When students are anxious/depressed, one method of remediation might be TEACHING THEM TO DO SCHOOL BETTER. Just got this message from a college mental health professional.

Call for Papers - How Art History Teaches: Images, Infrastructure, Cognition

Call for papers: Symposium in Toronto on teaching art history. Hope to see you there! arthistory.utoronto.ca/news/call-pa...

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Do Today's Kids Have Reduced Attention Spans?

Do Students Today Have Reduced Attention Spans? In this American Educator article, I argue they don't. (This piece is mostly a reprint of the one I published last year in Education Next.) www.aft.org/ae/spring202...

“Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched.” —Nabokov

New York promised to center phonics in reading instruction, but new course for teachers sidelines science of reading A New York State course intended to help educators use phonics and the science of reading effectively doesn’t do so and could impede students’ progress, literacy experts say.

The main teachers' union in NY state took on the job of educating in-service teachers in the science of reading. They blew it. hechingerreport.org/new-york-ten...

Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading Two champions of knowledge-rich instruction reflect on its current momentum

New article from E. D. Hirsch and me on (1) the evidence for the importance of knowledge in reading; (2) why it’s taken so long for people to acknowledge the evidence; (3) what we predict if the role of knowledge is taken seriously. www.educationnext.org/rediscoverin...

I still hear this justification re: AI in classrooms: “It’s out there & we can't be left behind.”
Friendly challenge: which happens more often?
1. Schools regretted waiting too long to adopt a technology.
2. Schools regretted adopting a technology before they fully understood how to use it.

Q&A: Why are a child’s first 1,000 days so critical for brain building? Many parents think the school years matter most for neurological development, but a UVA expert says the biggest gains start much earlier.

"During the first 1,000 days, the brain builds itself at a breathtaking pace, forming up to a million neural connections per second..." news.virginia.edu/content/qa-w...

Generative AI has been adopted in US workplaces more rapidly than PCs or the internet pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1...

“Let’s talk about you teaching me some of that psychology so I can manipulate people?”

Sending babies to nursery completely reshapes their microbiomes Socializing at a young age helps to develop greater diversity in children’s microbiota, according to an analysis of baby-to-baby transmission of gut bacteria.

Sending babies to nursery (daycare, for Americans) completely changes their microbiome www.nature.com/articles/d41...

CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story. How much time workers say the technology saves them on the job is vastly different from what executives report.

Executives say AI is a huge time-saver. Their employees disagree. (link is WSJ gift article) www.wsj.com/lifestyle/wo...

That New Yorker article The New Yorker article “Alphabet Soup” (Dec 29/Jan 5 issue) did a good job of conveying the complexity of dyslexia, the frustrations of dyslexics and their families, and the promise of schools such as...

It's not the case that children with dyslexia need identical instruction as typically developing kids, just a higher dose: Mark Seidenberg explains www.seidenbergreading.net/blog/oexqqvu...

Dragons, Sex and the Bible: What Drove the Book Business This Year

Contra predictions of a decade ago, physical bookstores and sales of paper books are doing well www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/b...

Decades of lab evidence show spacing effect but S's self-report spaced study doesn't correlate w grades. Why? Bes E asked about study sessions, not whether same material was repeated in spaced sessions. When you ask that Q, you see predicted correlation. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about declining test scores Experts (and everyone else) have theories but no definitive answers just yet.

@mattbarnum.bsky.social with a sensible take on declining test scores...no one knows what's going on, and it's probably complicated. cbnewsletters.chalkbeat.org/p/what-expla...

Data from 117 grad programs at one university indicate that making applications GRE-optional did not increase diversity of applications. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

I'll no longer review for journals that use an editorial platform. If I provide free a service to publishers, I think
1) they should care about my convenience, and these platforms are a pain
2) the data use statement should simply say "we don't" but, predictably, it doesn't.

New meta-analysis concludes that prequestions confer an advantage to content relevant to the prequestions, but the advantage does not bleed over to other content. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

To AI-proof exams, professors turn to the oldest technique of all A small but growing number of educators are experimenting with oral exams to circumvent the temptations presented by powerful AI platforms.

In the face of chatbot cheating, more professors turning to oral exams. Not really an option in my class of 350... www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

New American Educator article with Eric Turkheimer @ent3c.bsky.social on what IQ scores mean. www.aft.org/ae/winter202...

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: What Do IQ Scores Mean?

New article with Eric Turkheimer: "What Do IQ Scores Mean?" www.aft.org/ae/winter202...

'I taught an octopus piano' - the video the internet can't get enough of! In one of the most bizarre, brilliant, and unexpectedly wholesome musical experiments of the year, Swedish musician and YouTuber Mattias Krantz has done the unthinkable: he spent six months teaching a...

B. F. Skinner: *shrugs*
www.pianistmagazine.com/blogs/i-taug...

Math anxiety: meta analysis of longitudinal studies suggests a bi-directional relationship. Being bad at math makes you anxious when doing it AND being anxious about it impairs performance. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

A Smartphone Before Age 12 Could Carry Health Risks, Study Says

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/w...

Many possible reasons...

Retractions in medical journals disproportionately less likely to include women authors. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Using PISA data from 73 countries, researchers estimated the extent to which growth mindset mediates the association of SES on achievement, and find results consistent w/ the picture of the last 10 years. It's a real effect. It's small. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exercise improves academic performance in Norwegian college students (open) www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1...

Every psychologist knows this feeling: you’re not mad that these two sections are adjacent. You’re grateful that they’re separate sections.