There’s been a lot of talk lately of college- and career-readiness for high-school graduates, notes Amanda Paulson in the Christian Science Monitor. But according to a just-released study, what community colleges actually require is less rigorous than we think—and many high school graduates aren’t meeting even those low standards: “Community colleges enroll nearly half of all college students in America, and
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Jon Hamilton has a very interesting segment on NPR about how the brain interprets language: “Just a few decades ago, many linguists thought the human brain had evolved a special module for language. It seemed plausible that our brains have some unique structure or system. After all, no animal can use language the way people can. But in the 1990s,
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The race is over. You (or your son or daughter) got into college, accepted the offer of admission, bought the sweatshirt with your school’s logo. There’s just one obstacle standing in the way: summer. A growing body of research shows that the summer before college can be a treacherous time for teenagers, poised as they are between home and high
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Early college counseling—as early as middle school—is essential to students’ aspirations for attending college, according to new study from the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). The study, “Preparing Students for College: What High Schools Are Doing and How Their Actions Influence Ninth-Graders’ College Attitudes, Aspirations and Plans,” found that instilling positive attitudes about post-secondary education is critical to
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Kindergarten teachers report spending much of their math instructional time teaching students basic counting skills and how to recognize geometric shapes. To which their students might say: “Duh!” New research shows that most students have already mastered these skills before ever setting foot in the kindergarten classroom. From the website of Vanderbilt University: “‘It’s been well-documented that the vast majority
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Are you a good listener? Most of us would probably say yes—and most of us would be wrong. In an excerpt from their new book, The Plateau Effect, that appears on the Scientific American website, Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson describe some fascinating—and unsettling—research on listening: “Ralph Nichols, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, had teachers stop
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My post earlier this week on the validity of the “10,000 hour rule” received a lot of attention, so I thought I would point my readers to this piece by Scott Barry Kaufman, an NYU psychology professor, Scientific American blogger, and author of the forthcoming Ungifted. Kaufman asks: “While deliberate practice may be an important contributor to expertise, is it
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In the British magazine New Statesman, writer Jane Shilling has a provocative essay about the way we parent (Shilling herself has a twenty-one-year-old son): “Mine was certainly the last generation in which one could allow oneself to muddle along without the assistance of the experts, treating parenthood as though it were analogous to friendship—a relationship that would grow and flourish
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In the Guardian, writer Oliver Burkeman has an interesting piece about the burgeoning movement known as “conscious computing.” Its adherents ask, as Burkeman puts it: “What if there were a way to use the internet—and all our web-connected phones and tablets and laptops and games consoles—to foster rather than erode our attention spans, and to replace that sense of edgy
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Last week, I addressed a group of teachers and principals from the Common Core Lab of the New York City Department of Education. The lab is a group of New York City public schools who are thoughtfully working through the challenges of implementing Common Core standards. This process involves a lot of learning on the part of adults as well
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