As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.
I became a cognitive psychologist because I met a bunch of teachers I really liked.
Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.
When I talk to people about 'KnowMore', it is as an experiment. The biggest thing I'll say there is that we've learned a lot from 'KnowMore'.
In other words, unlike some people with new theories, we will go out, we'll go into a school and we get products and the products are evaluated, whether it's by teachers or others. The scores are quantified and then we compare performances.
Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no one pays any attention to it.
New laboratories and centers will help our schools lift their standards of excellence and explore new methods of teaching. These centers will provide special training for those who need and deserve special treatment.
Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been in existence for most of this century.
The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.
I'm not a policy oriented person. I'm constrained to what I study. But educational policy has not yet taken adequate note of the whole child. Kids are not just their IQ or standardized test scores. It matters whether or not they show up, how hard they work.
Whether four years of strenuous attention to football and fraternities is the best preparation for professional work has never been seriously investigated.
My challenge as university minister is about getting right balance of teaching and research.
We all know—not just from common wisdom but from hard research—that all children benefit from being in smaller classes.
If something can be proven to work, we should try it... Making sure that our young folk get the best education is the only thing that matters to me, and if something can be shown to work in doing that or if something's worth trying to do that, then I'll certainly be in the market for it.
Creating a global platform for collaboration in education research and innovation has been the PISA initiative's aspiration from its conception in the late 1990s.
In 1996, I received a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Southern California.
Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.
Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.
The most reliable way to be certain of their classroom impact is through independent studies conducted by third-party organisations which compare the student growth in our corps members' classrooms to that of other teachers in similar situations.
Learning research tells us that the time lag from experiment to feedback is critical.
You have all this education theory, and people try to make larger statements than maybe what their data would back up, because they've done these small experiments that are tied to a very particular case with a very particular implementation... theory definitely matters, but I think dogma matters less.
Education has always produced an incredible amount of data; that's always been obvious to me. But technology had to catch up.
