What can teachers learn about ‘remembering’ and ‘thinking’ from Bjork, Kahneman and Tversky?
What can teachers learn about ‘remembering’ and ‘thinking’ from Bjork, Kahneman and Tversky?
Memory is obviously essential for learning. Some educational researchers even define learning as ‘building long-term memory’. However, as a lifelong learner, as an experienced teacher and as a budding researcher on the topic of memory and education, I learned that filling up our memory is only part of the story. For example, how do we retrieve information from our long term memory when we need it? In this talk, I will present what I learned about this topic from the researchers Bjork and Bjork. I will connect this to other knowledge about learning mathematics and physics, which I accumulated in the past 18 years working in teacher education, reading about mathematical pedagogy, and supervising master students and PhD students in mathematics education. I will also speculate on the educational relevance of work by Kahneman and Tversky on different modes of thinking, for which they won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics.
Bio:Jeroen Spandaw finished his PhD in algebraic geometry in 1992. After a long period as a postdoc in Germany, he decided to obtain his teaching certificates for mathematics and physics, and he taught mathematics and a little science at high school until 2007. Since then, he has been working in (mathematics) teacher training at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. His research interests in education center around (1) mathematical modelling and (2) getting students to think deeply about mathematics, usually using peer discussions as a means. He is involved in the supervision of 5 PhD’s: 2 about peer discussions, 2 about spatial ability, and 1 about mathematical modelling. He is a member of an innovation and research team about “Retention and Progression in Engineering Education” at Delft University. Apart from education, he is also interested in mathematics, physics, languages, music, history, and sailing.
January, 31st, 2025, Friday, 1.15 P.M., MSTeams