
What are the future reading challenges for Covid-era babies?
We know the pandemic has had a serious negative impact on the academic achievement of school-age children. But recent evidence shows we also need to worry about Covid-era babies and toddlers.
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How home literacy experiences impact children’s reading abilities
When parents read with their kids, they improve their vocabulary and foster the development of brain areas that are vital for further literacy.
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Want Kids To Learn History? Ask These 4 Questions
History teachers generally get inadequate training and materials, and students often don’t learn much. Several initiatives are trying to address the problem, but only one—the Four Question Method—provides teachers with the framework they need.
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The making of a mathematics curriculum: a story of hope from Ballarat, Australia
An example of how concerned citizens can and should speak up regarding education
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War and education challenges in the 21st century
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has created the biggest human catastrophe modern-day Europe has experienced. Millions of Ukrainians, mostly women, children and other vulnerable groups, were forced to leave their country. How do we ensure fleeing children continue to pursue their education? And what skills do we all need in order to prepare ourselves and our children for an unpredictable future?
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Retrieval Practice and Processing Load
If you read our blog even occasionally, you know retrieval practice has many benefits. Retrieval improves learning and memory, reduces test anxiety, and can protect against learning losses associated with stress. Today’s blog post is about another benefit of retrieval practice, reducing processing load.
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Expanding Retrieval Practice for Preschoolers
Compared to older children, preschool children are easily distracted, are poor at predicting how much they will remember, and tend to forget things quickly. Preschool children also do not tend to attempt to adopt effective learning strategies on their own. Given all of this, it is important to understand whether relatively simple strategies, like spacing and retrieval practice, can be implemented in preschool classrooms to help preschool children retain more of what they are learning in school.
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The hypercorrection effect and the benefits of practice testing in learning
Recent research suggests that students benefit more from being corrected when they are confident they were right in the first place.
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Mapping the Global Learning Crisis
Despite record enrollments in school worldwide, learning is limited
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More Useful Measurement of Mathematics Learning in K-12
Measuring student progress in mathematics is harder than one might think. In order to make teaching act upon particular students’ difficulties, it is not sufficient to establish comparisons with a class evolution as it is not sufficient to establish simple and fixed metrics to accompany a curriculum evolution. Frequent formative assessment is key to constantly monitor, fine-tune, establish progressive and adaptive mastery measures and so help students’ understanding of math concepts and procedures. New research on measurement learning in mathematics gives hope that simple 2-minute class with well-chosen questions and practices may accelerate mastery of concepts and procedures.
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The COVID-19 slide in education: new data on learning loss
COVID-19 led to school closures throughout Europe. Early evidence is showing that the pandemic is resulting in learning losses. At its peak, the pandemic led countries in the region to close their schools. Given the abruptness of the situation, teachers and administrations were unprepared for this transition and were forced to build emergency remote learning systems. To reduce and reverse the long-term negative effects, countries need to implement learning recovery programs, protect educational budgets, and prepare for future shocks by building back better. However, we need to assess learning losses from more countries.
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Reading bedtime stories: are parents helping with vocabulary building?
Reading stories to children plays a fundamental role in their acquisition of vocabulary. In “Timing story time to maximize children’s ability to retain new vocabulary”, an article published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in 2021, a group of researchers at the University of York sought to verify to what extent children between the ages of five and seven learn new words when listening to their parents tell them stories. The study also sought to ascertain whether reading is particularly beneficial in the period prior to sleeping. They reach some interesting conclusions.
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