Student achievement is high on the priority list, but as more educators focus on helping underachieving students progress, overachieving students are being forgotten.
Read the rest of this entry »
More Females in STEM Fields Means More Innovation
As the demand for innovation increases and the number of innovators drop, making students proficient in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects has become a hot topic. Now that STEM has become a household acronym for many concerned parents and educators, more attention is being paid to the unbalanced ratio of boys to girls interested in STEM subjects and careers.
Flipping the College Lecture
Can you remember what it felt like learning new concepts in your college lecture classes? How many new concepts did you master in the duration of a one-hour lecture? How much did you remember about those concepts a week later? A year later? A decade later?
Cognitive researchers began making breakthroughs in understanding how the human brain processes and retains information in the 1970s and 80s, according to the article “Don’t Lecture Me: Rethinking How College Students Learn.”  When studying how much students learned in a lecture, they found people had very limited short-term memory that didn’t allow them to process all the information presented in a typical lecture. However, it’s 2012 and many college students are still attending lecture-based classes that require them to memorize facts, not understand concepts.
Students Take Charge of Learning in the New Classroom
Of the following two options, which would be your preferred way of learning how to change a tire? Â Option 1: You attend a lecture on how to change a tire and then have to change your first tire in a real-life scenario. Option 2: You take a hands-on class where you learn about changing the tire by actually changing a tire. Then, you’re confronted with a real-life scenario. Which option do you think would have better prepared you for the real-life scenario when you need to change your own tire? New research would say option 2.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Popular Misconceptions of Learning
What does it look like when students are learning? Are they sitting quietly at their desks, listening to the teacher lecture, and scribbling notes? According to a recent article in the Washington Post, those are three of seven misconceptions people have about how students learn.
Read the rest of this entry »
Unemployed Youth Cost More Than Money: Turning the Trend Around
America’s unemployed youth each take $40,000 a year from the economy and cost the government $14,000 in taxes, according to the article “What Does One Jobless Youth Cost Taxpayers? $14,000 a Year.” The “lost generation” is projected to cost taxpayers $437 billion over the next five years, and possibly $1.15 trillion in their lifetime.
Read the rest of this entry »
Bridging the Achievement Gap with Summer Reading
In recent years, closing the achievement gap has been high on the priority list. Among many signs, the achievement gap is evident in things like poor test scores and grades, higher dropout rates, and limited class participation. As legislation, educators, and parents look for ways to close the gap, improving literacy has proven to be a popular choice to tackle these problems.
Read the rest of this entry »
Going Global In the Classroom
With technology, students don’t need to leave the classroom in order to take a trip around the world. In November 2011, Edmodo, a social networking site, teamed up with Polar Bears International to send five people to the Tundra to film polar bears and stream webcasts straight to 1,700 classrooms around the world. Websites like Khan Academy, YouTube, and Stanford’s free online classes, have become highly accessible databases of knowledge available to people around the world. Social networking is being used in and outside of the classroom to extend the learning community for students after they leave school and for educators to connect with other teachers around the nation and world.
Read the rest of this entry »
Economic Climate Requires Creativity, Ingenuity, Tenacity
The recession has changed the way many Americans live, causing some to file for unemployment, go back to school, relocate, or downsize. The economic downturn is also showing effects of changing how the next generation of young adults will adapt to the changed economy they are inheriting. According to the NPR article “US Jobs Between Young And Old Is Widest Ever,” a new study by the Pew Research Center shows, in record numbers, young adults are choosing to live with their parents longer and delaying marriage to raise kids out of wedlock, if they choose to have them at all.
Read the rest of this entry »
Using “Think-aloud” YouTube Videos to Teach Math
As more classrooms integrate technology into the curriculum, the flipped classroom model continues to become more popular among educators, students, and parents. In the flipped classroom, students watch lessons, traditionally taught in the classroom, on YouTube or their school website and then do work, traditionally done at home, in the classroom. This learning method allows for students to learn in a self-paced environment and bring their questions to their peers and instructors where there is more time for one-on-one instruction.
Read the rest of this entry »