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 [...]
Since 1966, Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), a nonprofit literacy-enhancing organization, has distributed 380 million new, free books to underprivileged children in the United States. RIF provides these books for children ranging from infancy to the age of eight. Their flagship program, Books for Ownership, allows children to handpick two to five books a year. Volunteers create engaging reading events, revolving around the joy and value [...]
With tablets becoming more and more popular, new apps for children’s education have developed, and teachers have even started using them in the classroom. According to Forbes, Apple sold three million of its new iPad during its opening weekend, with analysts expecting over sixty million of the tablets to be sold worldwide; ereaders are selling even faster than tablets. With so many different options, [...]
From touch-and-feel genre books such as Dorothy Kunhardt’s Pat the Bunny, originally published over 60 years ago, to new interactive ebooks such as those hosted on Scholastic’s Storia, which come with text, audio, and games, children’s literature has taken on many forms. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. As interactive children’s stories are taken to a new level, classic [...]
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 [...]
Audiobook sales, the Audio Publishers Association (APA) reports, are at an all-time high. Their increasing use, however, is met by resistance from those who say that deep reading requires having the text in front of you. Readers of audiobooks claim that they enhance the pleasure of reading and invite more people to read. Regardless of the debate, over the past year the share of [...]
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 [...]
When Todd Bol built a miniature single-room schoolhouse, placed it in his front lawn and filled it with free books, he did not expect to attract a lot of attention. Honoring his mother, a lifelong school teacher, Bol built the structure (about the size of a large mailbox) and filled it with his own books. He hoped that some passerby would stop to [...]