Gwen Mueller is an IT Professional, #dnd Gamer-girl, #coffee drinker, geek in Secondary Education, editor on tumblr #education, curating #science, and #tech resources to inspire lifelong learning with 1/4 cup of #fun.
Enrollment in advanced placement courses has skyrocketed in recent years, and there are many reasons for this spike. Students often believe taking AP courses will give them an edge in getting into college, help them do better once there, and save them money by not having to take those classes again. And many believe AP programs enrich students’ lives because they’re taking part in a rigorous program of learning.
But a recent study found that research doesn’t unequivocally support those beliefs.
“The research is mixed,” said Denise Pope, co-founder of Challenge Success, a non-profit organization at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. “There isn’t any clear research for any of those claims.”
When a child with autism copies the actions of an adult, he or she is likely to omit anything “silly” about what they’ve just seen. In contrast, typically developing children will go out of their way to repeat each and every element of the behavior even as they may realize that parts of it don’t make any sense.
The findings, reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 8, are the first to show that the social nature of imitation is very important and challenging for children with autism, the researchers say.
“The data suggest that children with autism do things efficiently rather than socially, whereas typical children do things socially rather than efficiently,” says Antonia Hamilton of the University of Nottingham. “We find that typical children copy everything an adult does, whereas autistic children only do the actions they really need to do.”
Mayoral control and accountability is one of very few major education reforms that aim at governance coherence in our highly fragmented urban school systems. A primary feature of mayoral governance is that it holds the office of the mayor accountable for school performance. As an institutional redesign, mayoral governance integrates school-district accountability and the electoral process at the systemwide level. The so-called education mayor is ultimately held accountable for the school system’s performance on an academic, fiscal, operational, and managerial level. While school board members are elected by fewer than 10 percent of the eligible voters, mayoral races are often decided by more than half of the electorate. Under mayoral control, public education gets on the citywide agenda.
New findings based on more than 20 years of research suggest that despite decades of controversy, elementary school teachers now feel fine placing students in “ability groups.”
The research, out Monday from the centrist Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on American Education, finds that between 1998 and 2009, the percentage of fourth-grade teachers who said they created ability-based reading groups skyrocketed from 28% to 71%. In math, between 1996 and 2011, the practice rose from 40% to 61%. The practice remained fairly constant in eighth-grade math, rising from 71% to 76%. Data for other eighth-grade subjects was incomplete or inconclusive.
Switching majors, falling behind the academic schedule, and feeling disenfranchised by the conventional college system are becoming institutionalized student experiences, states the report from MyEdu, an Austin, Texas-based company that offers online tools to help college students manage their academic lives and career opportunities.
The study, which takes into account the randomly selected responses of 1,047 students from MyEdu’s 300,000 profiles, shows that:
more than half of students have switched or considered switching their major during their academic career
and that the overwhelming reason for this change was due to changing interests, and a lack of enjoyment in the first major selected.
What’s more, 37% of respondents classified themselves as “nontraditional students.”
New report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project: A survey of teachers shows that digital tools are widely used in their classrooms and professional lives, and a majority of these teachers are satisfied with the support and resources they receive from their school in this area. However, it also indicates that teachers of the lowest income students face more challenges in bringing these tools to their classrooms. A few findings of note:
Mobile technology has become central to the learning process, with 73% of AP and NWP teachers saying that they and/or their students use their cell phones in the classroom or to complete assignments
More than four in ten teachers report the use of e-readers (45%) and tablet computers (43%) in their classrooms or to complete assignments
Just over half (52%) of teachers of upper and upper-middle income students say their students use cell phones to look up information in class, compared with 35% of teachers of the lowest income students
Lots of interesting findings in this study on both the digital divide and some of the obstacles presented by new technology — we’ll tease some of them here on Tumblr over the next few days.
“Half of America’s public school teachers say they feel great stress several days a week and are so demoralized that their level of satisfaction has dropped 23 percentage points since 2008 and is at its lowest in 25 years, according to an annual survey of educators.”
“Creativity is widely accepted as being an important outcome of schooling. Yet there are many different viewpoints about what it is, how best it can be cultivated in young people, and whether or how it should be assessed.”
In analyzing the ways in which school climate can support—or hinder—academic achievement, Education Week’s reporters drew on the latest research and visits to schools putting into practice approaches intended to assure a secure, supportive learning environment.
If your kids are in a good American public school, chances are you know it. (In fact, it’s probably the reason you traded in that urban loft for the property taxes of the suburbs.) But what if you woke up one morning and found that a Wizard of Oz-style tornado had dropped your entire district down in the middle of Singapore or Finland? How would your children’s test scores measure up then?
That’s more or less what the Bush Institute wants to you to imagine as you click through its Global Report Card, an interactive graphic that lets you rank your district against 25 other countries.
Generally, the Josephson Institute study found that high school students do believe in having a high moral character, and know better than to lie and steal.
The number of students who said they were dishonest with their teacher about “something significant” fell to 55% this year, from 61% in 2010. The number of those who said they deceived their parents dropped to 76% from 80% in the same two-year period.
High-res
