Psychology publications by Helen Abadzi
Gulf Education and Social Policy Review, 2020
This study, conducted in the United Arab Emirates, piloted a curriculum to increase early grade r... more This study, conducted in the United Arab Emirates, piloted a curriculum to increase early grade reading fluency. A curriculum with enhanced perceptual features, such as font size and spacing was used with grade one students in four schools to detect any significant difference in students' reading speed and reading accuracy after one year. Three hundred forty-five grade one students participated in the pilot-174 in the intervention group and 171 in the control group (ds= 0.33 0.47). At the end of the year, students in the intervention group read more letters and words correctly on average in one minute (p < .01) and in an entire text (p < .01 for letters; p < .001 for words) than those in the control group. These results suggest that curriculum with perceptual enhancement may be useful in facilitating early Arabic reading fluency. اﻟﻤﻠﺨﺺ
Comparative Education Review, 2020
(2019) tested the reading competencies of second graders attending Save the Children programs in ... more (2019) tested the reading competencies of second graders attending Save the Children programs in 11 countries. They used sixty-word passages and comprehension questions without time limits and analyzed data of students reading more than 10 words per minute. They found wide disparities in speed among those who showed high comprehension rates between-countries and within-country. They interpreted the findings as diminishing the role of speed in early-grade assessment and instruction. However, the study has major issues on three fronts: (a) use of English-language studies for transparent orthographies, (b) disregard of current neurocognitive research on memory functions, and (c) sample selectivity. These raise grave concerns regarding the internal and external validity of the conclusions. The authors' dedication is admirable, but their findings do not justify any policy recommendations. To the contrary, given the importance of speed for comprehension, their recommendations may have the perverse effect of disadvantaging the very students that Save the Children is supporting. Researchers and journals have the ethical obligation to publish studies that reflect contemporary reading research.
Comparative Education Review, 2020
Despite significant investments, lower-income countries face a learning crisis. A clamor has thus... more Despite significant investments, lower-income countries face a learning crisis. A clamor has thus arisen worldwide for greater accountability of those involved in service delivery. To obtain new insights, the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report was dedicated to accountability in 2017, and the research on this topic was reviewed. A summary is published herein. Accountability seems strongest in explicit hierarchies with direct principal-agent relations, as in an army, and when individual contributions are identified. It is enhanced when tasks are clearly defined, information is sufficient, and sanctions for violators are significant and credible. People may demonstrate better judgment if they are accountable for procedures, such as teachers using class time efficiently. By contrast, accountability for difficult outcomes, such as students’ actual memory consolidation, results in avoidance and efforts to limit one’s role. Conditions inherent in the education sector may compromise accountability. Government officials, who frequently change, are accountable to groups, whose staff and consultants also change. At the school level, parents rarely have principal-agent relations with staff, so the latter may feel little obligation to teach. In complex organizational settings, accountability could be enhanced by identifying individual contributions to a task, providing comparison standards, imposing significant and enforceable sanctions, and focusing on processes and decisions rather than strictly on outcomes. The
Sustainable Development Goals will be more easily fulfilled if governments and donors can mitigate the effects of this little-understood phenomenon.
Abadzi, H. 2020. Accountability features and their implications for education policies. Comparative Education Review, 64, 1, 66-86.
UNESCO - IBE: In-Process Reflections, 2019
There are about 750 million adult illiterates who in principle could learn fluent reading. Howev... more There are about 750 million adult illiterates who in principle could learn fluent reading. However, adult literacy programs have performed poorly. Various social and operational reasons may be responsible. This paper explores the role of some neurocognitive reasons in adult performance.
Automatic readers of a script detect letters and words effortlessly and involuntarily. Adults learning new scripts find it hard to attain this performance. Whether illiterate or educated, adults learning a new script detect letters slowly, may make mistakes, understand little, soon abandon the task, and may also forget what they learned.
When neoliterates glance at a text, they often see a jumble of letters and may process only a few of their features. They must activate reading consciously and sound out each letter. The difficulties are perceptual, and interviews suggest that perceptual distortions may continue for decades. This phenomenon called “neoliterate adult dyslexia” (NAD) has escaped attention, possibly because few educated adults need to learn new scripts, and because the adult literacy failures are often attributed to social reasons. The phenomenon also may have been missed because researchers of perceptual learning use simpler stimuli. Automaticity in reading musical notation and air traffic control may reflect similar age-related learning difficulties.
In the brain, the problem may originate at the early stages of the parietal cortex at the dorsal reading path, which constricts short-term visual memory. The visual areas V1 and perhaps V4 may also be involved. Deficits affect the ventral path that provides parallel processing and direct ‘print-to-meaning’ reading. Some neuronal groups may have a sensitive period that affects the capacity to collect frequency data and to integrate the appropriate features of letters and words. Then adults do not learn to perceive letter shapes and words as easily as most children do. A lack of data and research makes it difficult to design effective interventions.
The adults’ difficulties are not linguistic. Dysfluent readers simply cannot decipher the symbols in sufficient time to get to the meaning of texts, or they do so after considerable conscious visual effort. Therefore language competence seems to have little relationship to the visuospatial tasks described in this document. Language knowledge does help predict likely words when judgements must be made on the basis of just a few letter features, but the relative ease of linguistic identification may lead to reading errors.
The readers’ symptoms resonate with descriptions of severe and unremitting developmental dyslexia. Certain perceptual deficits may arise during adolescence and become more severe in adulthood. Some adults may become better readers than others. But learning a script at increasingly later ages seems related to worse outcomes, though no data exist to map this trajectory.
To explore this curious phenomenon, this review brings together a range of insights from of neurocognitive research, notably studies on (a) perceptual learning, including studies on feature integration and face recognition; (b) neurocognitive studies aimed at dyslexic children, (c) studies of adults suffering from brain damage that causes alexia, and (d) performance of adult literacy programs. Implications and potential remedies are also presented. The author posits the hypothesis that perhaps all people become dyslexics for new alphabets at about age 19, and that ability to read new alphabets fluently decreases with age.
Neoliterate adult dyslexia (NAD) may partly account for the difficulties of adult literacy programs. Thus it seems to impact about 750 million adult illiterates. For this reason, the paper calls for urgent research into this phenomenon.
The results from various international assessments suggest that Arab students are currently falli... more The results from various international assessments suggest that Arab students are currently falling behind students in other countries in terms of their academic performance, including their reading comprehension levels. Current research suggests that Arab students may be struggling due to visual and linguistic obstacles of reading the Arabic language, which include the difficulty of the script, diglossia, and the complexity of the grammar. In addition, some social factors, such as instructional time use and gender differences, also exacerbate the issue. This policy paper uses perspectives from cognitive science to offer policy recommendations linked to how improving Arabic reading in the early grades can potentially have a positive effect on students’ general achievement levels and their performance on international assessments.
In-Process Reflection Paper no. 28, UNESCO IBE, 2019
Governments and donors are faced with the challenge of attaining the 2030 Sustainable Development... more Governments and donors are faced with the challenge of attaining the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One of the challenges for education is to measure and set benchmarks that indicate whether people have developed sufficient core literacy and numeracy skills to function in the complex literate environments of the 21st century.
Benchmark setting has proved difficult in education because stakeholders find it hard to define which variables really matter and how they can be measured. Measurement of skills particularly in grades 1-3 is highly relevant for policy dialogue, because this is when many students fall behind. Donors use existing national, regional, and international assessments, for which longitudinal data are available. However, assessments require reading fluency and do not focus on the lowest literacy and numeracy levels, so they may overestimate or underestimate learners’ skills in grades 1-3.
Governments need specific feedback as soon as possible of likely student performance by 2030 so that they can take measures to improve performance by then. This monograph aims to publicize options for measuring early literacy and numeracy skills, using neuroscientific insights. These may help develop interventions that could accelerate early learning, facilitate monitoring and promote policy interventions to accelerate the achievement of the SDG 4.1 goals in various countries by 2030. The research evidence presented indicates that:
• Performance benchmarks can be set using reading and math fluency research;
• The performance of lower grades worldwide could be monitored through brief tests, measuring concepts that have high predictive validity, derived from cognitive science;
• If these test results were linked to international and national assessments, statistical models could be developing to estimate roughly how populations of various countries are likely to score in 2030;
• Clear feedback, along with recommendations for appropriate interventions, would allow countries and donors to engage in targeted policy dialogue to close the gap;
• Improved performance in grade 1 would improve performance in subsequent grades;
• With sufficient emphasis, funding, and space logistics, illiteracy among low-income students could be eliminated in about 7 years and near-universal and sustainable literacy could be attained by 2030.
Les programmes de lecture pour les populations à faible revenu donnent souvent des résultats déce... more Les programmes de lecture pour les populations à faible revenu donnent souvent des résultats décevants. Les échecs peuvent être dus en partie à une négligence de l'apprentissage perceptif et de la pratique. La lecture résulte d'une fonction d'apprentissage perceptif. Les stimuli visuels sont le mieux appris symbole par symbole, avec des analogies de motifs et beaucoup de pratique pour combiner des petits composants et accélérer l'identification. La condition préalable pour comprendre des grands textes est le traitement parallèle des lettres. Cela se produit lorsque la fonction de décodage lettre par lettre passe à l'aire visuelle de reconnaissance des mots du cerveau, qui reconnaît les mots comme s'il s'agissait de visages. Les gens peuvent alors distinguer plusieurs lettres en même temps, traiter rapidement les textes et les insérer rapidement dans leur mémoire de travail. S'ils connaissent la langue, ils peuvent alors comprendre. L'accent doit donc être mis sur la compréhension de la lecture et l'écriture après la fluence lorsque le temps d'enseignement est limité. Tous les humains apprennent à lire de la même manière. De telles méthodes devraient donc fonctionner pour toutes les écritures, y compris le chinois. Pour enseigner aux pauvres, les gouvernements et les donateurs devraient promouvoir l'enseignement des lettres individuelles et la pratique indépendante des élèves avec rétroaction de l'enseignant. Des manuels aux textes assez longs et bien espacés sont nécessaires, mais les images sont inutiles. Pour atteindre les Objectifs de développement durable à l'horizon 2030, les gouvernements doivent exiger des études scientifiques liant les résultats aux fonctions de la mémoire. Contexte : un dilemme inexplicable 1
Reading programs for low-income populations often give disappointing results. Failures may be par... more Reading programs for low-income populations often give disappointing results. Failures may be partly due to a neglect of perceptual learning and practice. Reading originates as a perceptual learning function. Visual stimuli are best learned symbol by symbol, with pattern analogies and much practice to unite smaller components and speed up identification. The prerequisite for comprehending volumes of text is parallel-processing of letters. This happens when the letter-by-letter decoding function moves to the visual word form area of the brain, that recognizes words as if they were faces. Then people can see multiple letters at the same time, process texts fast, and insert them into rapidly their working memory. If they know the language, they can then understand. Therefore, reading comprehension and writing should be emphasized after fluency when teaching time is limited. All humans learn to read the same way, therefore such methods would work for all scripts, including Chinese. To teach the poor, governments and donors should promote instruction of individual letters and independent student practice with teacher feedback. Fairly lengthy and well-spaced textbooks are needed, but pictures are unnecessary. To attain the Sustainable Development Goals of 2030, governments should demand scientific studies that link outcomes to memory functions.
Sheikh Saud Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research; Ras al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates; Policy Paper No. 20, Sep 2017
Overall, Arab countries score lower in international assessments than non-Arab countries. The gap... more Overall, Arab countries score lower in international assessments than non-Arab countries. The gap may be partly due to the visual complexities of Arabic script patterns and a limited command of standard Arabic grammar. Cognitive research suggests that students must process content instantly in order to retain it in working memory and make sense of it. Modern teaching methods may offer little reading practice or study
of grammatical patterns, so students may read slowly, understand little, and process shorter texts than those administered in international assessments. Thus students’ working memory may be unable to contain
messages long enough to make sense of them and respond correctly.
To overcome the challenges of visual and grammatical complexity, students studying in Arabic must become fluent and effortless readers by the end of Grade 1, if possible. They should also learn orally and systematically the standard Arabic grammatical patterns needed to
comprehend text instantly and precisely.
Instructional time must be used to practice
these skills and attain automaticity in
reading and language comprehension. Pilots
have showed sizable effect performance
improvement in Grade 1. Interventions that
focus on perceptual learning and working
memory issues may help Arab countries
perform at par with others.
UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report 2017/18, background paper. http://gem-report-2017.unesco.org/en/home/, 2017
Learning outcomes, particularly in low-income countries and populations are unexpectedly low. A ... more Learning outcomes, particularly in low-income countries and populations are unexpectedly low. A clamor has thus arisen world-wide for greater accountability of those involved at various levels. But who are these? Who should do what, whom to blame, on whom should the consequences be laid? Who will administer the consequences? To whom is that person or organization accountable?
Psychological research in the social, evolutionary, marketing, and cognitive fields has much explanatory power for the failures. Most easily accountable would be held people who are in explicit hierarchies, direct principal-agent relations, accountable for procedures rather than outcomes, who trust their superiors, and whose contributions are clearly identified. Important are also clearly defined tasks, an effortless flow of manageable information, optimal contract duration, and credible sanctions.
However, education involves multiple people and orgainzations in shared accountability relations. At national and international levels, it involves multiple, nested structures, often in loose networks. Group memberships may frequently change as staff rotate, so the opportunities for repeated collaboration may be limited. And since staff often know little about educating students, the likelihood of conformity may be significant. The principal-agent links may be weak, non-existent, or hidden. Identifying individual contributions may be hard, given the political imperative of optimizing collaboration. Sanctions may therefore not be enforceable. Managers may have conflicting feelings about various components, and their staff may thus be spurred to inactivity. The accountability function may be drowned in multilevel social loafing.
Given these well-attested human trends, the outlook of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations by 2030 is rather poor.
This is a background paper of the Global Education Monitoring Report. See the report and its other background papers at
http://gem-report-2017.unesco.org/en/home/
Reading programs for low-income populations often give disappointing results. Failures may be par... more Reading programs for low-income populations often give disappointing results. Failures may be partly due to a neglect of practice in decoding letters. Visual stimuli are best learned symbol by symbol, with pattern analogies and much practice to unite smaller components and speed up identification. The prerequisite for comprehending volumes of text is parallel-processing of letters. This happens when the letter-by-letter decoding function moves to the visual word form area of the brain, which recognizes words as if they were faces. Strangely, people may become fluent readers in transparent orthographies without knowing the relevant language. To teach the poor, governments and donors should promote instruction of individual letters and independent student practice with teacher feedback; then, students may achieve parallel processing. Teachers would emphasize comprehension and writing after the attainment of fluency. This methodology requires a rather lengthy textbook for every student, but it simplifies classroom activities and teacher training. To attain the Sustainable Development Goals of 2030, teachers must base instruction on specific scientific studies rather than ''best practices''.
Technological achievements require complex skills for the workplace, along with creativity, commu... more Technological achievements require complex skills for the workplace, along with creativity, communication, and critical thinking. To compete effectively in the global economy, governments must provide their citizens with relevant education and training. To help close the skills gap, international agencies often advise governments of developing countries to de-emphasise basic knowledge and focus instead on complex cognition and systemic improvements. However, the donors’ advice may be due to memory biases of highly educated people. Such training strategies would fail most students, because complex skills are built by combining and automatising shorter chains of thoughts or behaviours. An effective training process requires much practice, feedback and rearrangement of subcomponents over time. Execution of various tasks must become automatic and effortless to avoid using up too much of the very limited capacity of what is termed the “working memory”. Marketable skills are those skills which are fluently performed without excessive cognitive load. To provide complex skills for all, including non-cognitive skills, curricula should therefore first ensure detailed instruction and practice of basic components which can then be strung together and applied to new tasks. Policy advisers seem unaware of these scientific insights, so they are not taken into account. The article reviews the essential neurocognitive functions involved in the acquisition and execution of skills chains. The author concludes that to improve the skills of economically disadvantaged populations, donors and governments must acquire expertise and offer advice on the basis of cognitive science
Technological achievements and the globalization of labor require complex skills for the workplac... more Technological achievements and the globalization of labor require complex skills for the workplace. Companies reportedly demand employees ready to “plug and play”, who are also creative, communicative, and collaborative. Accordingly, international agencies often advise lower-income governments to de-emphasize “traditional” book learning and use innovative pedagogies to teach the needed skills explicitly. However, memory research suggests that this is impossible. Complex skills are formed only after shorter chains of component skills are automatized through practice and rearrangement. Implicit memory, which creates automatized skills, is mainly unconscious; declarative memory, which is involved in complex cognition is conscious and is recalled more vividly. Expectations of quick improvements, therefore, may be due to memory biases in favor of declarative memory, particularly biases of highly educated people. As a result, governments are advised to invest in methods appropriate for students who already know a lot. Governments should first ensure the automatization of basic skills and should encourage apprenticeships and other modes of practicing procedures. To close the skills gap, donor agencies must first close their own knowledge gap about memory functions and develop policy informed by cognitive science.
The countries that formally use the Arabic language and script for instruction range from the poo... more The countries that formally use the Arabic language and script for instruction range from the poorest to the wealthiest. But all experience a puzzling problem, that is low student performance in national and international tests. In fact, all Arabic-speaking countries score at the bottom of the relevant distributions in reading, math, and science in grade 4. The research suggests that the inordinate difficulties of Arab students are due to interactions between visual as well as linguistic obstacles. As a result of various factors, even experienced readers take about three times longer to identify letters in Arabic than in the Roman script. A great deal has been written on the above issues, but remedies have been in short supply. Use of cognitive science, however, opens unexplored possibilities. In principle it may be possible to speed up Arab students’ reading speed and comprehension, so that it can approximate that of students of other languages who have lower visual and linguistic challenges before they can read.
Creativity has been the driving engine of human evolution. The ability of the homo sapiens brain ... more Creativity has been the driving engine of human evolution. The ability of the homo sapiens brain to find unusual solutions to various problems has carried humanity from stone tools to quantum computers. Natural selection and competition for resources have refined over the millennia the expression of this trait in genetic and cultural terms.
In the 21st century there is a surprisingly high demand for
creative thinkers. Thousands of studies have been conducted, countless books and articles have been written. Scores of training programs have been implemented. Research started in the United States in the 1950s, but it is now also undertaken in countries such as China, India, and Brazil.
Which popular beliefs about creativity are valid? The research reveals intriguing mechanisms and mysterious linkages. Multiple strands of research are woven in this document, and they reveal the state of knowledge in mid-2014; they also offer some hints on how to benefit from it in your life and work.
Helen Abadzi, a senior education specialist at the World Bank and the Global Partnership for Educ... more Helen Abadzi, a senior education specialist at the World Bank and the Global Partnership for Education (c/o World Bank; 1987-2013) , prepared a set of e-courses for the training donor and government staff.
The Reading Essentials course is available for free. To make access rapid and open, it has been uploaded to udemy.com.
Reading Essentials offers evidence and practice on the variables critical in reading, as shown by neurocognitive research in 2014. It covers all aspects of reading, including teacher training, measurement, adult education, and strategy. The url is: https://www.udemy.com/reading-essentials/
The evidence suggests that that poorer students fail to read largely due to "low-level" variables that can be easily remedied once they are understood. One problem is complex methods derived from English and from high-income countries. Literacy in consistently spelled languages is attainable quickly through methods that are relatively inexpensive and parsimonious.
Unpublished working paper, Mar 2014
The UN and partner agencies have made brave efforts to define learning targets for post-2015 that... more The UN and partner agencies have made brave efforts to define learning targets for post-2015 that may be flexible and adapted by interested countries. The targets are too vague to guide countries, and their potential fulfillment would also come too late in the lives of students. However, use of little-understood memory functions, such as automaticity, helps specify reading and potentially math targets. If students are to develop 21st century skills and critical thinking, they must learn to read and calculate rapidly in grades 1-2.
Countries? The Challenges and Hopes of Cognitive Neuroscience. Peabody Journal of Education, Volume 89, Issue 1 pp. 58-69 10.1080/0161956X.2014.862472
The international Education for All initiative to bring about universal primary education has res... more The international Education for All initiative to bring about universal primary education has resulted in large enrollment increases in lower income countries but with limited outcomes. Due to scarcity in material and human resources, all but the better off often fail to learn basic skills. To improve performance within the very limited capacities of low-income educational systems, instructional interventions ought to be designed according to the ways people retain and recall information most efficiently. Without this research-based line of reasoning, donor and government staff may overestimate students’ ability to learn from complex methods and scant practice. Applicable concepts include perceptual learning for scripts, automaticity for basic skills, the limitations of working memory, and formation of cognitive networks in long-term memory. However, education faculties rarely teach these topics. A systematic effort is necessary to popularize cognitive science concepts pertinent to basic skills for staff working in the education sector of lower income countries. Therefore, better understanding and application of learning research is urgently needed if universal primary education is to succeed.
British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science, 3(4), 2013
Donor funding has helped enroll in school most children of low-income countries. However, student... more Donor funding has helped enroll in school most children of low-income countries. However, students get little schooling and few opportunities to encode and consolidate information. Many fail to automatize the small units needed for more complex skills, such as reading. As a result, many children remain illiterate and drop out in the early primary grades. Unfortunately, donors and governments often have limited insights about teaching students who have not seen a book before grade 1. Moreover, staff accustomed to middle class schools may expect rapid progress and promote complex activities that little-educated teachers cannot sustain. Thus expectations about the performance of the very poor are often unrealistic, and outcomes result in disappointment. Insights about essential memory functions can explicate performance gaps and lead to more efficient teaching. However, few academics have sufficient knowledge to offer. In high-income countries these topics add little value, so psychology departments teach them summarily, while education faculties typically do not teach them at all. To get results from the billions invested in international education, intellectual leadership is urgently needed in relevant memory functions and their implications. Targeted training also is needed in colleges of education and for personnel involved the education of the very poor.
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Psychology publications by Helen Abadzi
Sustainable Development Goals will be more easily fulfilled if governments and donors can mitigate the effects of this little-understood phenomenon.
Abadzi, H. 2020. Accountability features and their implications for education policies. Comparative Education Review, 64, 1, 66-86.
Automatic readers of a script detect letters and words effortlessly and involuntarily. Adults learning new scripts find it hard to attain this performance. Whether illiterate or educated, adults learning a new script detect letters slowly, may make mistakes, understand little, soon abandon the task, and may also forget what they learned.
When neoliterates glance at a text, they often see a jumble of letters and may process only a few of their features. They must activate reading consciously and sound out each letter. The difficulties are perceptual, and interviews suggest that perceptual distortions may continue for decades. This phenomenon called “neoliterate adult dyslexia” (NAD) has escaped attention, possibly because few educated adults need to learn new scripts, and because the adult literacy failures are often attributed to social reasons. The phenomenon also may have been missed because researchers of perceptual learning use simpler stimuli. Automaticity in reading musical notation and air traffic control may reflect similar age-related learning difficulties.
In the brain, the problem may originate at the early stages of the parietal cortex at the dorsal reading path, which constricts short-term visual memory. The visual areas V1 and perhaps V4 may also be involved. Deficits affect the ventral path that provides parallel processing and direct ‘print-to-meaning’ reading. Some neuronal groups may have a sensitive period that affects the capacity to collect frequency data and to integrate the appropriate features of letters and words. Then adults do not learn to perceive letter shapes and words as easily as most children do. A lack of data and research makes it difficult to design effective interventions.
The adults’ difficulties are not linguistic. Dysfluent readers simply cannot decipher the symbols in sufficient time to get to the meaning of texts, or they do so after considerable conscious visual effort. Therefore language competence seems to have little relationship to the visuospatial tasks described in this document. Language knowledge does help predict likely words when judgements must be made on the basis of just a few letter features, but the relative ease of linguistic identification may lead to reading errors.
The readers’ symptoms resonate with descriptions of severe and unremitting developmental dyslexia. Certain perceptual deficits may arise during adolescence and become more severe in adulthood. Some adults may become better readers than others. But learning a script at increasingly later ages seems related to worse outcomes, though no data exist to map this trajectory.
To explore this curious phenomenon, this review brings together a range of insights from of neurocognitive research, notably studies on (a) perceptual learning, including studies on feature integration and face recognition; (b) neurocognitive studies aimed at dyslexic children, (c) studies of adults suffering from brain damage that causes alexia, and (d) performance of adult literacy programs. Implications and potential remedies are also presented. The author posits the hypothesis that perhaps all people become dyslexics for new alphabets at about age 19, and that ability to read new alphabets fluently decreases with age.
Neoliterate adult dyslexia (NAD) may partly account for the difficulties of adult literacy programs. Thus it seems to impact about 750 million adult illiterates. For this reason, the paper calls for urgent research into this phenomenon.
Benchmark setting has proved difficult in education because stakeholders find it hard to define which variables really matter and how they can be measured. Measurement of skills particularly in grades 1-3 is highly relevant for policy dialogue, because this is when many students fall behind. Donors use existing national, regional, and international assessments, for which longitudinal data are available. However, assessments require reading fluency and do not focus on the lowest literacy and numeracy levels, so they may overestimate or underestimate learners’ skills in grades 1-3.
Governments need specific feedback as soon as possible of likely student performance by 2030 so that they can take measures to improve performance by then. This monograph aims to publicize options for measuring early literacy and numeracy skills, using neuroscientific insights. These may help develop interventions that could accelerate early learning, facilitate monitoring and promote policy interventions to accelerate the achievement of the SDG 4.1 goals in various countries by 2030. The research evidence presented indicates that:
• Performance benchmarks can be set using reading and math fluency research;
• The performance of lower grades worldwide could be monitored through brief tests, measuring concepts that have high predictive validity, derived from cognitive science;
• If these test results were linked to international and national assessments, statistical models could be developing to estimate roughly how populations of various countries are likely to score in 2030;
• Clear feedback, along with recommendations for appropriate interventions, would allow countries and donors to engage in targeted policy dialogue to close the gap;
• Improved performance in grade 1 would improve performance in subsequent grades;
• With sufficient emphasis, funding, and space logistics, illiteracy among low-income students could be eliminated in about 7 years and near-universal and sustainable literacy could be attained by 2030.
of grammatical patterns, so students may read slowly, understand little, and process shorter texts than those administered in international assessments. Thus students’ working memory may be unable to contain
messages long enough to make sense of them and respond correctly.
To overcome the challenges of visual and grammatical complexity, students studying in Arabic must become fluent and effortless readers by the end of Grade 1, if possible. They should also learn orally and systematically the standard Arabic grammatical patterns needed to
comprehend text instantly and precisely.
Instructional time must be used to practice
these skills and attain automaticity in
reading and language comprehension. Pilots
have showed sizable effect performance
improvement in Grade 1. Interventions that
focus on perceptual learning and working
memory issues may help Arab countries
perform at par with others.
Psychological research in the social, evolutionary, marketing, and cognitive fields has much explanatory power for the failures. Most easily accountable would be held people who are in explicit hierarchies, direct principal-agent relations, accountable for procedures rather than outcomes, who trust their superiors, and whose contributions are clearly identified. Important are also clearly defined tasks, an effortless flow of manageable information, optimal contract duration, and credible sanctions.
However, education involves multiple people and orgainzations in shared accountability relations. At national and international levels, it involves multiple, nested structures, often in loose networks. Group memberships may frequently change as staff rotate, so the opportunities for repeated collaboration may be limited. And since staff often know little about educating students, the likelihood of conformity may be significant. The principal-agent links may be weak, non-existent, or hidden. Identifying individual contributions may be hard, given the political imperative of optimizing collaboration. Sanctions may therefore not be enforceable. Managers may have conflicting feelings about various components, and their staff may thus be spurred to inactivity. The accountability function may be drowned in multilevel social loafing.
Given these well-attested human trends, the outlook of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations by 2030 is rather poor.
This is a background paper of the Global Education Monitoring Report. See the report and its other background papers at
http://gem-report-2017.unesco.org/en/home/
In the 21st century there is a surprisingly high demand for
creative thinkers. Thousands of studies have been conducted, countless books and articles have been written. Scores of training programs have been implemented. Research started in the United States in the 1950s, but it is now also undertaken in countries such as China, India, and Brazil.
Which popular beliefs about creativity are valid? The research reveals intriguing mechanisms and mysterious linkages. Multiple strands of research are woven in this document, and they reveal the state of knowledge in mid-2014; they also offer some hints on how to benefit from it in your life and work.
The Reading Essentials course is available for free. To make access rapid and open, it has been uploaded to udemy.com.
Reading Essentials offers evidence and practice on the variables critical in reading, as shown by neurocognitive research in 2014. It covers all aspects of reading, including teacher training, measurement, adult education, and strategy. The url is: https://www.udemy.com/reading-essentials/
The evidence suggests that that poorer students fail to read largely due to "low-level" variables that can be easily remedied once they are understood. One problem is complex methods derived from English and from high-income countries. Literacy in consistently spelled languages is attainable quickly through methods that are relatively inexpensive and parsimonious.
Sustainable Development Goals will be more easily fulfilled if governments and donors can mitigate the effects of this little-understood phenomenon.
Abadzi, H. 2020. Accountability features and their implications for education policies. Comparative Education Review, 64, 1, 66-86.
Automatic readers of a script detect letters and words effortlessly and involuntarily. Adults learning new scripts find it hard to attain this performance. Whether illiterate or educated, adults learning a new script detect letters slowly, may make mistakes, understand little, soon abandon the task, and may also forget what they learned.
When neoliterates glance at a text, they often see a jumble of letters and may process only a few of their features. They must activate reading consciously and sound out each letter. The difficulties are perceptual, and interviews suggest that perceptual distortions may continue for decades. This phenomenon called “neoliterate adult dyslexia” (NAD) has escaped attention, possibly because few educated adults need to learn new scripts, and because the adult literacy failures are often attributed to social reasons. The phenomenon also may have been missed because researchers of perceptual learning use simpler stimuli. Automaticity in reading musical notation and air traffic control may reflect similar age-related learning difficulties.
In the brain, the problem may originate at the early stages of the parietal cortex at the dorsal reading path, which constricts short-term visual memory. The visual areas V1 and perhaps V4 may also be involved. Deficits affect the ventral path that provides parallel processing and direct ‘print-to-meaning’ reading. Some neuronal groups may have a sensitive period that affects the capacity to collect frequency data and to integrate the appropriate features of letters and words. Then adults do not learn to perceive letter shapes and words as easily as most children do. A lack of data and research makes it difficult to design effective interventions.
The adults’ difficulties are not linguistic. Dysfluent readers simply cannot decipher the symbols in sufficient time to get to the meaning of texts, or they do so after considerable conscious visual effort. Therefore language competence seems to have little relationship to the visuospatial tasks described in this document. Language knowledge does help predict likely words when judgements must be made on the basis of just a few letter features, but the relative ease of linguistic identification may lead to reading errors.
The readers’ symptoms resonate with descriptions of severe and unremitting developmental dyslexia. Certain perceptual deficits may arise during adolescence and become more severe in adulthood. Some adults may become better readers than others. But learning a script at increasingly later ages seems related to worse outcomes, though no data exist to map this trajectory.
To explore this curious phenomenon, this review brings together a range of insights from of neurocognitive research, notably studies on (a) perceptual learning, including studies on feature integration and face recognition; (b) neurocognitive studies aimed at dyslexic children, (c) studies of adults suffering from brain damage that causes alexia, and (d) performance of adult literacy programs. Implications and potential remedies are also presented. The author posits the hypothesis that perhaps all people become dyslexics for new alphabets at about age 19, and that ability to read new alphabets fluently decreases with age.
Neoliterate adult dyslexia (NAD) may partly account for the difficulties of adult literacy programs. Thus it seems to impact about 750 million adult illiterates. For this reason, the paper calls for urgent research into this phenomenon.
Benchmark setting has proved difficult in education because stakeholders find it hard to define which variables really matter and how they can be measured. Measurement of skills particularly in grades 1-3 is highly relevant for policy dialogue, because this is when many students fall behind. Donors use existing national, regional, and international assessments, for which longitudinal data are available. However, assessments require reading fluency and do not focus on the lowest literacy and numeracy levels, so they may overestimate or underestimate learners’ skills in grades 1-3.
Governments need specific feedback as soon as possible of likely student performance by 2030 so that they can take measures to improve performance by then. This monograph aims to publicize options for measuring early literacy and numeracy skills, using neuroscientific insights. These may help develop interventions that could accelerate early learning, facilitate monitoring and promote policy interventions to accelerate the achievement of the SDG 4.1 goals in various countries by 2030. The research evidence presented indicates that:
• Performance benchmarks can be set using reading and math fluency research;
• The performance of lower grades worldwide could be monitored through brief tests, measuring concepts that have high predictive validity, derived from cognitive science;
• If these test results were linked to international and national assessments, statistical models could be developing to estimate roughly how populations of various countries are likely to score in 2030;
• Clear feedback, along with recommendations for appropriate interventions, would allow countries and donors to engage in targeted policy dialogue to close the gap;
• Improved performance in grade 1 would improve performance in subsequent grades;
• With sufficient emphasis, funding, and space logistics, illiteracy among low-income students could be eliminated in about 7 years and near-universal and sustainable literacy could be attained by 2030.
of grammatical patterns, so students may read slowly, understand little, and process shorter texts than those administered in international assessments. Thus students’ working memory may be unable to contain
messages long enough to make sense of them and respond correctly.
To overcome the challenges of visual and grammatical complexity, students studying in Arabic must become fluent and effortless readers by the end of Grade 1, if possible. They should also learn orally and systematically the standard Arabic grammatical patterns needed to
comprehend text instantly and precisely.
Instructional time must be used to practice
these skills and attain automaticity in
reading and language comprehension. Pilots
have showed sizable effect performance
improvement in Grade 1. Interventions that
focus on perceptual learning and working
memory issues may help Arab countries
perform at par with others.
Psychological research in the social, evolutionary, marketing, and cognitive fields has much explanatory power for the failures. Most easily accountable would be held people who are in explicit hierarchies, direct principal-agent relations, accountable for procedures rather than outcomes, who trust their superiors, and whose contributions are clearly identified. Important are also clearly defined tasks, an effortless flow of manageable information, optimal contract duration, and credible sanctions.
However, education involves multiple people and orgainzations in shared accountability relations. At national and international levels, it involves multiple, nested structures, often in loose networks. Group memberships may frequently change as staff rotate, so the opportunities for repeated collaboration may be limited. And since staff often know little about educating students, the likelihood of conformity may be significant. The principal-agent links may be weak, non-existent, or hidden. Identifying individual contributions may be hard, given the political imperative of optimizing collaboration. Sanctions may therefore not be enforceable. Managers may have conflicting feelings about various components, and their staff may thus be spurred to inactivity. The accountability function may be drowned in multilevel social loafing.
Given these well-attested human trends, the outlook of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations by 2030 is rather poor.
This is a background paper of the Global Education Monitoring Report. See the report and its other background papers at
http://gem-report-2017.unesco.org/en/home/
In the 21st century there is a surprisingly high demand for
creative thinkers. Thousands of studies have been conducted, countless books and articles have been written. Scores of training programs have been implemented. Research started in the United States in the 1950s, but it is now also undertaken in countries such as China, India, and Brazil.
Which popular beliefs about creativity are valid? The research reveals intriguing mechanisms and mysterious linkages. Multiple strands of research are woven in this document, and they reveal the state of knowledge in mid-2014; they also offer some hints on how to benefit from it in your life and work.
The Reading Essentials course is available for free. To make access rapid and open, it has been uploaded to udemy.com.
Reading Essentials offers evidence and practice on the variables critical in reading, as shown by neurocognitive research in 2014. It covers all aspects of reading, including teacher training, measurement, adult education, and strategy. The url is: https://www.udemy.com/reading-essentials/
The evidence suggests that that poorer students fail to read largely due to "low-level" variables that can be easily remedied once they are understood. One problem is complex methods derived from English and from high-income countries. Literacy in consistently spelled languages is attainable quickly through methods that are relatively inexpensive and parsimonious.
Saadi Levi was a prominent printer and publisher in the 19th century of Thessaloniki, Greece. He wrote a book of memoirs that was lost for decades and published in 2012. In it Saadi describes many events, locations, and nationalities, which later disappeared through fires, the demolition of the city walls, and the political upheavals. The article summarizes issues of interest to the people who live and love Thessaloniki in the 21st century.
In 2015, author and journalist Radhika Yeddanapudi recast the book to facilitate comprehension by foreign readers and added new information. This is the pdf of the work. It is draft, but it is published in the academia website in order to aid cinema researchers.
An English rendition by Radhika Yedanpuddi has been uploaded.
This is the picture insert of the Greek "Indoprepon Apokalypsh' on the Hindi songs of the 1950s-60s in Greece.
Το πρωτότυπο είναι γαλλικό, και το μετέφρασε στα ισπανικά ο γιός του Ανδρέας Πολυμέρης. Εξεδόθη στο Santiago de Chile με το όνομα Memorias.Την ελληνική του μετάφραση επιμελήθηκε η Ελένη Αμπατζή, ανηψιά του Δ. Πολυμέρη. Το κείμενο δημοσιεύτηκε σε συνέχειες στο σερραϊκό περιοδικό Γιατί περίπου το 2009.
You and a colleague are looking at a large century-old country house that is up for sale. It’s listed for only £499,000. You instantly guesstimate likely mortgage payments for the next 20 years, and roughly compare them to your monthly salary. And repairs? Hmm, maybe that’s another £50,000. In less than a minute you realise that unless you get it for £300,000, you should pass it up. Your colleague has very different thoughts. The house exudes charm and prestige. It will cost something to fix up, but colors may be combined very creatively. Now what was the price again? Maybe the owner will accept £450,000…
See the rest of the blog at:
https://www.ukfiet.org/2017/sdgs-social-equity-and-the-contents-of-your-working-memory/
https://en.unesco.org/news/helen-abadzi-perils-childhood-illiteracy
The official UNESCO World Literacy Day is at:
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/prizes-and-celebrations/celebrations/international-days/literacy-day/
Las investigaciones de la memoria indican que las escuelas deben enseñar a los alumnos trozos de información pequeños y darles retroalimentación y oportunidades a practicar, hasta automatizar la información en una cadena y poder ejecutarla fluidamente. Esto es vigente para todas las asignaturas.
Sin embargo, los métodos que se enfocan a la composición de cadenas de destrezas y a la automatización a veces se consideran ‘tradicionales.’ Muchos ministerios de educación prefieren métodos globales y de descubrimiento que se consideran más modernas y humanistas. Desgraciadamente, estos métodos presuponen el dominio de pequeños trozos de información y perjudican a los estudiantes de familias marginadas. Esto incide a la repetición escolar y el abandono.
La psicología cognitiva y neurociencia investigan la memoria y dan ciertas pautas claras para la política educativa. Los métodos “tradicionales” que componen cadenas de información y actos son eficaces y deberían usarse. Otros, como el énfasis antiguo a la memorización, deben usarse principalmente en casos específicos. Contenido como las tablas de multiplicación se debe memorizar para aliviar la carga de la memoria de trabajo. Pero después es necesario vincular los conceptos a través de la ‘elaboración’, la contemplación del material para construir redes cognitivas bien intercaladas. El pensamiento crítico y la creatividad dependen de la existencia de información que se puede recuperar rápidamente para la toma de decisiones.
Se necesitan investigaciones adicionales para aumentar la eficiencia de la enseñanza. Una rama de estas abarca el proceso de la consolidación. Con experimentación en las escuelas se encontrarán maneras de disminuir el tiempo que necesitan los estudiantes actualmente y también sus maestros para automatizar las destrezas básicas y de recordarse más fácilmente la información.
El método más innovador para enseñar, entonces, es aplicar los hallazgos de la ciencia cognitiva. Para llegar a este propósito, es necesario revisar ciertos conceptos del constructivismo del siglo 20. El concepto básico de construcción del conocimiento todavía es vigente, pero las reglas de la construcción ahora se conocen más. Para servir los estudiantes marginados, esta filosofía tiene que actualizarse con la ciencia del siglo 21.
Los resultados del aprendizaje son limitados en los países de bajos ingresos, a pesar de la ayuda de los donantes destinada hacia la educación primaria universal. Las razones y los remedios a menudo no están claros. Sin embargo, se espera que los estudiantes aprendan, sin ayuda, en la casa, grandes cantidades de información a partir de conocimientos previos limitados, con pocas actividades de elaboración y sin el apoyo de libros de texto. La ciencia cognitiva señala razones del fracaso escolar y opciones de mejora poco conocidas y comprendidas. Los conceptos que aplican incluyen el aprendizaje perceptual de la escritura, la automaticidad de destrezas (o competencias) básicas, las limitaciones de memoria de trabajo y la formación de conexiones cognitivas en la memoria a largo plazo.
Estos conceptos están principalmente fundamentados en las investigaciones cognitivas hechas entre los años 1940-1980, y han dejado de usarse en la medida en que la forma de enseñar a estudiantes de grupos con mayores ingresos económicos se ha vuelto más sofisticada. Las escuelas raramente les enseñan. Sin embargo, el aplicar las investigaciones existentes ayudaría a ser más eficientes en la enseñanza y mejorar el desempeño de los estudiantes, aun con las limitadas capacidades de los sistemas educativos de países con bajos recursos. Investigaciones adicionales también son necesarias para clarificar las barreras de aprendizaje en las poblaciones de bajos recursos de los países pobres. Para lograr los objetivos es necesaria una cercana colaboración entre los neurocientíficos, los psicólogos cognitivos y los especialistas en educación con el fin de diseñar la enseñanza conforme a la manera en que las personas procesan la información.
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Learning outcomes are limited in low-income countries, despite donor aid towards universal primary education. The reasons and remedies are often unclear. However, students with little prior knowledge are often are expected to learn without home help big chunks of information with few elaboration activities and despite a widespread lack of textbooks. A cognitive science framework pinpoints to little-understood reasons for failure and to options for improvement. Applicable concepts include perceptual learning for scripts, automaticity for basic skills, the limitations of working memory, and formation of cognitive networks in long-term memory. These concepts are mainly derived from the cognitive research of the 1940s-1980s and have fallen into disuse as higher-income students have become more sophisticated. Colleges of education rarely teach them. However, applying the existing research findings would help create efficiencies and improve performance, even within the very limited capacities of low-income educational systems. Additional research is also needed to clarify learning barriers among low-income populations in poor countries. To achieve the goals, closer collaboration is needed between cognitive neuroscientists and education specialists in designing instruction according to the ways people process information.
Primer Encuentro Internacional de Educación: Materiales para el Currículo Basado en Competencias
El Salvador, 18-24 de agosto de 2015
Workshop Description:
Students studying in Arabic must progress at a pace comparable to other countries. Performance in international comparative tests, such as TIMSS, PIRLS, and PISA has improved over time, but accelerated progress is possible. To forge ahead, it is wise to heed the advice of memory research. There are some little known and sometimes counterintuitive variables to explore. What are the prerequisites that will make students effortlessly process information written in Arabic and make good decisions fast?
Participants will be challenged to push the frontiers of curricular possibility. They will examine test samples and even take a test in a strange language. They will consider some textbooks and think how learning functions can be optimized through them. They will similarly consider other overlooked variables that could enhance comprehension. The workshop may become a springboard for coordinated research on variables that will speed up information processing among young Arab students and improve performance in higher levels of education.
-Fluency in the prerequisite skills
-Remediation of gaps
-Efficient classroom time use
-Sustainable textbooks (of some sort)
-Teacher (instructor) training
-Supervision of teaching, incentives