Comment by ricaurte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ricaurte | Hacker News Reader

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I whole-heartedly agree with the last phrase - "Schools don't teach the way children learn." It's amazing how much more learning happens outside of the classroom than in it, especially when you look at how much time you had to spend in the classroom to begin with. Hopefully some educators will take the practical advice in the article, and if the education leaders don't heed it, they might be watching some of this research.

With people exploring different ways to improve education, there are some interesting tidbits in an article published in Science last week that talked about how scientists are creating a new foundation for education by understanding learning's three principles, "learning is computational, social, and supported by brain circuits linking perception and action that connect people to one another."

One of the things they found - "Apparently babies need other people to learn. They take in more information by looking at another person face to face than by looking at that person on a big plasma TV screen."

The Press Release on ScienceDaily.com: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090716141134.ht...

The Science Daily article is extremely inaccurate. Not only are the studies they describe not new, they don't even summarize them correctly.

Care to elaborate? They didn't cite a bunch of studies in Science Daily (but I'd assume in the article published in Science they would), and the article is taken directly from the University of Washington's press release.

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=50883

First, research about the 'video deficit' isn't new, this science has been around for at least ten years, probably much longer.

Second, while there is evidence that eye contact is necessary for children under one to recognize phonemes, and that eye contact has an effect on extroversion and other elements of temperament, there is (AFAIK) no evidence that it has any affect on children's ability to acquire academic skills of the sort taught in school.

I believe that in language there is evidence that children that learn by having their teachers do sign-language as they speak teach them languages faster.

Furthermore academic skills is not really what the article seem to be after.

I was responding to the "schools don't teach the way students learn" quote. That implies this research has vast implications for school-age children, but there is no evidence to suggest this and really no reason at all to even casually believe it's true.

Thanks for the elaboration, and agreeing with ThomPete, this article isn't going after academic skills but how the brain learns in general.

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