In 1993, a surprising study was published claiming that college students who listened to Mozart before taking a test did better than those who did not. This sparked the belief that mothers who played Mozart to their babies while still in the womb were doing them a great service because listening to classical music would make them smarter, despite the original researchers never [...]
In its recent reading assessment, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) included a measure of vocabulary comprehension “that aims to capture students’ ability to use their understanding or sense of words to acquire meaning from the passages they read.” The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released a report last year comparing results from the 2009 and 2011 exams testing the vocabulary [...]
In the last several years, New Jersey school district attempts to reopen the uniform debate or instate uniform policies have been met with strong parental opposition. Bayonne parents filed suit over a uniform policy that requires students to wear navy tops and khaki bottoms, citing First Amendment freedom of speech protections, but a judge ruled in favor of the district in 2007. Parents in Clifton have protested [...]
It goes without saying that kids’ attention is not focused where it used to be. Children are more apt to sit in front of the television screen watching shows or playing video games than to read or write. Luckily, there are many ways to incorporate television into educational activities, encouraging children to learn in fun ways. Many popular children’s shows were originally book [...]
The access of Internet in all schools across the country has been a pressing issue, with government programs intending for 99 percent of America’s students to connect with broadband Internet within the next five years. The average American school has the same bandwidth as the average American home, and current figures show that between 29 and 39 percent of America’s students have access to high-speed Internet at [...]
From the 1990s, American post-secondary institutions enjoyed a boom in enrollment that remained fairly steady until 2012, but the recent significant decline has some colleges scrambling to boost their numbers. Beginning a decade earlier, high school graduates were increasingly looking to further their education by attending college. The population explosion of the 1990s, the largest in American history, coupled with the prosperous economy, resulted [...]
What would you do if you were able to see into your child’s classroom? Many school districts around the country are conducting surveys of teachers, students and their parents to gather more insight on day-to-day happenings behind school doors. The state of Illinois began conducting one such survey, the first statewide education survey, in early 2013. The survey was taken by over one million [...]
Teachers, administrators and students are using social media in all new ways. How can public schools use social media? Schools have often relied on traditional ways of disseminating information such as town hall meetings or newsletters. But more and more opportunities are arising for public schools to get their message out using social media. There are many different ways educators and administrators are [...]
The cost of higher education is always on the rise. The main concern for many students looking into college is the rate of tuition. When considering their academic future, students’ considerations no longer focus mainly on educational offerings, but also on the need for scholarships and student loans. According to the American Association of Community Colleges, the average cost of public community colleges [...]
The use of electronic formats of things we read is on the rise. The population of Americans aged 16 and older who read e-books has grown from 16 percent to 23 percent over the past year. More and more people are now buying e-book readers and tablets. Universities, following this trend of electronic information, are developing ways of replacing the textbook with more interactive ways of learning, such as [...]