the Department of Economics, University of Colorado at Boulder, US, presents (along with co-author Alexander Cauley) a new 48 page working paper which suggests that (males) who have a surname initial which occurs towards the end of the alphabet are more likely to end up […]
Evaluating Students’ Evaluations of Medical Professors: Are There Cookies?
Some medical schools may be selecting or rejecting faculty members because those individuals do or do not offer cookies to their students. That is a possible conclusion one might draw, after reading this new study done by faculty members: “Availability of cookies during an academic course session affects evaluation of teaching,” Michael Hessler, Daniel M […]
The world’s first “Pastarimeter” — lefty pasta and righty pasta
“Our experience of explaining polarimetry to the general public is that they frequently ask how molecules rotate light, which is difficult to explain using non-technical language. Therefore we were keen to find an analogous large scale system which mimicked the polarimeter and used everyday left- and right-handed objects.” – explain Claire Saxon, Scott Brindley, Nic […]
Do a person’s genes predict how high they will go in school? — The 3.2% solution
Scholars have wondered whether (and in some cases, assumed that) success in schools comes largely from the good genes a person inherits. A new study of scholars and their genes provides evidence that YES, IT DOES, sort of, a little bit, maybe. The study is powerful — its authors tell us exactly how powerful. The study is “Genome-wide association study […]
The Candy-Fish Sustainability Experiment
Candy fish gain an additional and/or alternative kind of value in this study: “Ecological and evolutionary effects of harvesting: lessons from the candy-fish experiment.” Beatriz Diaz Pauli [pictured here] and Mikko Heino, ICES Journal of Marine Science, vol. 70, no. 7, 2013, pp. 1281-1286. (Thanks to investigator Martin Aker for bringing this to our attention.) The […]
Discovery: Students Who Do Homework Get Higher Grades
A proud press release from East Carolina University announces: Department of Economics professor Dr. Nick Rupp, who counts education tactics among his research interests, recently published the results of a study in which he found that doing homework assignments leads to higher test grades. “There’s always been anecdotal evidence,” he explained, “but I wanted to […]
Effect of 5th grade on 4th graders
Mike the Mad Biologist [that’s his name for himself] sees an apparent wee flaw in the way some educators [as they call themselves] evaluate things. M the MB writes: One of the supposed key innovations in educational ‘reform’ is the adoption of value added testing. Basically, students are tested at the start of the school […]
For wound-flashcard enthusiasts
Anyone who enjoys learning descriptions of wounds, and also enjoys playing games, will perhaps enjoy and benefit from the wound flashcards on the Quizlets web site. Here are a few of the items on offer there: Necrotic Slough color is tan/yellow in the base of the wound bed, texture is soft and soggy, and is […]
17 minutes of feet
The dramatic image below, with its caption — “Wearing wrong kind of Clothing [Should wear suspenders]” — is from a motion picture called “Educated Feet for Correct Posture“. Almost 17 minutes in duration, the film maintains a uniform level of pedagogical excitement from beginning to end. The camera often focuses on shoes. Watch the entire […]