EdNA retweeted
Another take-away from @nhannahjones's piece...if you, consciously or unconsciously, think "the smart kids will always be okay," you're wrong. The smart kids need attention and good instruction too.
EdNA retweeted
There is growing concern that AI can blunt memory and reasoning. Science shows ways to keep the brain sharp
go.nature.com/4h4cZP2
EdNA retweeted
Retrieval practice is always vastly more effective than re-consuming information (re-reading, re-watching, transcribing, etc.).
The way you make it easier to pull information out of your head is, well, by practicing pulling it out of your head.
EdNA retweeted
The key to learning fast is reducing friction in the learning process.
One of the biggest sources of friction:
Not knowing the prerequisites for the thing you're trying to learn.
Knowing the prereqs can make the difference between feeling like new content is being presented overwhelmingly fast versus at a comfortable pace.
EdNA retweeted
Stimulant medications may help children with #ADHD stay engaged by enhancing arousal and reward systems rather than directly improving attention.
Read more highlights from recent peer-reviewed studies: at.apa.org/27046c
EdNA retweeted
Among adolescents, smartphone acquisition at age 13 years was linked to insufficient sleep but not depression or obesity; greater smartphone use was associated with higher odds of #Depression, #Obesity, and insufficient #Sleep. ja.ma/3PMMH9i
EdNA retweeted
Living with a dog at 3 months of age was associated with a 90% reduction in food allergy by age 3.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This study did not replicate. Later studies show a smaller odds ratio (0.6/0.8) and may be cofounded by a prior pet allergies.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38044191/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22192443/
EdNA retweeted
NEW: Have you heard of i-Ready?
It's in a THIRD of school districts.
The company behind it makes $800m/yr revenue.
Kids are often required to use it for 90 min/week, or more, and they hate it.
It doesn't count toward grades.
Teachers can't see a student's answers.
Schools are paying millions for it hoping to improve their state test scores, but critics say there's no proof it works.
My latest @NBCNews story digs into the controversy around one of the most commonly-used software products in education today
EdNA retweeted
Right before you fall asleep, your hands and feet get warmer. That warming is the real trigger that switches your brain into sleep mode. A 1999 Nature paper tested it against melatonin, core body temperature, heart rate, and how sleepy people felt. The hand and foot warming won.
The drawing in the tweet works on this exact trigger. The pose has a name in Japan: Mōkan Undō, or "capillary exercise." Katsuzō Nishi designed it in 1927. He was the chief technical engineer on the Tokyo subway, Japan's first. It became one of six daily exercises in his system, still done in Japan today.
You lie on your back, point your arms and legs straight up, and shake them for thirty seconds. While the limbs are up, gravity drains the blood from them. When you lower them, the blood floods back into your hands and feet, warming them in seconds. Your brain reads that warming as a green light to sleep.
The shaking activates a separate reflex, the kind most mammals use after a scare. Dogs and rabbits shake themselves off after a fright for the same reason. Dr. David Berceli, a trauma therapist, built a whole method around it, with certified instructors now in 40 countries. The shaking flips your nervous system out of "I'm wired" mode and into "I'm safe to sleep" mode.
Nishi got the biology wrong. He believed capillaries, the tiny blood vessels at the ends of your veins, did the pumping. William Harvey, an English doctor, had shown the heart did the work, three centuries earlier, in 1628. The exercise still works, for entirely different reasons than Nishi thought. The drained limbs come back warm. The body reads that as a sleep cue, and the shaking calms the nervous system on top of it.
A drawing on X with millions of views just rediscovered a 100-year-old Japanese sleep exercise. A subway engineer designed it first, decades before sleep scientists figured out why it would work.
EdNA retweeted
When students can’t find the "main idea", the problem is almost never a missing strategy.
EdNA retweeted
Is sleeping in on the weekends bad or good for teens and young adults?
Looking strictly at mental health, the answer seems to be: good.
A new study in the Journal of Affective Disorders looked at sleep data of over 1,000 16- to 24-year-olds. They found that the roughly 60% of them who slept in on the weekends had a 41% reduced risk of suffering from depressive symptoms.
That’s a huge effect, especially given that, as Emma Young notes for the British Psychological Society, 17% of adolescents and young adults experience a depressive episode each year.
Though of course, the best option is for teens and young adults to get the recommended eight to ten hours of sleep every night. But that’s not always realistic given schoolwork, jobs, socializing and, yes, late-night scrolling.
As a former parent of teens (or a parent of former teens?), I’m very familiar with the closed bedroom door late into the morning (and sometimes the afternoon). And if that describes your weekends, maybe it’s best to let sleeping teens lie.
You can read more here: bit.ly/4aNyYp7
EdNA retweeted
12 Things Everyone Should Know About the Big Five Personality Traits
1. The Big Five Predict Success in Every Domain of Life
[Link below.]
EdNA retweeted
For those who say that "it should be up to the parents" and that "parents need to parent:" Turns out that Meta's own research shows that parents have little ability to control how bad their kids' "problematic use" will be, once the kid opens an account:
techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/me…
EdNA retweeted
We’ve been told for years that the secret to learning is "less is more". Strip away the fluff, simplify the visuals, and protect the student's working memory at all costs.
But what if "clean" design is actually making learning less effective?
The Realism Paradox, a shift in Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is turning traditional instructional design on its head.
The "Cost-Benefit" Shift
We used to treat the mind like a bucket with limited space. The new Cost-Benefit Model suggests a more strategic trade-off: we can intentionally "spend" a little mental energy on a realistic or immersive interface to "buy" a massive spike in student motivation and deep processing.
Realistic details may be harder to process, but they lead to significantly better retention of visual nuances.
Intentional Immersion: VR demands more sensory resources, yet it dramatically improves a learner’s ability to transfer skills to the real world.
Emotional Design: Warm colors and human-like cues aren't "noise"; they are motivational engines that can lower the perceived difficulty of a task.
The most critical takeaway is that Cognitive load is task-specific. We aren't just trying to make learning "easier"; we are trying to make it authentic. But kf course, sequencing learning matters, a lot .
Read why "aligned complexity" is the new standard for the digital age:
open.substack.com/pub/ammara…
EdNA retweeted
This sounds like a joke, but it's not:
– 1 in 12 incoming UCSD freshmen don’t know middle school math,
– and the remedial math course was too advanced,
– so UCSD had to create a remedial remedial math course,
– and a quarter of the students placing into it had a perfect 4.0 GPA in their high school math courses.
That sounds so ridiculous, like something you’d read in The Onion, but it’s unfortunately real.
Here are some direct quotes from the UCSD report:
"Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort."
"While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11)."
"Few, if any, students who place into Math 2 have successfully completed an engineering degree."
"high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation."
"The correlation between the average math grade and the placement result is only around 0.25 on a scale of 0 to 1. In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0."
"of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels, 94% went beyond [the minimum high school course requirement], with 42% percent completing Calculus or Precalculus."
"The pattern of high school math classes taken in many cases suggests much higher levels of math skill than the actual math skill the student often has."
"In fact, for more than two decades the Mathematics Department has found that out of all available student data, the single best predictor for math placement has been the SAT (math section) score, with the ACT score being an equally good predictor."
EdNA retweeted
There are plenty of learning-enhancing practice strategies that have been tested scientifically, numerous times, and are completely replicable.
They might as well be laws of physics.
For instance: we know that actively solving problems produces more learning than passively watching a video/lecture or re-reading notes.
(To be clear: active learning doesn’t mean that students never watch and listen. It just means that students are actively solving problems as soon as possible following a minimum effective dose of initial explanation, and they spend the vast majority of their time actively solving problems.)
Another finding: if you don’t review information, you forget it. You can actually model this precisely, mathematically, using a forgetting curve.
I’m not exaggerating when I refer to these things as laws of physics – the only real difference is that we’ve gone up several levels of scale and are dealing with noisier stochastic processes (that also have noisier underlying variables).
Okay, but aren’t these findings obvious? Yes, but…
-- Yes, but in education, obvious strategies often aren't put into practice. For instance, plenty of classes still run on a pure lecture format and don't review previously learned unless it's the day before a test.
-- Yes, but there are plenty of other findings that replicate just as well but are not so obvious.
Here are some less obvious findings:
EdNA retweeted
It's not the case that children with dyslexia need identical instruction as typically developing kids, just a higher dose: @markseidenberg explains seidenbergreading.net/blog/o…
