Blog posts

When it comes to creating an effective team, cohesion is far more important than co-location.

Virtual meeting and collaboration tools can be a great servant, but not a great master. Rather than letting technology dictate processes, a virtual team should aim to take effective face-to-face working practices and adapt them to work virtually.

A shared vision, which is understood by all team members, acts as an anchor for decision making. Each team member’s responsibilities should be in service of the collective purpose.

A virtual environment should support relationship development, not simply communication.

SNAPP uses information on who posted and replied to whom, and what major discussions were about, and how expansive they were, to analyse the interactions of a forum and display it in a Social Network Diagram.

On-line spaced education can generate improvements in learning that are retained 2 years later. Although the effect size is modest, the persistence of detectable knowledge differences between educational interventions after such a long duration is exceedingly unusual.

<em>Purpose</em> – <it>The purpose of this paper is to compare the impact of a long-term (13-week, spaced learning) with a short-term (two-day, block intensive) coaching skills training programme on participants' coaching skills and emotional intelligence.</it>

<em>Findings</em> – <it>Participation in the 13-week training course was associated with increases in both goal-focused coaching skills and emotional intelligence, whereas the two-day block intensive training was associated with increased goal-focused coaching skills, but not emotional intelligence. Further, the magnitude of the increase in goal-focused coaching skills was less for the two-day programme than for the 13-week programme.</it>

Spaced learning usually leads to better recognition memory as compared with massed learning, yet the underlying neural mechanisms remain elusive.

Recognition memory tests afterward revealed a significant spacing effect: Participants recognized more items learnt under the spaced learning condition than under the massed learning condition.

The Modified Low-First Method is an optimal spaced learning method which was derived from a reactivation theory of spacing effects and was designed to be effective by setting as advantageous spaces as possible for all items and for any learners with various working memory capacities. It consists of three principles; the first is to sort all items by their probabilities of recall in ascending order at the end of each learning session for the subsequent session, and the second is to omit items whose probabilities of recall have reached a certain level, and the third is to transit to a new learning session when the number of unrecalled items in a session have reached a certain number.

<b>Conclusion </b> Spaced education consisting of clinical scenarios and questions distributed weekly via e-mail can significantly improve students' retention of medical knowledge.

<p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">1. Class Size</span></strong></p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">My initial thought:</span> Decreasing Class Size from 25 to 15 could significantly improve student achievement.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The bold, loud claim I hear:</span>&nbsp; “Decreasing class sizes is a key to student success!”</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">What the research says:</span>&nbsp; Of the 138 factors of the meta-analyses done, this was ranked as number 106, and had a impact factor of 0.21, well below the hinge point of showing notable change.&nbsp; This is based on studies of more than 40000 classes, and nearly 950000 students worldwide. Perhaps not surprisingly, “quality teaching” has nearly double the impact on student achievement than this factor.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">My new thought:</span><strong>&nbsp; </strong>Not the high-yield strategy that I believed.</p>

<p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">6.&nbsp; Formative Evaluation of programs</span></strong></p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">My initial thought</span>:&nbsp; Extremely important for teachers to adapt and change their methodologies in response to student learning. Using student data to guide instruction and reflection through collaboration with their peers is something that we have been<a href="http://thelearningnation.blogspot.com/2010/11/restructuring-not-remortgaging-to-make.html"> focussing on in our school through our change in structures</a>.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Loud, bold claim I hear:</span>&nbsp; “I know what works in my class!”</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">What the research says</span>:&nbsp; This ranks as #3 of 138, with an effect of 0.9 over nearly 4000 students and 38 studies.&nbsp; Teachers being purposeful to innovations in that they are looking to see “what works” and “why it works” as well as looking for reasons why students do not do well lead to improvement in instruction and student achievement.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">My new thought</span>:&nbsp; This is the high-yield strategy that can really make a difference at our school, and through the Professional Learning Community Model of providing time for teachers to collaborate and reflect on teaching practices, we have seen a marked increase in the success of our students.</p>