Before I came to Washington, DC, to head the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) nine months ago, I spent my entire career analyzing data, researching reform and school improvement efforts, and working with members of Chicago’s education community to make those findings useful. My experiences convinced More
In Part 1 of this essay (Buskist & Howard, 2009), we made a broad distinction between two types of failing students — those students who actively fail our classes and those students who passively fail them. Actively failing students, despite their efforts to pass our classes, nonetheless perform poorly in More
Do your kids want a Wii, a PlayStation or an Xbox 360 this year? This holiday gift season is packed with popular gaming systems and adrenaline-pumping, sharpshooting games. What’s a parent to do? Is there any redeeming value in the hours that teens spend transfixed by these video games? According More
With its cavernous interior and concrete floors, San Francisco’s Exploratorium looks more like an airplane hangar than a museum. In fact, a visible workshop taking up part of the first floor inspires, at least for a moment, thoughts of mysterious projects at Area 51. But it’s no secret why the More
In this issue and in the May issue, APS Members will have the opportunity to learn about new work by psychologists who are bringing their research out of the laboratory and into a variety of education settings (e.g., elementary school classrooms, Web-based tutoring systems, etc.). Their work represents some of More
Every student hates tests, and teachers often aren’t fond of them either. A pain to study for and a pain to take, they are also time-consuming to give and to grade. No wonder then, that many college professors give tests so infrequently, sometimes just twice or three times in a More
