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After four years at the charter school, eighth-graders showed average test score gains in math equal to an additional year and a half of school, compared with district students.

the charter has a lean administrative staff and slightly larger classes—31 students compared with an average of about 26 or 27 in district schools—so it can pour resources into teacher pay and training.

14 percent of high school biology teachers personally reject not only the theory of evolution but also scientific method, which teaches rigorous critical thinking skills and draws a clear path to the discovery of real truths and how to separate them from merely apparent truths.

The rooms are part of a larger faculty development program intended to promote active learning techniques and cut down on lecturing

university is researching whether teaching at-risk students -- those withdrawing from or earning a D or F in a basic math course -- in the classrooms could improve academic outcomes and, eventually, graduation rates.

Pavlechko described the two spaces as “intake classrooms” -- faculty members who work in the development program are required to teach in them for two semesters. By the end of this academic year, the classrooms will have hosted 68 faculty members representing 29 of the university’s 48 departments and more than 3,500 students.

My conclusion is that to do justice to using the term “curating” for educational resources, inquiry must be a part of the process. Part of this process is deciding what goes “in” to the collection – meaning many, many items are evaluated and set aside.

Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.” Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important. So, as collecting progresses into curating, context becomes essential to determine what to keep, and what to discard.

curating, it seems that collecting serves primarily the needs or interests of the collector. With curating, a larger goal is to benefit not only the collector, but other potential learners as well. It is meant to be shared. And, both the process and the product of curating help the curator as well as those who view the curated collection to understand and to learn.

average life of a Web page is about a hundred days

Twitter is a rare case: it has arranged to archive all of its tweets at the Library of Congress.

Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,”

the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.

Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history

What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills

A federal jury in Los Angeles on Tuesday ordered singers Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams to pay about $7.4 million to the family of Marvin Gaye, after finding the duo’s 2013 hit song “Blurred Lines” copied parts of Mr. Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up.”

only to compare “Blurred Lines” to the sheet music composition of “Got to Give it Up.” So the jury only heard a stripped down version of Mr. Gaye’s song, with his lyrics over a bass line and keyboards.

grounding in both theory and pedagogical application

current research,

Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle by Scott Edinger  |   9:00 AM January 17, 2013 Comments (78)         In my nearly 20 years of work in organization development, I've never heard anyone say that a leader communicated too much or too well. On the contrary, the most common improvement suggestion I've seen offered up on the thousands of 360 evaluations I've reviewed over the years is that it would be better if the subject in question learned to communicate more effectively. What makes someone a good communicator? There's no mystery here, not since Aristotle identified the three critical elements — ethos, pathos, and logos. — thousands of years ago. Ethos is essentially your credibility — that is, the reason people should believe what you're saying. In writing this blog I made an effort to demonstrate my ethos in the introduction, and here I'll just add that I have a degree in communication studies (emphasis in rhetoric for those who want the details) for good measure. In some cases, ethos comes merely from your rank within an organization. More commonly, though, today's leaders build ethos most

Blended learning, with its mix of technology and traditional face-to-face instruction, is a great approach. Blended learning combines classroom learning with online learning, in which students can, in part, control the time, pace, and place of their learning. I advocate a teacher-designed blended learning model, in which teachers determine the combination that's right for them and their students.

most of us would like to ascribe authority to sites and authors who support our conclusions and deny authority to publications that disagree with our worldview

Wikipedia’s guidelines for determining the reliability of publications. These guidelines were developed to help people with diametrically opposed positions argue in rational ways about the reliability of sources using common criteria.

defined by process, aim, and expertise.

remember books. Books challenge and improve memory

(The book will kill the cathedral, alphabet will kill images).

During the sixties, Marshall McLuhan wrote his The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he announced that the linear way of thinking instaured by the invention of the press, was on the verge of being substituted by a more global way of perceiving and understanding through the TV images or other kinds of electronic device

We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.

I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.

The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.

What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.

n contrast to others who are not as prone to divulge their feelings about their creative process

"Variation in style may have historical explanation but [End Page 94] no philosophical justification, for philosophy cannot discriminate between style and style."3

The testimonies of the composers concerned bear on questions about (a) the role of the conscious and the unconscious in music creativity, (b) how the compositional process gets started, and (c) how the compositional process moves forward

Primary and secondary appraisals formed theoretically consistent and reliable evaluations of threat and challenge. Secondary appraisals were significantly lower for students who viewed the performance as a threat. Students who viewed the performance as a challenge reported significantly less cognitive anxiety and higher self-confidence. Findings indicate that the PAM is a brief and reliable measure of cognitive appraisals that trigger precompetitive emotions of anxiety and confidence which can be used to identify those performers who could benefit from pre-performance intervention strategies to manage performance stress.

Music performance anxiety (MPA) can be controlled when musicians cognitively restructure their own thoughts and feelings about their performance by anticipating symptoms of anxiety and turning them to constructive use

The cognitive interpretation, or appraisal, of an initial emotional response, such as fear, exerts a proximal influence on performance

In a nutshell, COPPA requires operators of commercial websites, online services, and mobile apps to notify parents and obtain their consent before collecting any personal information on children under the age of 13. The aim is to give parents more control over what information is collected from their children online.

allow learners to solve relevant issues that matter to them

the team determined a specific goal that they wanted to accomplish by the end of the day

To guide the work time, we observed some classrooms and discussed what we noticed. Based on our goals, we set clear targets and some time boundaries to check in on progress.