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A visit to the doctor can produce anxiety and confusion under the best of circumstances; when doctor and patient don’t speak the same language, misunderstandings can be dangerous. In a recent article in the American Translators Association (ATA) Chronicle, EDC researcher Maria-Paz Avery and her co-author Eduardo Berinstein describe recent efforts to develop a certification tool for medical interpreters in Massachusetts.
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In a one-room schoolhouse in northern Morocco’s Rif Mountains, forty young children between the ages of three and seven sit shoulder to shoulder on floor mats, reciting the Quran from memory. As they repeat after their teacher, sometimes in unison, sometimes individually, they join a centuries-old practice of training young children to commit Islam’s holy book to memory.
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In 1997, Lori Handrahan, a human rights teacher with the United Nations Development Programme in Krygyzstan, wanted to deepen her students’ understanding of the democratic process she was teaching. With permission from the university, she encouraged her students to design their own governing body.
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EDC has developed a series of discipline-specific guides that introduce and review a variety of standards-based curricula.
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It is fitting that Mildred Solomon named the book she edited The Diagnostic Teacher. In her two decades of work at EDC, she has researched and designed numerous professional education programs for teachers and health care professionals.
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Senator John Glenn credits his high school civics teacher with inspiring his lifelong interest in public service. Students today, Glenn says, are likely to receive similar inspiration from "an innovative teaching method for making civics lessons real for all students: service-learning."
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In a high school biology class, students are circulating the room, test tubes of clear liquid in hand. At a nod from their teacher, they exchange the contents of their test tubes with as many other students as they wish. Three minutes later, when the teacher stops them, she reveals that while all the test tubes looked identical, one originally contained an "infectious agent.
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In her years of research and collaboration with teachers, Deborah Schifter knows how difficult it is to change the way you teach. It’s particularly hard in mathematics, where prescriptive textbooks have provided a welcome crutch for many teachers.
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As the fourth largest state in the union, Montana extends to regions so sparsely populated students attend one-room schools staffed by teachers whose nearest colleague might be a hundred miles away. While news of education reforms may reach these rural teachers, opportunities to examine and discuss them with peers are rare. EDC’s Center for Science Education (CSE) wants to change that.
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Bernie Zubrowski has spent much of his professional life devising ways to educate young people when they are out in the world, away from the classroom. In more than 23 years with Boston’s Children’s Museum and other museums in the U.S., Great Britain, India, Sweden and Bahrain—and in several EDC projects—Zubrowski’s quest has led him to design activities that illuminate scientific principles with very simple materials.
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If you could design a fantasy machine, what would it look like? What might it do? For years, researchers at EDC’s Center for Children and Technology (CCT) have been asking that question and others like it to groups of children and adults. In the process of analyzing the responses, the researchers have discovered some distinct gender differences in the ways we think about technology.
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A new EDC study has found that training Head Start teachers to enhance literacy activities in their classrooms translates into measurable vocabulary gains for their students.
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In preschool classrooms around the world, children build structures with blocks, knock them over, and start again. In Cindy Hoisington’s Head Start classroom in Roslindale, Massachusetts, children also build with blocks. But before they get the pleasure of watching their structures tumble, her students are documenting what they’ve built. Sometimes they photograph the structures; sometimes they draw them with paper and pen; and sometimes they create small-scale replicas of their large structures with foam blocks and glue.
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Once taught primarily to college-bound students, algebra is now recognized as a critical “gateway” course for all students. “It’s considered the entrée into higher math, the hard sciences, even into university study itself,” explains Peter Braunfeld, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s become the difference between getting in and being left out.”
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EDC released a new study of community technology centers (CTCs). A longitudinal analysis of a dozen users over two years, it confirms that CTCs play an important and ongoing role in peoples’ lives. Participants quickly come to rely on the technical assistance, high-end equipment, and the social and educational opportunities the centers provide. Most users return regularly for additional support and training or as teachers themselves.
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This past summer, a group of science teachers from northern Illinois spent six weeks poring over student work from Japan, Germany, the Czech Republic, and six other countries. As part of an EDC online workshop, the Illinois teachers logged on to a website to review student work and accompanying commentary from teachers.
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The Making Health Academic project develops and disseminates coordinated school health and strong prevention strategies to administrators, educators, and policymakers around the country.
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A roundtable discussion featuring Judith Zorfass, associate director of the Center for Family, School, and Community; Glenn Kleiman, EDC vice president, and director of the Center for Online Professional Education; and Robert Spielvogel, EDC’s director of technology.
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Poor and minority students are disproportionately placed in special education programs, driving up district costs and holding back many children from a quality education.
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One of the first principles of universal design is that it is better to build flexible options into a curriculum at the outset rather than trying to retrofit the program after it is published. A corollary might be that even when you’ve built in flexibility, you never stop retrofitting to meet the needs of an ever-expanding universe of users.
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How do we know that a new approach works, adding to a practitioner’s knowledge, effectiveness, and ability? And if it does work, how can we use the model to reach more practitioners? These questions are central to two of EDC’s latest experiments with online professional development.
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Speech recognition technology is a relatively new word processing software. Rather than typing in your words, you speak into a microphone and the text appears on screen.
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At the heart of Project ASSIST is the action reflection process, a carefully structured, time-limited discussion format that focuses on the work of three students chosen by their classroom teacher to represent the range of students in his or her class.
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In school districts around the country, special educators are remaking themselves.
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Change comes slowly to Macon Ridge, Louisiana, a rural area spread out over 150 square miles in the northeast corner of the state. The region is home to five of Louisiana’s poorest counties—or “parishes,” as they’re known locally, a term that dates back to the days when Louisiana was still a French Catholic colony. But the slow pace of change in Macon Ridge is evident in more than just its nomenclature: Cotton, corn, and lumber are still the dominant industries in the
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In our introduction to this issue of Mosaic, we referred to Paulo Freire’s description of literacy as “reading the word and world.” That same phrase-with its dual emphasis on the concrete and the abstract—can be used to characterize EDC’s definition of mathematical literacy.
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One of the ironies—and challenges—of effective education is that in order to engage individual learners you have to look at the whole environment.
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Thomas Hehir, former director of the Office of Special Education Programs in the U.S. Department of Education and currently an EDC consultant, and Judith Zorfass, associate director of EDC’s Center for Family, School, and Community, discuss how changes in special education law and practice are transforming American schools.
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EDC is searching the country for middle schools that feature “academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, and social equity.” Would some of those same schools also earn high marks for inclusive practices?
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When Sara was in the first grade, her teacher discovered that she had weak writing skills. No matter what techniques they tried, the teacher saw no improvement. Throughout her elementary school years, Sara made little progress in writing and often felt embarrassed about her handwriting. On occasion classmates ridiculed her.
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.
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43 Foundry Avenue Waltham, MA 02453-8313, USA
Boston - Chicago - New York - Washington, DC