Category Archives: Education

The Benefits of Taking a Gap Year for College Students

The practice of taking a gap year after graduating high school is becoming more and more popular. Instead of heading to college right away, students instead take a year off to travel — either at home or abroad — to either work, volunteer, or just see the sights.

The gap year isn’t just something that irresponsible students take to postpone the inevitable. For many students, a gap year is a carefully planned step that offers many benefits.

Here are just a few of the benefits of taking a gap year for college students: (more…)

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Technology in the Classroom

Teaching future educators how to read and write in a new way

Rachel Karchmer-Klein, an associate professor in the University of Delaware’s School of Education, is teaching future educators to read and write multimodal texts, which includes everything from literature on a Kindle or iPad to information on a website.

“With traditional texts we teach students to read left to right, top to bottom, but electronic text is different because it contains multiple modes,” Karchmer-Klein explained. (more…)

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Author Paul Tough Gives Talk on the Traits that Help Children Succeed

To Paul Tough, his recent visit to the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy was “a nice homecoming.”

During the two years of research for his new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character, Tough spent time at UChicago and in its surrounding neighborhoods.

“The nerve center of my journalistic enterprise was a small dorm room in International House,” he joked Oct. 18 in a speech at Chicago Harris, saying that many of the ideas in the book drew from work in the Department of Economics, the Economics Research Center, the Crime Lab and from the Consortium on Chicago School Research. (more…)

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Principal Plays Surprising Role in Why New Teachers Quit

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Why do so many beginning teachers quit the profession or change schools? Surprising new research finds it’s not a heavy workload or lack of resources that has the most significant effect, but instead the relationship between teachers and their principal. (more…)

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Preschoolers’ Counting Abilities Relate to Future Math Performance, MU Researcher Says

Counting, in addition to reciting, should be emphasized in early childhood education to establish foundation for future academic success

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Along with reciting the days of the week and the alphabet, adults often practice reciting numbers with young children. Now, new research from the University of Missouri suggests reciting numbers is not enough to prepare children for math success in elementary school. The research indicates that counting, which requires assigning numerical values to objects in chronological order, is more important for helping preschoolers acquire math skills.

“Reciting means saying the numbers from memory in chronological order, whereas counting involves understanding that each item in the set is counted once and that the last number stated is the amount for the entire set,” said Louis Manfra, an assistant professor in MU’s Department of Human Development and Family Studies. “When children are just reciting, they’re basically repeating what seems like a memorized sentence. When they’re counting, they’re performing a more cognitive activity in which they’re associating a one-to-one correspondence with the object and the number to represent a quantity.” (more…)

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Six Facts about Yale’s President-Elect

In the wake of the announcement that Provost Peter Salovey has been named as Yale’s 23rd president (see YaleNews story), here is a look at how he fits in with his presidential predecessors.

• He will be the third psychologist to hold Yale’s top administrative post.

Noah Porter, president 1871-1886, was an early figure in the development of American psychology. His book “The Human Intellect,” which features an “Introduction upon Psychology and the Human Soul” (1868), explored the tensions between religious belief and “scientific” psychology. (more…)

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