Education

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...

A desire to produce well-rounded graduates, an influx of Chinese students, heartburn over university rankings: Such universal topics were among the subjects of discussion at the three-day annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education in Seoul, South Korea, which ended March 20. Several university presidents and vice chancellors from Asia lamented an overemphasis in higher education on graduates’ employability. There is too great a focus, they said, on imparting a narrow set of skills rather than on educating students broadly. Are modern universities, asked Inwon Choue, president of Kyung Hee University, in Seoul, “begetting academic excellence without soul?”...

We know that students plagiarize. We suppose that plagiarism, as well as academic dishonesty in general, has increased over the past few years, decades, or century—depending on which academic ax we choose to grind. The caveats are familiar: Perhaps cheating just is easier than it used to be (most honors students who are caught plagiarizing say they did so because it was “easy”). Perhaps we are better at detecting plagiarism because of software such as Google and Turnitin. Or perhaps we forget that every generation, at least since the ancient Romans and Greeks, complains that the next one is composed...

In the United States, college degrees come from many sources with many different perspectives on the nature and function of the degree. According to the Random House Dictionary, college degrees generally refer to “an academic title conferred by universities and colleges as an indication of the completion of a course of study, or as an honorary recognition of achievement.” The concept of post-secondary education is broader than the two- or four-year institutions that are typically thought of as “college.” The concept of higher education includes all the trade, vocational, and career institutes, as well as academic college and university programs...

They’re too confining, he says. They trap kids in chairs, in classrooms, in the narrow bounds of an established curriculum. So White and a handful of fellow revolutionaries have begun pushing a new vision for American public education. Call it the a la carte school. The model, now in practice or under consideration in states including Louisiana, Michigan, Arizona and Utah, allows students to build a custom curriculum by selecting from hundreds of classes offered by public institutions and private vendors. A teenager in Louisiana, for instance, might study algebra online with a private tutor, business in a local entrepreneur’s...