Academy Education Research
Creative Arts
Creativity and Academics: The Power of an Arts Education
Synopsis: This article posits that the arts are as important as academics, and should be treated as such in school curriculum. Then the author lists and expounds on these five benefits of arts education:
Growth Mindset
Self Confidence
Improved Cognition
Communication
Deepening Cultural and Self-Understanding
Education Systems Can Stifle Creative Thought. Here’s How To Do Things Differently:
Synopsis: There is significant disjunction between the skills our education system nurtures and the needs of society.
Traditional education does not sufficiently value innovative and entrepreneurial thinking. According to a test developed by NASA, our system even dumbs down the creative genius that we were born with. Yet creative skills and mindsets are indispensable in a workforce that must be responsive to change and capable of finding new solutions to complex problems.
We live in the times of autonomous cars, reusable rockets and artificial intelligence, yet we are still teaching in an education system that was set up for factory workers some 200 years ago. What we should be doing instead is to focus on skill-building and preparing any learner – be it in compulsory education or in lifelong learning – for success.
Education Philosophy
A Look Inside the Classroom of the Future
Synopsis: To educate students for 21st-century careers, educators should be using real-world case studies, embracing complexity, practicing empathy, integrating technology, and encouraging reflection.
The challenges today's students will face as tomorrow's leaders will involve working more closely across geographic borders, and with people who have very different backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences. In short, diversity and global citizenship are our common future.
Aligning Spaces, Strategies & Assessments
Synopsis: Bringing out student voice is not a one-time happening; rather, it is a process, in which educators need to carefully guide their students. Student voice is deeply connected to children’s understanding of who they are as individual beings. Because of this, nurturing student voice requires adult attention on many levels, including personal, academic, and social. There are three main areas of teaching that need to align in order for students to feel empowered to discover and share their voices: learning spaces, teaching strategies, and assessments.
Children's Need to Know: Curiosity in Schools
Synopsis: In this essay, Susan Engel argues that curiosity is both intrinsic to children's development and unfolds through social interactions, yet almost completely absent from classrooms. Calling on well-established research and more recent studies, Engel argues that interactions between teachers and students can foster or inhibit children's curiosity. She offers an explanation for why curiosity is not a priority in our educational system and calls for greater attention to children's interests and explorations, which, she argues, are the mechanisms that underlie authentic learning.
Designing Schools for Students Today
Synopsis: That standardization, and the image of American schools preserved in amber, is a drum often beaten by critics. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently tweeted out a decades–old picture of a classroom with the message, "Everything about our lives has moved beyond the industrial era. But American education largely hasn't."
"I felt like a lot of the contemporary discussion about education was really focused on content," she tells NPR. "In that really tight space in front of the kid's face. And as someone interested in design I'm always interested in, what kind of room are you in? How much natural light does it get? What kind of materials is it made of? What kind of a chair are you sitting in?"
Essential Conditions: Student-Centered Learning
Synopsis: ISTE is a company that promotes student-centered learning and using technology to solve tough problems in education. On this page of essential conditions, student-centered learning is described as an ideal learning model for students to take ownership of their own learning. Included in this short page are the answers to the following questions about student-centered learning: “What is it?”, “Why is it important?” and “What does it look like?”
How Helping Students to Ask Better Questions can Transform the Classroom
Synopsis: Educators and parents have long known that curiosity is at the center of powerful learning. But too often, in the push to meet standards and pressure to stay on pace, that essential truth about learning that sticks gets lost. Worse, many older students have forgotten how to ask their own questions about the world, afraid that if they wonder they will be wrong. It’s far less risky to sit back and wait for the teacher to ask the questions. And yet, good questioning may be the most basic tenet of lifelong learning and independent thinking that school offers students. Taking the time to activate curiosity doesn’t have to mean abandoning learning standards, nor is it necessarily a waste of time.
How the Power of Interest Drives Learning
Synopsis: In recent years researchers have begun to build a science of interest, investigating what interest is, how interest develops, what makes things interesting, and how we can cultivate interest in ourselves and others. They are finding that interest can help us think more clearly, understand more deeply, and remember more accurately. Interest has the power to transform struggling performers, and to lift high achievers to a new plane.
Importance of Life Skills in the Education and Training of the Differently-abled
Synopsis: Life skills have been defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.” Practicing life skills leads to qualities such as self-esteem, sociability and tolerance, competencies to take action and generate change, and the capability to have the freedom to decide what to do and who to be.
Is College A Waste of Time?
Synopsis: Bryan Caplan, author of 'The Case Against Education', explains why he believes the current education system fails and why the US should instead push for vocational education.
Is Recess Important for Kids or a Waste of Time? Here's what the Research Says
Synopsis: This article initially recaps the recent law change in Florida that makes 20 consecutive minutes of recess mandatory for all public schools. Previously students were only receiving 10 minutes of recess two times per week. Much of the decline in recess on a national level is directly connected to the increase in standardized testing (students average 112 standardized test between Kindergarten and 12th grade) The article continues stating that research shows the benefits of recess. Here are some fast facts:
According to the 2016 Shape of the Nation report, just 16% of states require elementary schools to provide daily recess.
In 2001, the Council on Physical Education for Children and the National Association for Sport and Physical Education recommended that physical education classes not become a replacement for the unstructured playtime of recess.
A 2009 study found that 8- and 9-year-old children who had at least one daily recess period of more than 15 minutes had better classroom behavior.
Learn Better by Doing
Synopsis: With the assistance of the 5,910 teachers who participated in this four-year study, we now know the benefit of students doing hands-on activities. Learning by doing is as vital to a student’s education as cognitive learning is in today’s technological world.
Lifelong Learners
Synopsis: As the pace of technological change accelerates, so will the need to educate, and re-educate, workers. The long-term goal should be to revolutionize educational systems -- to make them places that adults revisit, as needed, throughout their working lives.
Project-Based Learning
Synopsis: “Some teachers believe that PBL is just about building something physical, such as a robot or an artifact. Many times, at the end of this process, students don’t understand how the artifact that they created works or what knowledge it is based on. That is why some research indicates that our key challenge in teaching PBL is focusing on identified learning outcomes rather than promoting “doing for the sake of doing.”
Reading Instruction in Kindergarten
Synopsis: In the United States there is a widespread belief that teaching children to read early — in kindergarten or even pre-kindergarten — will help them be better readers in the long-run. Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence that this is so. How then did this idea take hold so strongly?
Research Tested Benefits of Breaks
Synopsis: Regular breaks throughout the school day—from short brain breaks in the classroom to the longer break of recess—are not simply downtime for students. Such breaks increase their productivity and provide them with opportunities to develop creativity and social skills. Particularly for younger students, regular breaks throughout the school day can be an effective way to reduce disruptive behavior and an opportunity for creative play and divergent thinking.
Rethinking Homework
Synopsis: Daily homework is expected in schools, but places unreasonable stress on families with little to no proven benefit. Homework loads should be re-evaluated.
Service Learning
Synopsis: Although service learning has been documented as a promising pedagogy for middle grade learners, it remains the exception rather than the rule in many middle schools. This qualitative study examined fifth grade students’ experience of a service learning class.
Skills-Based Instruction
Synopsis: This article argues that skill-based instruction provides students with access to real life and critical thinking skills that will allow them to do something with the content that they attain, rather than just answers to the “what” questions offered through a content-based education. This article also includes a table to show the contrast between content-based and skills-based education.
Teaching Students Good Digital Citizenship
Synopsis: Teachers have long understood the importance of instilling good citizenship in their students, focusing on social etiquette and how to treat their peers with respect in the course of their daily lives. Today, though, it’s just as important that students understand what kinds of behaviors are acceptable online. Instilling the principles of good digital citizenship can help students become smart, responsible, and respectful members of their online communities.
The Importance of Life-Skills Based Education
Synopsis: This article explores how our education systems have shifted to preparing students for careers for their future but have have neglected to teach the soft skills needed to truly succeed. Life skills are some of the building blocks needed for students to apply knowledge that they learn in school to real world problems. The article also discusses the benefits of introducing these skills at a young age.
What is the Point of a Makerspace?
Synopsis: A makerspace in classroom is more than just a place for kids to get messy. Creativity is sometimes idea generation, it’s sometimes problem-solving, but in a makerspace, you’re actually going to create some kind of product. It’s a space devoted to and differentiated and set up for making.”
Language Arts
Does Spelling Matter?
Synopsis: This book narrates the history of English spelling from the Anglo-Saxons to the present-day, charting the various changes that have taken place and the impact these have had on the way we spell today. While good spelling is seen as socially and educationally desirable, many people struggle to spell common words like accommodate, occurrence, dependent. Is it our spelling system that is to blame, and should we therefore reform English spelling to make it easier to learn? This book evaluates such views by considering previous attempts at reform, while also looking critically at claims that the electronic age heralds the demise of correct spelling.
How Spelling Keeps Kids from Learning
Synopsis: Mastering English requires abilities that most children don’t develop until they're pre-teens.
Adults who have already mastered written English tend to forget about its many quirks. But consider this: English has 205 ways to spell 44 sounds. And not only can the same sounds be represented in different ways, but the same letter or letter combinations can also correspond to different sound.
As a result, there’s no systematic way to learn to read or write modern English—people have to memorize the spelling of thousands of individual words, file them away in their mental databases, and retrieve them when needed. A small percentage of people excel at this skill, but for most children in English-speaking countries, learning to read and write their native language is a laborious and time-consuming exercise.
Inventive Spelling: Guidelines for Parents
Synopsis: Research and scenarios are explicitly laid out in this PDF to help parents explore the ideas behind inventive spelling and give teachers an effective way to include parents in understanding the development of spelling for individual students. This article states that “a positive relationship has been found to exist between a child’s use of invented spelling and the child’s academic achievement in spelling, reading and writing.”
Why is my Kid Allowed to Make Spelling Mistakes?
Synopsis: Former middle school language arts and nationally board certified teacher Jennifer Gonzalez shares her experiences with allowing students to write using inventive spelling without the negative effect of spelling curriculums. She explains that often times these curriculums take away from a child’s freedom to explore writing. Research has shown that allowing students to use inventive spelling develops them into “more fluent writers with a richer vocabulary.”
Why Kids Should be Allowed to Act Out (Scenes) in Class
Synopsis: For children, acting out words on the page can yield benefits. Especially for beginning readers, physically moving objects or one’s own body can provide a crucial bridge between real-life people, things, and actions, and the printed words meant to represent them. Fluent readers take this correspondence for granted, but many children find it difficult to grasp.
Social / Emotional
Building Students' Non-Cognitive Skills
Synopsis: Research shows that non-cognitive factors affect learning in its infancy, but preliminary findings also point toward promising returns. Here non-cognitive factors are discovered as commonly lacking in today’s students. The reading addresses how to develop these skills through specific (and easy to implement) instruction.
Emotional Intelligence: Why it Matters and how to Teach it
Synopsis: This article explores the five main areas of Emotional Intelligence and why they are important to teach in a school setting: self-awareness, emotional control, self-motivation, empathy and relationship skills. It is more than just important for good communication with others – it is a gateway to better learning, friendships, academic success and employment. If developed in our formative years at school, skills like can provide the foundation for future habits later on in life.
How Empowering Girls to Confront Conflict and Buck Perfection Helps their Well-being
How Students Critiquing One Another's Work Raises the Quality Bar
Synopsis: Too often, when students produce school work, they turn it into a teacher for a grade and move on. And after the teacher spends time evaluating the student's work, many students never look at the feedback, a cycle that frustrates both parties and isn't the most effective way to learn.
Several schools are trying a different model -- one that takes more time but also helps students feel more ownership over the quality of their work. Called peer critique, students follow clear protocols that remind them to "be kind, be specific, and be helpful" in the feedback they give to peers.
Students & Social Media
Synopsis: If you work with young people in any capacity, you are also teaching social media norms and expectations. But what do norms mean in the context of social media? Norms are a standard or pattern of social behavior that is typical or expected of a group. Our social media use is still so new that most people are all trying to figure out what our social media norms are and should be. Do teachers have that luxury?
What Do We Mean When We Say 'Social & Emotional Skills'?
Synopsis: According to the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, a research and advocacy group, social and emotional skills include the 4Cs of critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity, as well as life and career skills and information, media and technology skills.
The problem is that "if anything, all the evidence would suggest that in the closing decades of the 20th and 21st centuries, cognitive skills became more important than ever." So this term, although it's often heard in business and technology circles, doesn't necessarily signal the shift in focus that some researchers want.
S.T.E.M.
Fluency Without Fear
Synopsis: The development of number sense and fluency becomes a difficult goal when the only route for elementary mathematics is the rote memorization of math facts. Fluency with numbers is incorrectly taken to mean the ability to recall math facts quickly when in actuality it means, “knowing how a number can be composed and decomposed, using that information to be flexible and efficient with solving problems.” If students do not understand the relationship of numbers and only learn the facts, they will lack the skills needed to problem solve in the real world.
Learn Math Without Fear
Synopsis: This article talks about how students learn math best when they approach the subject as something they enjoy. Speed pressure, timed testing and blind memorization pose high hurdles in the youthful pursuit of math.
Project-Based Learning Can Fuel a STEM-Ready Economy
Synopsis: This year's crop of U.S. News STEM Leadership Hall of Fame recipients all began a life-long love affair with science, technology, engineering and math quite unintentionally through hands-on experiences.
Now, as the U.S. economy braces for dramatic change in workforce realities due in part to the proliferation of artificial intelligence (a shift that will require an increased understanding of STEM concepts) getting young people excited about STEM has never been more important.
Teaching STEM Through Horticulture
Synopsis: School gardens are ideal places for students to ask and answer questions about science. This paper describes a case study of two 3rd grade teachers and two STEM coordinators who were recruited to implement and evaluate a horticultural-based curriculum developed for this study.
