New Scientist - educational items

I've been reading the latest New Scientist and found a couple of articles relevant to education.  The first is a brief article about using Twitter to provide relatively simple continuous student-assessment of teaching quality on a course - an interesting idea I thought. 

The second article provides food-for-thought rather than directly applicable methods. It contrasts IQ, which is hard (impossible?) to alter, with "RQ", rational decision-making skills, which can be taught. There are a lot of people with a high IQ who have problems making good decisions!

"A high IQ is like height in a basketball player," says David Perkins, who studies thinking and reasoning skills at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It is very important, all other things being equal. But all other things aren't equal. There's a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and there's a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ."


What is interesting in an educational context is that working to improve students' RQ would help everyone, and perhaps even help make the world a better place. 
Everyone can read an introduction to the article, but only subscribers can read the whole article.


Happy reading!