“The impulse to repeatedly tell and listen to stories appears to be a lock-and-key mechanism of intergenerational information transfer.” Cozolino, L. (2013). The social neuroscience of education : Optimizing attachment and learning in the classroom (First ed., Norton books in education). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Storytelling, easily dismissed as the domain of fantasy …
Tag Archives: Curiosity
Asking the Right Questions
The Question Formulation Technique “Our methods often presume students can pivot effectively from an information need to information discovery. The QFT does away with that presumption.” I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to studying a classroom activity that has the potential to strengthen a soft spot in my teaching. The Question Formulation Technique (henceforth …
Children are Curious; Students are not
“Intellectual curiosity becomes a casualty of the education and status wars.” Joshua Eyler. How Humans Learn. 2018 I mentioned psychologist Susan Engel in an earlier post. As recounted in Joshua Eyler’s How Humans Learn, Engel documents a drop-off in curiosity between kindergarten and fifth grade. Eyler points to other research that corroborates an age-related decrease …
The Hungry Mind and the Educated Mind
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny…” —Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) https://www.americanscientist.org/article/thats-funny One of the common threads Joshua Eyler identified while researching How Humans Learn is curiosity. Most every reader intuitively grasps the meaning of curiosity, but scholars have leveled varying definitions. Eyler cites …
The Scientist as Child
In How Humans Learn (2018), author Joshua Eyler reminds us he’s a medievalist, not an education scholar. Eyler’s book, then, is his distillation of others’ work. He selects and presents research drawn from related disciplines, like evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), psychology (both cognitive and developmental), and neuroscience. One such example comes from psychologist Alison Gopnik. …