creative thinking

In the Age of Google, Should Schools Teach Memorization Skills?

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As school is about to resume, peo­ple are remind­ed of their strong opin­ions about how to fix schools: more fund­ing, bet­ter teach­ers, less gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, more gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, etc. But the one obvi­ous, and nev­er-stat­ed prob­lem, is that stu­dents don’t remem­ber what they are taught. In spite of all the “teach­ing to the test” that par­ents and teach­ers com­plain about, stu­dents still don’t remem­ber the very things they were taught as answers to test questions.

The rea­son they don’t remem­ber is that they are not taught how to mem­o­rize. Why is that? [Read more…] about In the Age of Google, Should Schools Teach Mem­o­riza­tion Skills?

Enhance Metacognition and Problem-Solving by Talking Out Loud to Yourself

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The MC at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michigan’s reunion din­ner encour­aged audi­ence mem­bers to reveal the most sig­nif­i­cant take-away from their under­grad­u­ate nurs­ing edu­ca­tion. The great­est ben­e­fit was quick­ly clear to me — prob­lem-solv­ing think­ing. Mem­o­ry pro­duced a mind video: a short, dark-haired, nurs­ing instruc­tor lec­tur­ing a small group of first year stu­dents in an emp­ty patient room. “Don’t mem­o­rize the steps of ster­ile tech­nique. Use a prob­lem-solv­ing think­ing process.” She described the sequen­tial, cycli­cal process: define the prob­lem, gath­er infor­ma­tion, devel­op a solu­tion strat­e­gy, allo­cate resources, mon­i­tor progress, and eval­u­ate the solu­tion. [Read more…] about Enhance Metacog­ni­tion and Prob­lem-Solv­ing by Talk­ing Out Loud to Yourself

Study: Contrasting Brain Growth in Baby Humans and Baby Chimpanzees

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Chart­ing Brain Growth in Humans and Chimps (New York Times):
— “Although baby humans and baby chim­panzees both start out with unde­vel­oped fore­brains, a new study reports that the human brain increas­es in vol­ume much more rapid­ly ear­ly on.”
— “The growth is in a region of the brain known as the pre­frontal cor­tex and is part of what makes humans cog­ni­tive­ly advanced com­pared with oth­er ani­mals, includ­ing the chim­panzee, our clos­est rel­a­tive. The pre­frontal cor­tex plays a major role in deci­sion-mak­ing, self-aware­ness and cre­ative thinking.”

–> To learn more about study Dif­fer­en­tial Pre­frontal White Mat­ter Devel­op­ment in Chim­panzees and Humans: click Here (requires subscription).

–> To explore what may have hap­pened oth­er­wise, you may want to watch the new movie Rise of the Plan­et of the Apes.