The Learning Success Blog

It is fairly well understood that a good night’s sleep helps us learn better.

Now scientists have discovered people who take short breaks while learning a new skill make more gains than after a night's sleep.

In a Study at the USA National Institutes of Health 33 right-handed volunteers were shown a five-digit code "41234" on a screen and asked to type it out with their left hands as many times as possible for 10 seconds and then take a 10 second break. Subjects were asked to repeat this cycle of alternating practice and rest sessions a total of 35 times.

Australian kids are more than halfway through the school term, and it's likely that most of them are already tired and stressed over homework and revising for exams. According to a recent survey, over 30 percent of students said that their homework workload is their biggest source of stress, while more than 25 percent said that tests like NAPLAN are causing them anxiety in school.

Being worried over grades and performance can cause a child to lose interest in their school work. This is why parents should take active steps to ensure that their kids stay engaged during the school year, and have a love for learning that goes beyond the classroom.

Here are some simple yet effective ways to keep kids interested in learning.

Our world is in constant flux. Rapid digitisation, partly due to the global pandemic, has made information, work, education, services and products more accessible online. And since teenagers spend more time online compared to other demographics, it is no surprise that this added accessibility impacts their financial behaviour the most as well.

While online shopping may discourage frugality at times, internet use may also increase financial literacy as well. According to recent statistics, 61% of teenagers have already started actively saving their money in a bank account. Meanwhile, 64% had sought out financial advice already.

Why Should Teens Learn Financial Literacy?

Only a very small percentage of the worldwide student population attends a boarding school.

I spent the last four years of secondary school as a “boarding student” because my family lived in country Queensland, and there was no high school nearby.  

Living away from family, sleeping in the dormitory with 30 other kids, and eating what I and my fellow students deemed totally unsatisfactory food was, in retrospect, not too bad. Not too good either, especially in my senior year when the school started to feel a little like a detention centre.

I imagine the quality of the accommodation and food has improved in the decades since I was a boarding school student. At least I hope so!

Nowadays some city parents choose to send their son or daughter to board at a school in the same city because they can afford to do so. 

Would you send your child to a boarding school if you could? What do you know about boarding schools?

For some folk, these words: Speling, Spieling, Spelling, Spealing,  look so similar that it’s very confusing.

Which one is the correct one? 

Good spelling is vital because it allows the writer to focus on what they want to say. It frees up brain space for their ideas to flourish.

As children learn to spell, their knowledge of words improves, and this makes reading easier.

There is no denying that the Covid-19 global pandemic has disrupted just about every aspect of our lives, including our children’s education. By the end of March 2020, interruptions were experienced at schools in every state. Although the extent and timeline of the closures differed from one region to the next, the Australian education system as a whole was impacted greatly.

Even now, a year later, great uncertainty still remains, with lockdowns being enforced and lifted without much forewarning. Although Australia has managed to avoid much of the large-scale devastation the pandemic caused elsewhere in the world, the country’s education system remains vulnerable.

There are actually a number of ways in which the pandemic is changing education across the world. 

Speaking almost sixty six years ago Professor John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of AI said at the Dartmouth University conference 1956 , “Every aspect of learning... can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” 

Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist, said “Every aspect of our lives will be transformed by AI” and it could be “the biggest event in the history of our civilisation”.

Financial literacy is a skill that is vital for us all to learn, particularly considering the fact that many young adults seek their first loans soon after leaving school or when they are at university.

Recent research by the University of Western Australia has found, however, that around 45% of adults in Australia lack financial literacy. When it comes to investment, budgeting, and other financial matters, it is never too early.

To ensure children feel confident about making money and managing it well, teaching them vital skills in investment may be the first, crucial step towards financial literacy and expertise.

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• attention, 
• neurofeedback, 
• neuroscience and 
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You can access just the “nuggets of gold” on the above topics in 5 x 1 hour sessions delivered by 5 industry experts, each of whom is passionate about their subject.

People with autism may simultaneously have too much connectivity in some parts of their brain and poor connectivity in other parts, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, USA, published in Nature Neuroscience in January 2015.

The research compared brain scans from a group of people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and brain scans of a control group with normally developing brains.  The resting brains of the control group looked very similar to each other whereas the scans of the brains in the autistic group were all different. They showed unique patterns of connectivity, different patterns of excess or poor connectivity in each brain.