Announcing Vicki Adele Pascoe and Kylie Radel of Central Queensland University, Queensland, Australia as winners of the 2008 International Journal of Learning Award for Excellence, for their paper “What are Nice Guys Like them doing in a Place Like that?”: Education Journeys from Australian Indigenous Students in Custody.
Indigenous Australians have been the subject of long-term disadvantage and discrimination. They are “nearly 16 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous people” (Council of Social Service of New South Wales, 2006, p. 1). Just over one third of Indigenous prisoners have completed primary education as compared to just 16% of non-Indigenous prisoners (Rawnsley, 2003, p. 19). The majority of Indigenous people in custody have little opportunity to intervene in the offending cycle because they lack the education tools. Since 2000 our university has offered a Tertiary Entry Program (TEP) specifically designed for Australian Indigenous people who wish to gain the necessary skills for successful university study. More …
Kris Gutiérrez
Kris Gutiérrez is a Professor of Social Research Methodology at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. Professor Gutierrez was the 2005 recipient of the AERA Division C Sylvia Scribner Award and is a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences 2006-07. She was also the Noted Scholar in Residence, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, July 23-August 10, 2006. She has a Ph.D., in English/Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Colorado at Boulder. More …
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Toward the end of the 19th century, the German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus concocted an experiment that countless children have unwittingly replicated ever since, over a morning bowl of Alpha-Bits. Ebbinghaus took consonants from the alphabet, slapped a random vowel between them, and, voila! some 2,300 nonsense syllables were born. For years, Ebbinghaus practiced these syllables at random, learning and re-learning until he had mastered the material. In 1885, he recorded his observations in Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology — a seminal work that countless psychologists have wittingly read ever since, over morning bowls of cereal or otherwise.
Near the end of his monograph, Ebbinghaus mentioned a “noteworthy” detail from his learning trials. He found that a particular 12-syllable series could be conquered in two ways: by cramming 68 repetitions into a single day before testing, or by spacing 38 repetitions across several days. The difference, he wrote, was significant. “It makes the assumption probable that with any considerable number of repetitions a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time.”1
Ebbinghaus’s tests had a sample size of one: himself. But time and again, using far more rigorous empirical settings, psychologists confirmed the potency of this “spacing effect.” The method would seem to lend itself to immediate real-world application; what teacher or student would not want to enhance learning while limiting study-time?
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