✎Education & Learning

Four levels of reading, and a method for analytical reading that treats a difficult book as a conversation to be earned.

Retrieval, spacing and interleaving beat rereading and highlighting, which feel effective precisely because they are easy.

A history of autism as a story of how a diagnosis was constructed, and of the cost of treating difference as deficit.

Follows exchange students into high-performing school systems, and finds the difference is rigour and teacher selection rather than spending.

A note system built on atomic, linked notes turns reading into an accumulating body of thought rather than storage.

Children should program the computer rather than be programmed by it — the argument behind every constructionist tool since.

Design a course backwards from the evidence of understanding you will accept, because starting from activities produces coverage without learning.

Assessment is only useful if it changes what happens next; feedback that arrives after the decision is a grade, not teaching.

Education is not preparation for life but life itself; a democracy needs schools that practise it rather than describe it.

Names the modern university a 'multiversity' — several institutions with incompatible purposes sharing a name and a budget.

A meta-analysis of 254 studies quantifying how retention improves as practice is spaced further apart.