“Decision making and independence of thought are stressed for those at “the top” while obedience and acceptance are instilled in those at the lower end of the scale.” (Ansalone 2010)
I’d never thought about school tracking in terms of what personality traits they encouraged in students, but given my experience in the classroom, as a teacher and as a student, the above quote seems plausible. Continue reading A Post About Tracking
Though recent research (Conrad 2018) has shown that nearly 10% of adolescent gamers regularly become addicted, when it comes to academics, research shows that video games, in general, do not negatively impact academic student performance. In fact, Drummond and Sauer (2014) clearly distinguished between pathological and non-pathological gaming; the latter actually being associated with increased academic performance.
Continue reading Media and Technology Critique – Video games and Math Education
Video games, therefore, involve individualized skill
development, which likely leads to enhanced motivation (Green and Bavelier 2008). In contrast, this high level of individualized skill development is more difficult to replicate in the average classroom where there often are more than 30 students per class, potentially contributing to the finding that many adolescents report feeling bored and unmotivated in school (Larson 2000). As we have shown, mainstream ‘‘popular’’ video games that involve problem solving are associated with increased self-reported problem solving skills, and thus educational video game developers […] should focus more on including problem solving tasks in educational games.
As someone who played a lot of games in my adolescence, I’d like to be a little nitpick-y with this quote from the article. Continue reading Discussing Motivation and Video Games
“A few researchers began to view recent brain and genetic findings in a brighter, more flattering light, one distinctly colored by evolutionary theory. The resulting account of the adolescent brain—call it the adaptive-adolescent story—casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside”(Dobbs 2011).
Framing teenage rebellion as a well-adapted behavior for a “creature wired perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home” to face the world is an idea that I really like. Continue reading Give Them Space
Authoritative parenting is less prevalent among African American, Asian American, or Hispanic American families than among White families, no doubt reflecting the fact that parenting practices are often linked to cultural values and beliefs[…] Research also has indicated that authoritarian parenting is more prevalent among ethnic minority than among White families, even after taking ethnic differences in socioeconomic status into account. (Collins & Steinberg 2008)
Given that students from ethnic minorities over represent in low-income urban schools, I wonder how much the teaching styles at these schools reflect the parenting that these students are subjected to, as described in the quote. Continue reading Encouraging Independence