Horacio Alvarez-Marinelli

@greg_ashman @rastokke In 2002-04 I was so tired of trying to argue without educationalists who always answered “that’s not what we defend” that I wrote a book quoting them profusely and criticising the ideas. It was published in 2006 and was on the top-10 sales list. Nonsenses need to be registered

What's new in learning science: Retrieval practice under scrutiny, feedback's missing mechanism, AI that actually teaches, and the quiet erosion of cognitive effort. Link in reply ⤵️

The argument that inquiry learning "when implemented with appropriate supports, can be beneficial" is supported by Alfieri et al. (2011); the paper the authors use against the Science Of Maths, but they fail to note that the same paper found that unassisted discovery learning was consistently inferior to explicit instruction, and that even enhanced discovery only approached equivalence when it incorporated feedback, worked examples, and scaffolding: elements that look, from a cognitive science perspective, rather like... explicit instruction.

This is a must-listen about Mississippi's turnaround on national test scores. Interesting to hear about the accountability measures. podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the…

“@KristenDiCerbo, @khanacademy’s chief learning officer, said AI can only respond to students based on what they ask. And it turns out, she said, ‘Students aren’t great at asking questions well.’”

Decoding gets kids into the text. Knowledge helps them make sense of it. Both matter. #KnowledgeMatters educationnext.org/cost-of-over-t…

Un dictado diario y una hora de lectura. Así funciona uno de los institutos más demandados de Castilla y León.
El refuerzo lingüístico y el hábito lector explican parte del éxito de la región en los resultados educativos. Más lectura, más vocabulario y mejor comprensión: claves para mejorar el rendimiento académico. A veces la innovación educativa es volver a lo básico: leer y escribir mejor cada día amp.elmundo.es/elecciones/ele…

This is one of the best ways schools can support a student’s mental health: TEACH THEM WELL. Competence, and the confidence it brings, is addictive, reassuring, and the foundation of a secure sense of wellbeing. ‘I can do this. I understand things’ is a profoundly human way to flourish.

Excellent piece by @LianaLoewus. Highly recommend for teachers and everyone interested in the science of reading. educationnext.org/cost-of-over-t…

Like an appreciation of progress, reading and literacy are among the things that are good but cognitively unnatural. That is, they go against our evolved nature. We didn’t evolve with print; it was a recent invention. Reading, for many of us, has become so second nature that we just assume it’s the most natural way of getting information. But what we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, when video has become so cheap because of the cloud computing revolution and the broadband revolution, is that a lot of people, unlike us, much prefer to listen and watch than to read. You just see this: when I go to Google and ask a basic question about how to unstick my printer or solve a problem, I get like five videos. And I just want a paragraph that would solve it. I don’t want to see Seth saying, “Hi, welcome to my show. If you like it, subscribe and give it a like.” So just help me solve the problem. But clearly there’s something unusual about me, because people are going for the video. And the massive availability of video—of TikTok, of YouTube—means that people may not be getting the practice or putting in the effort into literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect and of cognitive sophistication in general. @HumanProgress

Researchers in Australia assigned > 1,000 young teenagers to: either a typical middle-school health class or one that taught a version of a mental-health treatment called dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. The ones with the therapy got worse. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

When students are anxious/depressed, one method of remediation might be TEACHING THEM TO DO SCHOOL BETTER. Just got this message from a mental health professional.

For more than a decade, a seventh-grade math teacher used technology in his classroom. This year, he took the Chromebooks away—and quickly learned how the computers were holding his students back, Jenny Anderson writes. theatln.tc/IVzRfsv5 🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Los niños con un vocabulario rico llegan a la escuela con una ventaja cognitiva oculta Han oído palabras como «ridículo», «extraordinario» e «investigación» en la mesa, en cuentos para dormir, en conversaciones ajenas de adultos elocuentes 1/2

2/3 The truth about Finland's education "Success" youtube.com/shorts/iYfLaQa…

I have written a free guide on responsive teaching for @UNESCO available here: unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0…

Spelling matters.

Do Students Today Have Reduced Attention Spans? In this American Educator article, I argue they don't. (This piece is mostly a reprint of the one I published last year in Education Next.) aft.org/ae/spring2026/…

If students struggle with fraction arithmetic, algebra is inaccessible. If they struggle with basic number operations (including times tables), fractions are inaccessible. Math is hierarchical & gaps compound. There's no way around it. We have to get math right in primary.