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Today’s education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how they learn.  Schools are struggling to keep pace with the astonishing rate of change in students' lives outside of school.  Students will spend their adult lives in a multitasking, multifaceted, technology driven, diverse, vibrant world--and they must arrive equipped to do so. Learning for the 21^st Century.

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• 21st Century Content
• 21st Century Context
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Spotlight on Learning & Teaching Resources

 

• Reading & Math Software: Effective?
  

  For the second year in a row, a controversial $14.4 million federal study testing the effectiveness of reading and math software programs has found few significant learning differences between students who used the technology and those taught using other methods.  Of the 10 commercial software programs tested at various grade levels, only one—LeapTrack, a supplemental-reading program for 4th graders that is published by LeapFrog Schoolhouse, of Emeryville, Calif.­—produced significant improvements in students’ test scores across both years of the study. Although not large, the test-score boost that the program provides is considered enough to move a typical student from the 50th percentile to the 54th percentile on a national standardized reading test, according to the report. The two Algebra 1 products tested—Carnegie Learning’s Cognitive Tutor Algebra 1 and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Larson Learning Algebra 1—led to similar-size test-score gains, but only among students taught by a subset of teachers who had used the same products for two years in a row. Publishers, researchers, and federal officials called the findings disappointing, but also raised cautions about relying too heavily on the results to compare effectiveness among products and choose which ones to buy. The findings don’t mean that products that seem to be ineffective in one school or district won’t work better in another, the report concludes, nor should educators and policymakers use the results to make head-to-head comparisons between products.

  High School Science: Depth Better Than Breadth
  

• High school students who focus more intensely on core topics within their biology, chemistry, and physics classes fared better in beginning college science than those who delved a little bit into a larger list of topics, a recent study has found. Observers say those findings could offer direction to developers of science curricula, tests, and textbooks. Numerous scientific organizations and researchers have called for teaching and tests that are more focused on mastery of big topics. In their view, that position is backed up by the opinions of scientific experts and research on cognition and how humans build knowledge. Yet paring down scientific topics, and determining which ones merit the most attention, is not easy. Many textbooks are written to meet the academic standards of multiple states, and as a result, are crammed with information, or "encyclopedic," as the study notes. Teachers also face pressure to prepare students for the questions they will encounter on state-mandated science tests, which are in turn based on the content found in state academic standards.

  Teacher Training: No Effect on Student Scores
  

• Students who have teachers certified through alternative-training programs do no worse in mathematics or reading achievement than students whose teachers have been certified by traditional teacher education programs, according to a study released by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. The study, which was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, also found no correlation between teacher effectiveness and the amount of coursework that teachers received as part of their alternative or traditional teacher-training programs.