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majority of colleges in the United States use a single test to determine what courses incoming students are eligible to take

placement tests decide whether students are ready for college-level coursework or if they first need to re-take the fundamentals to prepare.

these placement tests aren't necessarily good predictors of success in college courses.

But after seeing ads from Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart appear next to racist, anti-Semitic or terrorist videos, its engineers realized their computer models had a blind spot: They did not understand context.

Now teaching computers to understand what humans can readily grasp may be the key to calming fears among big-spending advertisers that their ads have been appearing alongside videos from extremist groups and other offensive messages.

But the recent problems opened Google to criticism that it was not doing enough to look out for advertisers. It is a significant problem for a multibillion-dollar company that still gets most of its revenue through advertising.

Since citizens cannot cast informed votes or make knowledgeable decisions on matters of public policy if the information on which they depend is distorted, it is vital to American democracy that television news and other media be fair and unbiased.

the majority of Americans believe that the mass media slant reports in favor of the liberal position on current issues.

A reporter’s job is to present a balanced story.

Though Britain sent more than 9,000 students to the United States last year — more than ever before — and Germany sent about 9,300, both lagged behind Turkey, which has been sending more than 10,000 students a year to the United States since 2000.

demographics had much to do with the number of Turkish students on U.S. campuses. “There was a baby boom here from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, which is still just reaching the age to go to college,” he said. “Turkey expanded its own educational capacity a lot in the past 20 years. From a few dozen universities, the current figure is 164, and that number keeps growing. But it hasn’t grown fast enough to keep up with the demographic bulge.”

The highly competitive nature of admissions poses a problem for Turkish families, which traditionally place a strong emphasis on education.

an approach developed at Stanford's Graduate School of Education that's rapidly gaining adherents across the country

trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress

David Riesman spent the first half of his career writing one of the most important books of the twentieth century. He spent the second half correcting its pervasive misprision. “The Lonely Crowd,” an analysis of the varieties of social character that examined the new American middle class

the “profound misinterpretation” of the book as a simplistic critique of epidemic American postwar conformity via its description of the contours of the “other-directed character,” whose identity and behavior is shaped by its relationships.

he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there’s even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus.

The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University, found that when a white teacher and a black teacher consider the same black student, the white teacher is 30 percent less likely to think the student will graduate from a four-year college. White teachers, the researchers also found, are nearly 40 percent less likely to think their black students will graduate from high school

high-school graduation rates are lower for black students, the discrepancy has to do with unequal access to opportunity and resources, not innate ability. Black students are more likely to attend high-poverty schools with fewer resources, and to have less access than their white peers to advanced-placement courses

The College Board, a nonprofit corporation founded in 1926 to make higher education accessible to more Americans, introduced the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and, after World War II, the advanced placement (AP) test.

Students who score three of five points on the AP test are credited with completing a two-semester introductory college course in subjects like English, math and history. But revisions are coming, and they’re not going to result in better education.

Periodically, the College Board publishes new frameworks to alert schools to changes in AP tests. The latest American history framework has raised a raging controversy over what should be taught in AP U.S. history classes.

My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.

one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.

Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. In New Mexico, 43 percent of white students fell below “proficient,” along with 39 percent in Tennessee

“What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,” Cooke said. He explained to me that mnemonic competitors saw themselves as “participants in an amateur research program” whose aim is to rescue a long-lost tradition of memory training.

it wasn’t so long ago that culture depended on individual memories. A trained memory was not just a handy tool but also a fundamental facet of any worldly mind. It was considered a form of character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics. Only through memorizing, the thinking went, could ideas be incorporated into your psyche and their values absorbed.

all the other mental athletes I met kept insisting that anyone could do what they do. It was simply a matter of learning to “think in more memorable ways,” using a set of mnemonic techniques almost all of which were invented in ancient Greece. These techniques existed not to memorize useless information like decks of playing cards but to etch into the brain foundational texts and ideas.

Self-control, curiosity, “grit” — these qualities may seem more personal than academic, but at some schools, they’re now part of the regular curriculum.

Some researchers say personality could be even more important than intelligence when it comes to students’ success in school. But critics worry that the increasing focus on qualities like grit will distract policy makers from problems with schools.

A number of researchers have been successful in improving students’ conscientiousness, Dr. Poropat said in an interview. One team, he said, found that when elementary-school students get training in “effortful control,” a trait similar to conscientiousness, “it not only improves the students’ performance at that point in their education, but also has follow-on effects a number of years afterward.” Another study found that a 16-week problem-solving training program could increase retirees’ levels of openness.

Not being able to pronounce a name spells a death sentence for relationships. That’s because the ability to pronounce someone’s name is directly related to how close you feel to that person. Our brains tend to believe that if something is difficult to understand, it must also be high-risk.

companies with names that are simple and easy to pronounce see significantly higher investments than more complexly named stocks,

People with easier to pronounce names are also judged more positively and tend to be hired and promoted more often than their more obscurely named peers. 

Between May 2009 and January 2010, five Palo Alto teenagers ended their lives by stepping in front of trains. And since October of last year, another three Palo Alto teenagers have killed themselves that way, prompting longer hours by more sentries along the tracks. The Palo Alto Weekly refers to the deaths as a “suicide contagion.”

the contagion has prompted an emotional debate about the kinds of pressures felt by high school students in epicenters of overachievement.

the situation isn’t so different in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., where a separate cluster of teen suicides in recent years forced educators and parents to re-examine the messages they give teenagers, intentionally and unintentionally, about what’s expected of them and what’s needed to get ahead in this world.

results of testing he did in cooperation with Irvington High School in Fremont, Calif., a once-working-class city that is increasingly in Silicon Valley’s orbit. He had anonymously surveyed two-thirds of Irvington’s 2,100 students last spring, using two standard measures, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results were stunning: 54 percent of students showed moderate to severe symptoms of depression. More alarming, 80 percent suffered moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.

“This is so far beyond what you would typically see in an adolescent population,” he told the school’s faculty at a meeting just before the fall semester began. “It’s unprecedented.” Worse, those alarming figures were probably an underestimation; some students had missed the survey while taking Advanced Placement exams.

What Dr. Slavin saw at Irvington is a microcosm of a nationwide epidemic of school-related stress. We think of this as a problem only of the urban and suburban elite, but in traveling the country to report on this issue, I have seen that this stress has a powerful effect on children across the socioeconomic spectrum.

In July, the U.S. government announced a plan for Costa Rica to temporarily host up to 200 refugees from Central America while they are processed for placement in the U.S. or elsewhere.

The new scale and diversity of refugees is challenging tiny Costa Rica’s capacity to manage these populations and ensure protection of their human rights. The U.S. plan to send more refugees their way will only add to this challenge.

The plan for Costa Rica to temporarily house refugees is in addition to an existing program that helps Central American minors gain refugee status in the U.S.

The city’s Department of Education announced in February that it would stop testing students for its gifted program, which places top students in schools with curriculum designed for high academic achievement. Instead, preschool teachers will refer students for consideration.

Research has shown that teacher referrals tend to lead to fewer Black and Hispanic students’ qualifying for gifted programs, though Black teachers refer Black students more equitably.

gifted education is a vital service to help students with exceptional academic ability realize their full potential.

Kianna Ameni-Melvin’s parents used to tell her that there wasn’t much money to be made in education. But it was easy enough for her to tune them out as she enrolled in an education studies program, with her mind set on teaching high school special education.

“I didn’t want to start despising a career I had a passion for because of the salary,”

leaving teachers concerned for their health and scrambling to do their jobs effectively.

Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220

It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.

Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.

European plane maker Airbus EADSY -0.02% SE said Wednesday it plans to cut production of its flagship A380 superjumbo and A400M military transport aircraft, threatening thousands of jobs, though overall strong demand for airliners may mitigate staff cuts.

But Airbus’s A380 has missed out on the boom. Airlines worry that they won’t be able to fill an aircraft that seats more than 500 passengers. Plus, the superjumbo carries a price tag of $445.6 million before typical discounts,

Emirates Airline, the world’s largest by international traffic, in February signed an order for 20 A380s with an option for 16 more.