This fall, hundreds of middle- and high-school students will... work with ... “affective pedagogical agents.” Some will be assigned to tutors who match their sexes and races. Others will... not match. Students will be hooked up to sensors monitoring sweat (...excitement or anxiety), the pressure they place on their mice (frustration) and how much they fidget on their seat cushions. A tiny camera atop the computer will register the slight furrow of the brow, the smile, the tilt of the head and the eye movements that indicate attention, nervousness, satisfaction. The resulting information will be used to tailor the tutors’ encouragements to achieve the maximum education outcome.

“Computer tutors are never going to completely replace human teachers or be 100 percent accurate,” Picard warns. But if Isabel keeps students engaged in math with her emotion-friendly style, she will have done plenty.

Dervishaj’s entire grade 7 math class has been outfitted with “smart pens” made by Livescribe, a start-up based in Oakland, Calif. The pens perform an interesting trick: when Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.

In recent decades, the study of language acquisition and instruction has increasingly focused on “chunking”: how children learn language not so much on a word-by-word basis but in larger “lexical chunks” or meaningful strings ... that are committed to memory. Chunks may consist of fixed idioms..., but they can also simply be combinations of words that appear together frequently... known as “collocations.” ...the linguist Michael Halliday pointed out that we tend to talk of “strong tea” instead of “powerful tea,” even though the phrases make equal sense. Rain, on the other hand, is much more likely to be described as “heavy” than “strong.”

A native speaker picks up thousands of chunks ... in childhood, and psycholinguistic research suggests that these phrases are stored and processed in the brain as individual units. ...it is much less taxing cognitively to have a set of ready-made lexical chunks at our disposal than to have to work through all the possibilities of word selection and sequencing every time we open our mouths. Cognitive studies of chunking have been bolstered by computer-driven analysis of usage patterns in large databases of texts called “corpora.” Many English-language teachers have been eager to apply corpus findings in the classroom to zero in on salient chunks rather than individual vocabulary words. This is especially so among teachers of English as a second language... Michael Swan... has emerged as a prominent critic of the lexical-chunk approach... “high-priority chunks need to be taught,” he worries that... can mean that formulaic expressions get more attention than they deserve, and other aspects of language — ordinary vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and skills — get sidelined.”

“In educational circles, sometimes the phrase ‘drill and kill’ is used, meaning that by drilling the student, you will kill his or her motivation to learn,” explains Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia professor of psychology who has written extensively on learning and memory. But while drilling might not look pretty... might it nonetheless be a useful way for some students to learn some things? ...E. D. Hirsch Jr., the distinguished literary critic and education reformer... considers “distributed practice,” the official term for drilling, essential. “...helpful in making the procedures second nature, which allows you to focus on the structural elements of the problem.” Willingham... approves of drilling as a way to measure what you’ve learned. “Testing yourself... actually leads to better learning than... reading passages over and over... with a highlighter... “You can’t be proficient at some academic tasks without having certain knowledge be automatic...” For knowledge... like multiplication tables, “you need something like drilling,” ...something I’ve found...: colorful, happy apps... can make almost any exercise feel like a video game.