Education

It’s long past graduation season, but we recently learned that George Saunders delivered the convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013, and George was kind enough to send it our way and allow us to reprint it here The speech touches on some of the moments in his life and larger themes (in his life and work) that George spoke about in the profile we ran back in January — the need for kindness and all the things working against our actually achieving it, the risk in focusing too much on “success,” the trouble with swimming in...

“Most of them are not going to make it.” That was the thought that ran through Animesh Ray’s mind 15 years ago, as he watched excellent PhD students — including some at his own institution, the University of Rochester in New York — struggle to find faculty positions in academia, the only jobs they had ever been trained for. Some were destined for perpetual postdoctoral fellowships; others would leave science altogether. Within a few years, the associate professor was in a position to do something about it. A stint in a start-up company in California had convinced him that many...

The admissions test for the Indian Institutes of Technology, known as the Joint Entrance Examination or JEE, may be the most competitive test in the world. In 2012, half a million Indian high school students sat for the JEE. Over six grueling hours of chemistry, physics, and math questions, the students competed for one of ten thousand spots at India’s most prestigious engineering universities. When the students finish the exam, it is the end of a two plus year process. Nearly every student has spent four hours a day studying advanced science topics not taught at school, often waking up...

Scott Stearns interviews Aung San Suu Kyi at VOA in Washington D.C. VOA’s Scott Stearns interviews Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi at VOA in Washington D.C., Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012. (VOA/A. Klein) STEARNS: Thank you for being with us this afternoon. Our time is short, we’ll get right to the questions. Political and economic reforms in Burma are clearly not yet complete. What needs to happen next?   ASSK: We need to just go on with the process. We need to find out what we have to do in order to keep the democratization process on track.  Economic...

Some students seem to breeze through their school years, whereas others struggle, putting them at risk for getting lost in our educational system and not reaching their full potential.  Parents and teachers want to help students succeed, but there is little guidance on which learning techniques are the most effective for improving educational outcomes. This leads students to implement studying strategies that are often ineffective, resulting in minimal gains in performance. What then are the best strategies to help struggling students learn? Fortunately for students, parents, and teachers, psychological scientists have developed and evaluated the effectiveness of a wide range...

If students can only focus for 15-minute intervals, shouldn’t we devote precious class time to something more engaging? Each school day, millions of students move in unison from classroom to classroom where they listen to 50- to 90-minute lectures. Despite there being anywhere from 20 to 300 humans in the room, there is little actual interaction. This model of education is so commonplace that we have accepted it as a given. For centuries, it has been the most economical way to “educate” a large number of students. Today, however, we know about the limitations of the class lecture, so why does...