Early Education » Carol J. Carter

Funding STEM Education: Corporations Give Big Money But Not Ideas

One-quarter of high school students drop out every year. Of the students who do graduate, two-fifths leave underprepared for college or career and fifty-seven percent leave not having mastered remedial math, according to a recentÂ Fast CompanyÂ article. Â These statistics are tragic, but anymore, they aren’t shocking. Today, there is a fight for better institutions, educators, leaders, technology, funding, parents, and students. The article goes on to share some statistics that show why the fight is more important than ever.
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Start Planning for a Summer of Learning

Summer vacation will be here before we know it, and while it is an exciting time for students to take a break from academia, it is also where students experience the largest learning losses. No student is safe from summer learning losses if their brains aren’t kept active throughout the summer months. However, students in lower-income families are generally at a much higher risk to suffer from learning losses which continues to increase the achievement gap between lower and higher income youth.
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Chess Helps Develop Critical Thinking Skills in K-12 Students

How do you use critical thinking in your adult life? Do you wish you would have had better critical thinking skills when you made a decision in your youth?Â How did you learn to think critically?

Critical thinking skills aren’t only for the classroom and opportunities to teach students critical thinking skills are by no means limited to classroom, either. In Oregon and Washington, students in kindergarten through high school recently played in the 46th annual Oregon Chess for Success state tournament. Chess for Success has participated in research that found chess can improve critical thinking skills, according to the article “Students learn more than checkmates with Chess for Success.”
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Crucial to Build Critical Thinking Skills in K-12 for College, Career and Life

In 2011,Â an unprecedented studyÂ foundÂ forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college. Many were stunned by the number of college students entering and graduating from college without critical thinking skills, a core 21st century skill necessary for making smart personal and professional decisions.
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Student Success Efforts Not a Priority for High Achieving Students

Student achievement is high on the priority list, but as more educators focus on helping underachieving students progress, overachieving students are being forgotten.
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More Females in STEM Fields Means More Innovation

As the demand for innovation increases and the number of innovators drop, making students proficient in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects has become a hot topic. Now that STEM has become a household acronym for many concerned parents and educators, more attention is being paid to the unbalanced ratio of boys to girls interested in STEM subjects and careers.

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Students Take Charge of Learning in the New Classroom

Of the following two options, which would be your preferred way of learning how to change a tire? Â Option 1: You attend a lecture on how to change a tire and then have to change your first tire in a real-life scenario. Option 2: You take a hands-on class where you learn about changing the tire by actually changing a tire. Then, you’re confronted with a real-life scenario. Which option do you think would have better prepared you for the real-life scenario when you need to change your own tire? New research would say option 2.
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The Popular Misconceptions of Learning

What does it look like when students are learning? Are they sitting quietly at their desks, listening to the teacher lecture, and scribbling notes? According to aÂ recent article in the Washington Post, those are three of seven misconceptions people have about how students learn.
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Bridging the Achievement Gap with Summer Reading

In recent years, closing the achievement gap has been high on the priority list. Among many signs, the achievement gap is evident in things like poor test scores and grades, higher dropout rates, and limited class participation. As legislation, educators, and parents look for ways to close the gap, improving literacy has proven to be a popular choice to tackle these problems.
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Going Global In the Classroom

With technology, students don’t need to leave the classroom in order to take a trip around the world. In November 2011, Edmodo, a social networking site, teamed up with Polar Bears International to send five people to the Tundra to film polar bears and stream webcasts straight to 1,700 classrooms around the world. Websites like Khan Academy, YouTube, and Stanford’s free online classes,Â have become highly accessible databases of knowledge available to people around the world. Social networking is being used in and outside of the classroom to extend the learning community for students after they leave school and for educators to connect with other teachers around the nation and world.
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