Philippine Basic Education

Jonah Lehrer posed this math question on the New Yorker : A baseball and a bat cost one dollar and ten cents. The price of the bat is one dollar more than that of the ball. How much is the ball? If your answer is ten cents, then you are carelessly making shortcuts in your head. The ball is five cents and the bat costs a dollar more, one dollar and five cents. We often associate quickness with intelligence especially in math. It is true that it helps if we can answer questions like what is three times seven in a flash. But when evaluation is necessary, we must pause and think. There are four beliefs that make us stupid according to Stephen Chew of Samford University. Above copied from Stephen Chew, How to Get the Most Out of Studying The above captured image may look just like a meme that we often see on social media. What it says, however, comes from evidence-based research. Chew summarizes some of the misconceptions we have regarding how we learn in a chapter in  Applyin...

For a classroom teacher who is not actively engaged in education research, it is not easy to digest information from primary literature. Scientists often write articles not with the intention of reaching non experts. A book that attempts to bring recent advances in the science of learning into much more readable nuggets can therefore be very useful. One example is Applying Science of Learning in Education: Infusing Psychological Science into the Curriculum (2014) from the American Psychological Association, and this book is FREE . I have only browsed through the content, it has about 300 pages and 24 chapters, but each chapter is a stand-alone. And, of course, the first chapter I chose to read is on General Chemistry. Surprisingly, what is described in this chapter can easily apply to other subjects. Above copied from Samuel Pazicni and Daniel T. Pyburn (2014). Intervening on Behalf of Low-Skilled Comprehenders in a University General Chemistry Course. In V. A. Benassi, C. E. Ov...

In the previous post, No More Algebra , the strongest argument for retaining algebra as a requirement for all is that some people can easily take advantage of your gullibility. And they will. Misinformation abounds not just in social media or the internet. This is especially tragic when the medium is a traditional news source. A recent article in Philippine Star  even uses "Oxford" to propagate unsubstantiated news. And it is not just about a catchy headline as the article starts with this groundless statement: "A University of Oxford study found that $200,000, around P10 million, was spent to hire trolls who would spread propaganda for President Rodrigo Duterte and target his opposition."  The Oxford study mentioned in this news article is a working paper by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard. The Philippines Star fails to mention one major limitation of the study: This working paper lays the groundwork for understanding the global trends in the organi...

Math is beautiful. Algebra will help you with developing critical thinking skills. You will use it in the future. These are some reasons often provided to justfy making algebra as a required course. One can say the same thing about art. Art is likewise beautiful. You may likewise use what you learn in an art course in your job. Besides, our planet "earth" is simply "eh" without "art". However, there may be a slight difference between art and algebra. Students find algebra as a major hindrance to obtaining higher education. In community colleges, passing algebra has become a barrier to graduation. Removing algebra as a required course in community colleges has recently gained momentum in Calufornia. Jude Thaddeus Socrates, a professor of mathematics at Pasadein posted the following on Facebook : Above copied from Facebook But before arriving quickly at such a conclusion, we may need to pause. First, the challenges of algebra in both high school a...

Some colleges still provide questionnaires to students to evaluate their instructors. In educational research, students' self-reports are often used. It is therefore necessary to gauge how accurate these reports are. After all, a teacher knows quite well that even in basic recall tests, not all students get a perfect score. And these tests taken by students are of course high stakes than a simple survey which neither rewards nor punishes a student for accuracy. Since surveys still require some bit of cognitive skills, it is also possible that errors in students' surveys will not be random but systematic. The chance that a student who does not well academically will likewise not be so accurate in answering questions in a survey is high. In an instructor evaluation, it is probably not surprising to see results correlate with the students' academic performance. Yet, these surveys are sometimes used for merit decisions for the instructor. How reliable then are students' voi...

We hear this very often: "Children must be taught how to think and not what to think". Margaret Mead wrote this statement in " Coming of Age in Samoa ". What we do not hear often is what follows: "And because old errors die slowly, they must be taught tolerance, just as to-day they are taught intolerance". As a result, we frequently fall into this false dichotomy of content versus skills. Mead was warning us of indoctrination, not knowledge transfer. On the other hand, it is true that basic education nowadays is usually measured using standardized tests. Schools deemed excellent are those whose students score well in these exams. Nehring and coworkers, however, find in a recent study, " What real high performance looks like ",  that in these schools "task demand for a student in the interpersonal and intrapersonal domains was either rare or wholly absent". Seeing that this is the case obviously only fuels further the division between te...

Representatives of countries around the world when they met in Paris seemed to be united in acknowledging the perils of a continuing rise in carbon dioxide emissions. Although we are beginning to feel the consequences of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, next generations are much more likely to face the new challenges climate change brings. How we teach young children regarding this issue is therefore an important task to address. Victoria Hermann in US News   offers some advice: "Doomsday narratives about climate change don't work." Above copied from US News Hermann is responding to a New York Magazine   article by David Wallace-Wells: Above copied from New York Magazine Hermann cites a study by Haeffel and coworkers that links hopelessness to a decrease in goal-directed behavior. In this work, depression is shown to correlate with a decrease in our desire to find solutions and make decisions. This is basically what hopeless...