I read the paper - thank you for the recommendation. What a refreshing read! I really appreciated your interpretation of what this looks like in education (because refreshing or not the original was a lot denser 😂 and I have a personal policy to skip over paragraphs involving Foucault). It can be scary to pin your colours to the mast and risk being wrong when it comes to educational decision making but without some kind of simplification I often find myself just doing nothing at all about the problem in front of me, which is clearly unacceptable.
Timely for me as I wade through numerous papers in an effort to glean wisdom for my dissertation. As tools such as Notebook LM become more prevalent nuance could indeed matters less. The way they suck information from academic papers doesn't really leave much room for said nuance. While this can be a blessing, it means I can cover lots more ground, I do worry that in working this way, I may miss something nuanced. :)
This book you’ve reviewed seems like frustration that the world, in particular the education world isn’t as simple and predictable as the laws of physics. Thus most of the findings propping up the wobbly ‘what works’ and ‘cognitive science revolution’ agendas are riddled with nuance that government agencies, schools and teachers gleefully ignore. Used as as blunt instruments, most of their potential improvement is negated. If only the human bias towards simplicity weren’t so strong ..
I read the paper - thank you for the recommendation. What a refreshing read! I really appreciated your interpretation of what this looks like in education (because refreshing or not the original was a lot denser 😂 and I have a personal policy to skip over paragraphs involving Foucault). It can be scary to pin your colours to the mast and risk being wrong when it comes to educational decision making but without some kind of simplification I often find myself just doing nothing at all about the problem in front of me, which is clearly unacceptable.
Timely for me as I wade through numerous papers in an effort to glean wisdom for my dissertation. As tools such as Notebook LM become more prevalent nuance could indeed matters less. The way they suck information from academic papers doesn't really leave much room for said nuance. While this can be a blessing, it means I can cover lots more ground, I do worry that in working this way, I may miss something nuanced. :)
Yeah you might but fuck it :)
This is challenging and helpful. Thank you.
What did you find challenging?
You brought up so many important points. I talk about the importance of pairing nuance with clarity in this article https://substack.com/home/post/p-160278309
That actually sums up AQA English Lang and Lit mark schemes and AQA in general
This book you’ve reviewed seems like frustration that the world, in particular the education world isn’t as simple and predictable as the laws of physics. Thus most of the findings propping up the wobbly ‘what works’ and ‘cognitive science revolution’ agendas are riddled with nuance that government agencies, schools and teachers gleefully ignore. Used as as blunt instruments, most of their potential improvement is negated. If only the human bias towards simplicity weren’t so strong ..
It's not a book. It's an academic paper. It's pretty short. You should read it :)