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"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

"Students from some of England's worst-performing secondary schools who enrol on medical degrees with lower A Level grades, on average, do at least as well as their peers from top performing schools, a new study has revealed. The research also found that students from poorly performing schools who match the top A-Level grades achieved by pupils from the best performing schools, go on to do better during a medical degree."

"Not only do Montessori children do better overall than those in conventional preschools, but Montessori preschools help low-income children to perform as well as wealthier children Children in Montessori preschools show improved academic performance and social understanding, while enjoying their school work more, finds the first longitudinal study of Montessori education outcomes. Strikingly, children from low-income families, who typically don't perform as well at school, show similar academic performance as children from high-income families. Children with low executive function similarly benefit from Montessori preschools. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, suggests that well-implemented Montessori education could be a powerful way to help disadvantaged children to achieve their academic potential."

Is there a link between air pollution and student performance in K-12 schools? That's what University of Michigan researchers said they hope to discover as they embark on a three-year research project to determine correlations between air quality and performance benchmarks like absenteeism, test scores, and dropout rates.

We combine performance evaluation with a series mastery quizzes to lock in the essential concepts delivered by the tutorials. As an educator you'll have access to performance evaluation and mastery quiz data. You'll have an online record of each student's performance that can be downloaded for data analysis.

Inspired by UK Parliament debate secured by @karlmccartney MP - Click here to read tweets from the debate - the #UKEdChat poll this week established that the discussion will focus on the Educational Performance of Boys.

Students interact with music, movies, software, and other digital content every day-but many don't fully understand the rules surrounding the appropriate use of these materials, or why this should even matter. To help teach students about intellectual property rights and encourage them to become good "digital citizens," software giant Microsoft Corp. has unveiled a free curriculum that offers cross-curricular classroom activities aligned with national standards. The Digital Citizenship and Creative Content program was designed for students in grades 8-10 but can be adapted for use in grades 6-12, Microsoft says. In one unit, students are given a scenario in which a high school sponsors a school-wide Battle of the Bands. A student not involved in the production decides to videotape and sell copies of the show to students and family members. Later, one of the performers ("Johnny") learns his image has been co-opted by the maker of a video game without his permission. Students research intellectual property laws to see who owns the "rights" to the Battle of the Bands as a whole, as well as the rights of individual performers, to determine three or four steps that Johnny can take. http://digitalcitizenshiped.com

Questionnaires are an inexpensive way to gather data from a potentially large number of respondents. Often they are the only feasible way to reach a number of reviewers large enough to allow statistically analysis of the results. A well-designed questionnaire that is used effectively can gather information on both the overall performance of the test system as well as information on specific components of the system. If the questionnaire includes demographic questions on the participants, they can be used to correlate performance and satisfaction with the test system among different groups of users.

"The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release September 24, 2011 WEEKLY ADDRESS: Strengthening the American Education System WASHINGTON-In this week's address, President Obama told the American people that it is time to raise the standards of our education system so that every classroom is a place of high expectations and high performance. On Friday, the President announced that states will have greater flexibility to find innovative ways of improving the quality of learning and teaching, so that we can strengthen performance in our classrooms and ensure that teachers are helping students learn rather than teaching to the test. By modernizing our schools and improving the education system, the United States can continue building an economy that lasts into the future and prepare the next generation to succeed in the global economy."

Please tell parents that even losing an hour of sleep will impair their children. "The performance gap caused by an hour's difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. "A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development," Sadeh explains."

"In our school this year, we are focusing on raising the attainment of boys in relation to their female peers. This is by no means anything new; the gender gap is an entity that has plagued school results for as long as I can remember (and probably long before that). I should say that our boys perform better than national averages, but do not perform as well as the girls. You might be sat there in the same position. You've got an interesting situation in your school, where girls are outperforming boys, it features prominently on your School Improvement Plan (SIP), and you've read all the new books on the subject etc."

Contrary to popular belief, teenagers do not need less sleep than others. In fact, as they move through their teenage years, adolescents need increasing amounts of sleep - about nine hours nightly, as compared to eight hours needed by adults. Excessive sleepiness in teenagers and young adults is related to physiological changes during puberty. Yet, school starting times get earlier and earlier as students mature, despite the fact that puberty demands more sleep. This may have serious physical, mental, and social consequences for adolescents and negatively impact their academic performance.

One teacher reflects on how she feels "post-Wisconsin." Many teachers are hurting these days. "During my five years as a teacher I have learned that no matter what happens, the kids will be there the next day. They will show up and expect me to educate them, and they deserve that. There is little or no room to recover or wallow, and certainly no forgiveness in terms of wavers in classroom productivity and performance."

Commons from teachers who are heartbroken.

RAND Education and Sandler foundation recommends new measurements of school performance to federal government.

KeyCastr is a Mac OS X application that displays your keystrokes in a small floating window. It is intended to be used for screencasts or overhead projection, to emphasize what keystrokes need to be pressed when performing an action within an application.

"Charles Basch, a professor of health education at Teachers College of Columbia University, presented highlights from his research on the relationship between student health and achievement. Basch's research identifies major health risks that have a negative impact on learning, including asthma, teen pregnancy, poor vision and a lack of breakfast. "It's not a coincidence that children in the 5,000 lowest-performing schools are the same ones that experience the greatest health disparities," he said."

Surprising new research may rewrite learning theory as Brown University scientists contend that distractions do not necessarily impede the learning process of a motor task. Investigators discovered that if attention was as divided during recall of a motor task as it was during learning the task, people performed as if there were no distractions at either stage. Thus, the real issue is that inconsistent distraction can impair our recollection of the task. As long as our attention is as divided when we have to recall a motor skill as it was when we learned it, we'll do just fine, say the researchers.

"During a person's lifetime they will experience a variety of life events, both positive and negative. Negative life events, such as a loved one dying, tend to be researched more extensively than positive life events due to the damaging effects it could have on a person's life. Negative life events can induce a great amount of emotion and a person's reaction to these life events determines how they process the event and overcome it. When this processing is detrimental, emotional deficits can occur such as depression."