K-12 performance: more testing

From my college classmate Zeke Emanuel in The New Republic, here. Money quote:

Done properly, testing is not inert. Rather, it can be much more like the physical phenomena underlying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In the act of measuring students, you can actually affect how much knowledge they absorb and how well they retain it.

Zeke is raising a really important point. Learning outcomes are improved by the action of taking a test and getting the feedback of a grade. And increasing the frequency of testing actually improves those outcomes.

Mind and brain…

An excellent essay ultimately about consciousness and what neuroscience may reveal about it by Adam Zeman and Oliver Davies is here from the UK magazine, Standpoint.

Money quote:

Recent research, and the thinking that it has inspired, does not point to any simple reductive identity of mind and brain. An influential, and representative, theory of consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s theory of “integrated information”, suggests that all of nature has a – sometimes – hidden potential for mentality. The Canadian philosopher Evan Thompson has underlined the way in which the precursors of minds like ours can be glimpsed in even the simplest of organisms. Other contemporary philosophers, including Edinburgh’s Andy Clark, have emphasised that human minds are sustained by culture and community. The role of action and the body in forming and mediating consciousness has been a key theme in the work of the American neurologist Antonio Damasio, the Parisian psychologist Kevin O’Regan, the Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë and the Brighton-based psychiatrist Hugo Critchley. In the work of these thinkers, mind is understood to be “extended, embodied and embedded” – extended in its interactions with space and time, embodied through its dialogue with both the body and the brain, and embedded in human culture and society. 

Read it all. Very worthwhile.

Krasnow Institute Strategic Planning…

The Institute is actively preparing a strategic plan as part of an overall planning effort by George Mason University. This is a very useful exercise for us because it allows us to prioritize where we are going to invest over the long term, keeping in mind a vision for what we want to become over that same long term.

It’s very different from the day-to-day activities of research and education–while the two are both activities that, be definition, reach into the long term, they are, in term of action, very much of the here-and-now variety.

Recently the Institute’s advisory board completed its own work on preparing a vision for Krasnow’s future. We’ll post it on-line on the Institute’s web site in the near future. That vision will serve as a starting point for our strategic plan. At the same time, I’ve been meeting with faculty, students and staff to get their ideas about a roadmap for the Institute’s future.

Finally, the Institute’s plan will show alignment with the University’s own long term goals which you can read about here.

But a plan doesn’t mean anything unless it drives action–and that will be the most important aspect of putting this all together. Our plan has to lead to a set of coherent actions (think resource allocation, investments, prioritization) that move the Institute in the right direction. If it does that, then the planning activity will be well worth our efforts.

Andrew Sullivan became a better writer….

through blogging according to his own blogpost, here. He mentions the use of blogging in the classroom and actually we are seeing a great deal more of that, even here in the neuroscience program at George Mason. Beyond the classroom, our students also tend to blog on their own: The Cellular Scale, is authored by one of our own Mason neuroscience doctoral students.

I’ve blogged these past eight years because I enjoy communicating the unexpected links between diverse fields–something I get to see quite a bit of in my day job.