Op-eds & Policy Briefs
The Hidden Learning (Theories) of Stories
Stories promote sophisticated learning. So why are they disappearing?
Research-Backed Strategies to Engage Students on the Environment
How do you explain something that’s happening slowly and invisibly? Conversations are vital to understanding hidden threats, and photos offer a unique entry point.
Repairing Relationships
Studies show considering perspectives of others benefits us all — especially in the classroom
Here’s a Way Forward With Challenging Students
Giving teachers a chance to use their expertise can have stellar results.
Let’s Start Thinking about climate change as a modern educational problem—and solve it.
Framing this crisis differently could open up new solutions.
Stop Treating Teachers as Cheap Labor
US schools have suffered from a continued loss of teachers. The high turnover rate needs tackling. To do so, an approach that focuses on compensation, appraisal and networking (CAN) would lead to more teachers staying in the profession.
The Changing Climate for Social-Emotional Learning
Hunter Gehlbach seeks common ground in the value-laden questions that arise when we get deep into the heart of SEL.
We Must Raise the Bar for Evidence in Education
Educational policymakers and practitioners need to understand how study designs and research practices influence the reproducibility and credibility of a study’s findings. This is easier said than done, but there are a couple of initial indicators that suggest a research finding is “real” and worth implementing.
Weaning Educational Research Off Of Steroids
Hunter and Carly invite readers to wade into the weeds (only a little!), to see what research “on steroids” looks like and why it matters. By doing so, we hope to reveal possibilities for how educational practitioners and policymakers can collaborate with researchers to correct the problem and avoid making practice and policy decisions based on flawed research.
How My Mother Overcomes the “Mother of All Biases”
We often convince ourselves that even our most dubious, unsupported theories are correct. For this reason, some social psychologists view confirmation bias as the “mother of all biases.”
How Georgia State University Used an Algorithm to Help Students Navigate the Road to College
AI technology has come a long way — but what will it take for these automated tools to effectively replace human decision-making? In this piece, the authors discuss a research study conducted at Georgia State University in which an AI tool helped high school students with their transition to college. This study illustrates how combining data integration with artificial intelligence can benefit any institution that relies heavily on communication with multiple important stakeholders.
How Teachers Can Find the Time for Social-Emotional Learning
Social-emotional learning represents crucial skills and dispositions, but we already ask too much from our teachers. So how can we simplify their lives, without oversimplifying these complex ideas?
Overcoming the Biases That Come Between Us
Our capacity to discern the thoughts and feelings of others, particularly those who hold views different from our own, seems to have hit an all-time low. Yet, the picture isn’t all bleak. Burgeoning research identifies an array of cognitive biases—those predictable flaws in our thinking—as a root cause of our struggles to understand each other.
Small K-12 Interventions Can be Powerful
Do we really need any more comprehensive, costly initiatives to fix our most challenging problems?
How Learning About Commonalities Can Improve Student-Teacher Relationships and Boost Achievement at School
My colleagues and I investigated a way to improve teacher-student relationships based on the social-psychological tenet that people are more motivated to connect with others whom they perceive as similar. Our results show that when people learned that they shared beliefs and values, their relationships improved – and so did student achievement.
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