Only 54 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 are employed, according to the Pew Research Center. As unemployment among young adults grows, so does the amount of college-educated youth who decide to continue living with their parents. According to the article, “The Go-Nowhere Generation,” the number of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008.
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A new program in Baltimore aims to bring more technology to the classroom by bringing technologists, educators, and students together to become a community of technology trainers and experts, according to the article “Closing the Loop Between Students, Teachers, and Technologists.”
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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? 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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Some schools choose to ban technology, saying it’s not that complicated and kids will learn it later. Other classrooms fully embrace technology to open windows to new worlds, including their own. But for many schools, financial restraints make the choice for them. Recently a group of inner-city students from Los Angeles who were fated with a technology depleted school decided instead of accepting their circumstances, they should set out to to start a revolution and change them, according to the Mind/Shift article “Students Demand the Right to Use Technology in Schools.”
In 2011, an unprecedented study found 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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A few weeks ago I posted the blog “Students Take Charge of Learning in the New Classroom” where I asked which way you would rather learn how to change a tire. I gave two options.
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.
The average employee admits to spending two hours a day doing non-work related tasks, according to the New York Times article “Overwhelmed, And Prone to Procrastinate.” What are they doing? They’re watching YouTube, checking Facebook, Tweeting, Pinning, Stumbling, and doing anything else they can find that will keep them away from finishing that dreaded email, phone call, or next phase of their project.
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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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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.
Can you remember what it felt like learning new concepts in your college lecture classes? How many new concepts did you master in the duration of a one-hour lecture? How much did you remember about those concepts a week later? A year later? A decade later?
Cognitive researchers began making breakthroughs in understanding how the human brain processes and retains information in the 1970s and 80s, according to the article “Don’t Lecture Me: Rethinking How College Students Learn.”  When studying how much students learned in a lecture, they found people had very limited short-term memory that didn’t allow them to process all the information presented in a typical lecture. However, it’s 2012 and many college students are still attending lecture-based classes that require them to memorize facts, not understand concepts.