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"Growth mindset has become a pervasive theme in education discussions in part because of convincing research by Stanford professor Carol Dweck and others that relatively low-impact interventions on how a student thinks about himself as a learner can have big impacts on learning. The growth mindset research is part of a growing understanding and acknowledgement that many non-cognitive factors are important to academic learning."

" TWEETSHAREEMAIL Over the summer, academics debated the impact of growth mindset, the belief that one's intelligence can be developed with hard work and effort, and whether it can move the needle on academic performance. Even Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, who is often credited with the term, chimed in with additional research supporting the efficacy of mindset interventions. An Education Week survey found that the vast majority of educators believe that a growth-oriented mindset can help improve students' motivation, commitment and engagement in learning. But the study found that applying those ideas to practice, and helping students shift their mindset around learning, remains an elusive challenge. Those findings largely coincide with my observations as an administrator, coach, technology implementer, and now founder of an education company. Over the summer, my team ran a series of professional learning community sessions with dozens of educators across the country, focused on instructional practices that foster and support growth mindset. At these events, almost all teachers said they get the big ideas around growth mindset, but over 80 percent said their schools don't implement them well."

"We all know our chronological age. That's as simple as counting the candles on your birthday cake. But do you know your biological age? This second number measures not how many years you've seen, but how much those years have impacted the functioning of your body and brain. Scientists calculate it a number of ways, but whatever methodology they employ, they agree chronological and biological age don't always line up. Some 80-year-olds function like people decades younger. They ace their memory and cognitive tests, and scientists peering at their cells can even spot significant differences. Experts have dubbed these role models of healthy aging "superagers." Just about all of us would love to one day become one. How do you achieve that? A long and fascinating article in the latest issue of UCSF Magazine delves into the work of the University of California, San Francisco's Memory and Aging Center to answer this question (hat tip to PsyBlog). Much of this research is still far too new to be of everyday use, but science has already determined a few simple interventions you can start using today to help keep your brain young."

"For the more than 3,000 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Wednesday's mass shooting was terrifying and life-changing. But what of the tens of millions of other children, in schools across the country, who have since heard about what happened and now struggle with their own feelings of fear, confusion and uncertainty? For their parents and teachers, we've put together a quick primer with help from the National Association of School Psychologists and Melissa Reeves, a former NASP president and co-author of its PREPaRE School Crisis Prevention and Intervention curriculum."

"Many people will know what it feels like to be bullied. Despite a wealth of research and well-meaning interventions at a local level, bullying is still a common problem in UK schools (pdf) - and associated with depression, anxiety and even suicide."

"As you may remember from your own (in)glorious youth, most university students are required to take a statistics course even if they hate math and aren't in a particularly numbers-heavy major. Ellen Peters, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University, heard this was driving a lot undergrads on her campus crazy. "A lot of the students are really threatened by it. They're kind of afraid of it, they dread taking it," she says. "If they do dread it, they can end up in a cycle of failure." Curious to see if she could make a positive change among math-phobic Buckeyes, Peters created an intervention that tested whether or not value affirmation could improve student's comfort and ability with numbers, otherwise known as numerical literacy or numeracy. The results, which were published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, indicate that confidence and core values have a lot to do with learning the numbers."

"From content consumption to content creation, there are many ways to use mobile devices with students. They can create how-to videos for authentic audiences, explain their thinking through screencasting, or use scannable technology in the math classroom, for example. Mobile devices can also be used to help students practice foundational math skills and build their math fluency. You might decide to use an app on this list as part of an intervention plan or add it to a newsletter for families."

"The spread of online misinformation poses serious challenges to societies worldwide. In a novel attempt to address this issue, we designed a psychological intervention in the form of an online browser game. In the game, players take on the role of a fake news producer and learn to master six documented techniques commonly used in the production of misinformation: polarisation, invoking emotions, spreading conspiracy theories, trolling people online, deflecting blame, and impersonating fake accounts. The game draws on an inoculation metaphor, where preemptively exposing, warning, and familiarising people with the strategies used in the production of fake news helps confer cognitive immunity when exposed to real misinformation. We conducted a large-scale evaluation of the game with N = 15,000 participants in a pre-post gameplay design. We provide initial evidence that people's ability to spot and resist misinformation improves after gameplay, irrespective of education, age, political ideology, and cognitive style."

Pedagogy and curriculum that engages students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and is deemed personally relevant to the lives they live, are seen as important factors towards equality of outcome by Wrench, Hammond, McCallum and Price (2012). Their research involved designing a curriculum and pedagogy that would be highly engaging to students of low-socioeconomic status. 'The interventions involved curriculum redesigns that set meaningful, challenging learning task(s) (culminating in high quality learning products); strong connection to student life-worlds; and a performative expectation for student learning.' (Wrench et al 2012 p934)

"In an era of breakneck change and tech innovation, evaluating dyslexia in young students looks much the same today as it has in the past: A struggling reader's parents and teachers might sit down, gather information and assess the child on their strengths and weaknesses to determine a diagnosis and appropriate interventions. Often this is done via paper tests-despite the growing usage of predictive analytics in schools, where there are seemingly as many data dashboards as students in a classroom. All that's to say, it seems like an industry almost too tempting for deep-pocketed tech investors and an ambitious startup with an eye on using machine learning to trim the fat. "Today's methods are quite cumbersome," explains Frederik Wetterhall, the CEO and co-founder of Lexplore, a company that has devised a dyslexia screening tool that pairs eye tracking cameras with AI and algorithms. "With paper- and pen-based tests, it's quite hard to read the results and takes a lot of time. [Educators] ask, 'Who are the kids we think have difficulties?' and they miss a lot of kids.""

A great overview of Lance's research into the effectiveness of libraries.  He answers the question: Do school libraries or librarians make a difference?  His answer (A HUGE YES!) is back by 14 years of remarkable research.  The point is proved.  But this information remains unknown to many principals and superintendents.  Anyone interested in 21st century teaching and learning will find this interview fascinating.

"When the bell rang for early dismissal on a recent afternoon at Cold Springs Middle School in Nevada, students sprinted toward the buses while teachers filed into the library, where posters filled with the names of every child in the 980-student school covered the walls. Taking seats where they could, the teachers turned their attention to Principal Roberta Duvall, who asked her staff to go through the rosters with colored markers and make check marks under columns labeled "Name/Face," "Something Personal," "Personal/Family Story," and "Academic Standing," to note whether they knew the child just by name or something more-their grades, their family's story, their hobbies. "

this is great for special needs educators