The Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) will soon open a Web page where one can respond to it’s call for proposals for the spring 2011 conference. Launched in 2008, the conference series continues to offer direct access to studies of education practices that effectively change students’ outcomes. Not every session will focus on matters reflected in this blog, but many will.
The theme for the 2011 annual research conference, “Building an Education Science: Investigating Mechanisms,” focuses attention on the need to advance beyond primarily pragmatic education research in order to build an evidence-based science made up of explanatory theories of educational mechanisms. Symposium and paper presentations that address issues of process and mechanism within the context of rigorous experimental or quasi-experimental designs and that advance our understanding of the effectiveness of educational practices and policies, will offer the best fit for the 2011 conference. Topics of particular interest include studies that: (a) test hypotheses regarding the mechanisms through which educational practices and policies affect student outcomes or differentially impact individuals or groups, (b) investigate interactions among emotional, behavioral, cognitive and social processes and outcomes, or (c) develop new methods and research designs to enhance rigor in the evaluation of educational processes and mechanisms.
Link to the call for papers. Visit SREE. See the published materials from the 2010 conference.
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Left AND right brain
Teach Effectively pal Dan Willingham’s entry for this week at the Washington Post is about the myth of the left-brain-vs-right-brain dichotomy. He drives a very large convoy of vehicles through the gaping hole in the putative theory, a hole that was reopened by a report published by Arne Dietrich and Riam Kanso in a prestigious Psychological Bulletin article entitled “A Review of EEG, ERP, and Neuroimaging Studies of Creativity and Insight.”
Professors Dietrich and Kanso examined a shipload of studies that used multiple methods to examine the relationships between neurological functions and structures and creative thinking. What they found does not accord with the Pop-Ed views one is likely to hear in what passes as professional development sessions provided by at least some—if not many—schools and teacher education programs.
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