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Articles

Each month, EDC posts several new feature articles. This page provides an archive of past articles, including reports of emerging research and profiles of new EDC publications and Web sites.

  • Remembering Nat Burwash

    Nat Burwash working with a teacher

    In our 40-year history of curriculum development, we’ve learned that designing good hands-on activities often means more than writing a sound lesson plan. Sometimes you also have to design innovative materials to put in the hands of learners—or, better yet, let the learners design the materials themselves.

  • Partnership to Increase Organ Donation

    About 65,000 U.S. patients are waiting for transplants—kidneys, hearts, livers, and lungs—to save or improve their lives. More than 4,000 patients—or 12-13 each day—waiting last year died because of the critical shortage of transplantable organs.

  • Making Skill Standards Work

    Beyond simple descriptions, well-developed skill standards provide a common language for employers, educators, and current and future workers in a wide variety of industries.

  • Romania Teacher Training Project

    As Lucia Gliga describes it, the traditional Romanian approach to teacher education was very straightforward: "If you were good at a subject, you would be a good teacher."

  • Teaching Middle School Students to Be Active Researchers

    Carlo, a New York seventh-grader, had composed several questions for an interview his class would conduct with a local cardiologist. He and his classmates were preparing the interview for their social studies class, but they had composed the questions in science class and role-played the interview in language arts.

  • Connected Geometry

    Elegance. Culture. Habits of mind. Such phrases are usually reserved for literature, philosophy, or fine arts. But in the case of EDC’s newest curriculum, they describe geometry. While covering the basics of high school geometry, Connected Geometry discusses ways to build elegant bridges among mathematical ideas, create a lively culture of mathematical investigation, and develop students’ abilities to inquire and think.

  • Promoting Equity for Girls and Women

    After RAP, the longest-running EDC project comprises our largest body of equity work: the Women’s Educational Equity Act Resource Center (WEEA). For more than two decades, the WEEA Resource Center has developed, published, and distributed innovative, gender-fair materials to teachers and education leaders around the country.

  • Community-Based Education for Latina Women

    Today, thanks to the efforts of EDC, 20 Latina mothers from Waltham, Massachusetts, are enrolled in a class that offers them not only English language instruction but also lessons in job readiness, social skills, community action, health, and self-esteem.

  • Living and Learning in a World of Diversities

    In the summer of 1960, reverend Solomon B Caulker, an African college administrator from Sierra Leone, travelled to Israel to attend an international conference on improving science education in developing countries. After listening to several papers on nuclear power, Caulker stood up to address the group.

  • Improving Student Health Through Community Service

    When adolescents have an opportunity to contribute and to be depended on, they can transform their lives, reinvigorate their education, and touch the lives of many in their communities. And a new EDC study has shown that some community service projects may directly benefit teenagers’ health.

  • Preventing Violence and Beyond

    Toward the end of the Live Talk discussion program that opened EDC’s recent violence prevention summit, the audience of 200 people grew silent as Sha-King Graham, 17, spoke about the police officer who had killed his sister.

  • "Injury Is Not An Accident"

    Written for public health practitioners and students, Injury Prevention and Public Health: Practical Knowledge, Skills, and Strategies works from the premise that in most cases “injury is not an accident”—not the result of unpredictable or unavoidable occurrences. Instead, most injuries are foreseeable events with known causes and risk factors—and are therefore preventable.

  • Twenty Years of Inclusion in the Head Start Classroom

    When Eleanore Grater Lewis began teaching, more than 40 years ago, it was very unusual to see a child with disabilities in a preschool classroom. “In those days, children with disabilities were largely excluded from any sort of preschool experience,” she explains. “Basically there were two options: Either they stayed home or they were institutionalized.”

  • A New Yard Stick

    The staff of EDC’s K-12 Mathematics Curriculum Center at EDC likes to think of their new book, Choosing a Standards-Based Mathematics Curriculum, as the “eyes, yardsticks, and noses” schools will use to evaluate and select a mathematics program that fits their needs.

  • Multichannel Learning Center: Ten Years of Sustained Involvement in Bolivia

    From the dry, wind-burned Andean villages where the altitude thins the air and turns the land to dust to the lush Amazon jungle regions of Bolivia, the educational story is often the same: the opportunities for learning are reduced by isolation and the demands of daily life. Thirty-eight percent of children under five suffer from malnutrition, which is associated with four out of five deaths in young children.

  • New EDC Book Helps Teachers Explore Students' Mathematical Thinking

    Al Cuoco might have added that there are things kids need to understand about mathematics that do not show up on the traditional mathematics tests. And that touches on a particularly difficult issue for mathematics educators today: How can we evaluate students’ understanding of mathematical methods and concepts as well as their command of specific skills? What new tools and strategies do we need? And what roles should teachers play in employing these tools and strategies?

  • New EDC Study Documents Use and Benefits of Community-Based Technology Centers

    Community-based technology centers narrow the "digital divide" between the technology haves and have-nots by providing computer access and education to the unemployed and working poor, according to a National Science Foundation (NSF)—funded report released this month.

  • Broadening the Definition of School Mathematics

    Al Cuoco, director of EDC’s Mathematics Initiative, and EDC Vice President Wayne Harvey, a mathematics education researcher, emphasize that improving mathematics education goes beyond a simple choice between traditional mathematics and mathematics based on the NCTM standards.

  • Promoting Equity in Science Education

    In a large conference room, several groups of adults gather around an assortment of batteries, copper wires, and light bulbs. Their task is to discover how many different ways they can illuminate the bulbs using only this rudimentary electrical equipment.

  • Excellence in Early Childhood Teaching

    A coalition of educators committed to supporting excellence in teaching, NBPTS has established nationwide teaching standards at all levels of preK-12 education. In 1994, NBPTS contracted with the Center for Children and Families (CC&F) at EDC to design, field-test, and implement an assessment process for early childhood teachers.

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