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Psychology and education: two takes on individual differences
This post is an excerpt from my book "Ready to Learn: A crash course in child development, and how children experience school." Objectives: A. Learn how plasticity supports different kinds of learning in humans. B. Learn how plasticity and experience work together to generate individual differences in young learners. William James coined the word “plasticity” to describe how an organism’s “nervous tissues” are impressed by repeated experience during the formation of habits (J

Dylan Smith
Jan 209 min read
The origins of universal design and UDL
This brief post is an excerpt from "Universal design supports access, autonomy, and self-regulation," a section of my book "Ready to Learn: A crash course in child development, and how children experience school." Embedding need-satisfying provisions to create a barrier-free environment for diverse users is known as universal design . The term was coined by American Ronald Lawrence Mace. In 1950, at the age of nine, Mace was diagnosed with polio and, by all accounts, experien

Dylan Smith
Jan 43 min read
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