Cathy N. Davidson

Strangers on a Train A chance encounter provides a lesson in complicity and the never-ending crisis in the humanities. By Cathy N. Davidson Early on in my first tenure-track job at Michigan State University, in the late 1970s, I happened to be riding the same train from Lansing, Michigan, to Chicago as the department chair…

Standardized tests for everyone? In the Internet age, that’s the wrong answer. By Cathy N. Davidson, Friday, September 23, 1:55 PM When Frederick J. Kelly invented the multiple-choice test in 1914, he was addressing a national crisis. The ranks of students attending secondary school had swollen from 200,000 in 1890 to more than 1.5 million as immigrants…

Peer-Driven Learning: I’m No Cathy Davidson I received an interesting set of questions in the comments on my last peer-learning post: I’ve read Cathy’s piece in the Chronicle of HE. I hate to be a bit of a wet blanket but having had some experience of designing, leading and being part of peer driven teaching…

‘How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn’ By Whitney Burke September 7, 2011 – 10:00am Reblogged from DML central Duke University’s Cathy Davidson has staked out a reputation as a creative intellectual force committed to remaking the industrial model of education. In 2010, President Obama nominated her…

Project Classroom: Transforming Our Schools for the Future By Rebecca J. Rosen Aug 29 2011, 10:58 AM ET In 2003 the iPod was a relatively new gadget for listening to music. Billboard ads showed young people dancing, iPods in hand. Few people would have pinpointed this newfangled Walkman as a powerful teaching tool. Cathy N.…

Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age By Cathy N. Davidson Five or six years ago, I attended a lecture on the science of attention. A philosopher who conducts research over in the medical school was talking about attention blindness, the basic feature of the human brain that, when we concentrate intensely on one task, causes…