politicalowl

School days, school days Dear old  Golden Rule  days Reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic Taught to the tune of the  hick’ry stick The argument among educationalists about the best way to teach children mathematics will be enlivened by a recent paper by American and South Korean scientists in the journal Nature Neuroscience.  Hippocampal-neocortical functional reorganization underlies children’s cognitive development   looks at the transition from procedure-based to memory-based problem-solving strategies. In their scientific language the researchers write that “longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 7–9-year-old children revealed that the transition from use of counting to memory-based retrieval parallels increased hippocampal and decreased prefrontal-parietal engagement during arithmetic problem solving.” This is being interpreted by some educators as showing the crucial role played by rote memorization in ...

Australian 15-year-old students are among the best performers in an OECD Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA)  survey of financial literacy . Among the 18 countries and economies that participated in the assessment, Australia ranks somewhere between 3 and 5. PISA 2012 defines financial literacy as “…knowledge and understanding of financial concepts and risks, and the skills, motivation and confidence to apply such knowledge and understanding in order to make effective decisions across a range of financial contexts, to improve the financial well-being of individuals and society, and to enable participation in economic life”. The PECD found that in Australia, financial literacy is strongly correlated with mathematics and reading performance. Around 79% of the financial literacy score reflects skills that can be measured in the mathematics and/or reading assessments (compared with 75%, on average, across OECD countries and economies), while 21% of the ...