Deep Mastery

Like almost everyone else in Maths education, I have recently decided to broach the ‘mastery’ word.  It does feel a bit odd to do so, given that it’s been around at least since at least the 60’s, and I’ve never felt a need to use it before – despite having been an advocate of the […]

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Red lines and “complex moral duality”: TOK and ethics of witnessing

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“Civilians Attacked by Chemical Weapons!” Few headlines spark as much outrage. If a TOK class engages students in the questions of knowledge connected with this kind of horrendous event, it can help them feel the importance of the intellectual tools that the course provides for probing into – and reacting to – such events. A reflective piece in the current edition […]

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Reliability in psychological science: methodology in crisis?

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“Scientific truth is a moving target,” wrote the editors of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) a decade ago. “But is it inevitable, as John Ioannidis argues …that the majority of findings are actually false?” In the decade since the editors posed this question, the psychological sciences have been shaken by further challenges to their credibility, including some widely reported controversies. It was August of this […]

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Mathematics and Scientific Methodology: example Malaria

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(Originally posted on Activating TOK)  The statistics are horrifying.  Every minute, a child dies from malaria. In 2013, 90% of the world’s malaria deaths occurred in Africa and over 430,000 African children died before their fifth birthdays. And there are plenty more statistics  where these came from : In 2013, there were about 198 million malaria cases (with an uncertainty […]

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