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A study to be released today by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum [cites] improvements in a range of literacy skills among students who took part in a program in which the Guggenheim sends artists into schools. The study, now in its second year, interviewed hundreds of New York City third graders, some of whom had participated in the Guggenheim program, called Learning Through Art, and others who did not.

Freakonomics is well-worth checking out. Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, keep the conversation going from their best-selling book that explores the hidden side of everything.

An explanation of the current nutrition facts label required by the FDA. Contains facts and statistics about the American diet and use of the labeling system.

Serving breakfast in the classroom rather than the cafeteria appears to remove the stigma attached to schoolchildren who qualify for low-income meals.

The Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit group behind the SAT, Graduate Record Examination and other college tests, has developed a new test that it says can assess students' ability to make good critical evaluations of the vast amount of material available to them.

The resurgence of a language once rejected as outdated and irrelevant is reflected across the country as Latin is embraced by a new generation of students

Hanging out online helps teenagers develop "technological skills and literacy," a researcher on a new study said.

The number of Americans studying in China increased by 25 percent last year, according to a new report.

So just which book "about F.D.R.'s first 100 days" was President-elect Barack Obama talking about when he appeared on "60 Minutes" on Sunday?

An article, based mostly on anecdotal data, that discusses college students' lack of "religious literacy."

An article that explains a debate that has raged for years in academic circles. When you read online, are you reading or skimming? Is the Internet killing reading or just helping students develop different skills?

This blog, published by Stephen Dubner, talks about financial literacy among high school students, and the problems in a dangerously low financial literacy level. He also helps diagnose financial literacy by offering a series of questions to test the reader's own financial literacy. It is a very useful article to use not only in studying the financial literacy of America, but also to diagnose yourself on your own financial literacy. The comments posted on the blog are also very informative of the reactions to the freakonomics blog.

This NYT article is about how the way we refer to and treat the elderly (calling them "dear" or speaking loudly to them, for example) can affect their health. Such studies have broader ranging implications. When we call others derogatory names, can it affect their health? Does using "baby talk" affect the language development of children? Do our assumptions about teenagers affect their intellectual development?

How the moving image is upending the printed word.

A study found that women still lag far behind men in top political and decision-making roles, though their access to education and health care is nearly equal.

The investigation by the attorney general appears to be focused on the adequacy of disclosure of policy terms and costs to students.

Complex diet regimens are starting to look like exotic mortgages and, just like a reliable savings account, good old calorie counting is coming back into fashion.

This essay is an overview of the theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, ideological, and power-related issues of world Englishes: varieties of English used in diverse sociolinguistic contexts. The scholars in this field have critically examined theoretical and methodological frameworks of language use based on western, essentially monolingual and monocultural, frameworks of linguistic science and replaced them with frameworks that are faithful to multilingualism and language variation. This conceptual shift affords a "pluricentric" view of English, which represents diverse sociolinguistic histories, multicultural identities, multiple norms of use and acquisition, and distinct contexts of function. The implications of this shift for learning and teaching world Englishes are critically reviewed in the final sections of this essay.

Over the last seven years, Jessie Little Doe Fermino, a member of the Mashpee tribe on Cape Cod, has been on a single-minded mission to revive the language of her ancestors, Wampanoag, the one that greeted the Pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth Rock and that gave the state of Massachusetts its name. But when she applied to the National Endowment of the Humanities for a grant to create a Wampanoag dictionary, she was turned down. The apparent reasons: the Wampanoag language has not been used in about 100 years, the known descendants of the original speakers number only 2,500 and Ms. Fermino is trying to make a spoken language out of a language that until recently existed only in documents, many of them from the 17th century.