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EDC is working with 18 Boston-area towns to collect information on youth drinking and drug use and to help inform responses that will work.
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How should mathematics instruction change to fit the needs of students with learning disabilities? Fred Gross, principal investigator of EDC’s Addressing Accessibility in Mathematics, has been helping teachers across the United States answer this question.
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For many schools, it’s difficult to find the right combination of communication, compassion, and connection to help students who are struggling because of disabilities or ethnic or linguistic differences. While all schools are required to develop Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for students with disabilities, these programs often focus on addressing deficits and do not reflect the whole student or the family’s hopes for that child’s future.
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When communities set out to reduce teen alcohol and drug use, they are often hampered by a lack of understanding and denial about the problems. EDC is working with 18 Boston-area towns to collect information on youth drinking and drug use and to help inform responses that will work.
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It’s not easy to be a student in Somalia, a nation wracked by persistent violence. With 60 percent of residents fleeing Mogadishu, the capital, to live in camps, EDC and local teachers are working to ensure that learning continues. One key strategy is to reach into the camps with a regular schedule of educational radio programs.
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The typical science textbook is a dense read, presenting students with a highly specialized vocabulary and hundreds of new terms. For students with language-based disabilities, textbooks can be an insurmountable barrier to success in science.
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As schools in the Gulf Coast struggle to rebuild now more than two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region, a new initiative is infusing technology into seven districts in Mississippi and in New Orleans’ Jefferson Parish. EDC is a key research partner in this three-year, $41 million initiative by Cisco.
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Over the next 18 months, EDC will investigate how universities work with school districts to train principals, and which features of that partnership work best. The Wallace Foundation has awarded EDC $1.2 million to explore university-district preparation programs, using surveys, interviews, and observations to document the kinds of curricula, field experiences, and recruitment practices used in the programs.
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“Zanzibar is a small place, and everyone knows everyone,” reflects EDC’s Suzanne Simard. Recently, she has been spending a lot of time on this island, part of Tanzania and just off the east coast of Africa. There, she has worked with the Ministry of Education to pilot models for the development of Zanzibar’s first-ever system of public preschools. She and her colleagues are involved in every aspect of preschool startup—from developing curriculum to training teachers to distributing chalk and counting cubes.
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Because cystic fibrosis (CF) heightens risk of infection, teens are isolated from those who could give them much-needed support: other teens with CF. But now, with help from EDC, they will be able to connect via the Internet.
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Each year, there are 32,000 suicides in the United States—the equivalent of one every 16 minutes. As communities try to respond, more research and resources are emerging.
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For years, EDC trained African teachers on the basics of HIV prevention—consistently using a condom, for example, or asserting oneself in relationships. Yet teachers would return to environments where traditional gender roles did not support these behaviors.
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A Caribbean nation determined to address long-standing inequities in its education system is building a long-term national reform program on comprehensive research developed by an EDC team. The reform effort, led by the education ministry, aims to increase educational access and quality in Trinidad and Tobago.
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Like many school districts across the nation, Rochester, Minnesota, struggles to address the disparities in academic achievement among its students. Helping this city of 100,000 identify and address these gaps is the focus of new research conducted by EDC.
“We needed the school and community to see that addressing the gaps in education was important for all children, not just those of color and with disabilities,” says EDC’s David Riley.
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While pregnancy rates among teens in the United States have declined over the past decade, they continue to remain higher among Latinas than any other ethnic group. An innovative EDC teen pregnancy program, shown to be successful among English-speaking families, is now being tailored for Spanish-speaking communities.
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With 50 percent of students in Malawi dropping out of school by fifth grade, the Malawian government decided to try a new approach: it introduced an innovative national curriculum, which today is rapidly gaining in popularity among teachers and students alike.
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How can afterschool programs make the most of technology, meet the needs of diverse students, and achieve multiple program goals, all while staying within budget? A new online resource from EDC
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Before war ground business to a halt in the mid-1990s, Bosnia had been a vibrant center of engineering in Eastern Europe. Today, as the region rebuilds after years of conflict, unemployment rates top 50 percent, and the industrial sector is struggling to be competitive again on the world market.
“Bosnia has an emerging economy with huge opportunities,” says EDC’s Janice Brodman. “But most companies are working with outdated skills and tools.”
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No one knows how frequently children are left unattended in vehicles, but each year, several dozen young children across the U.S. die in parked motor vehicles from heat-related causes. There is no typical family affected by these tragedies. They occur to children whose parents are wealthy, and those who are not. They affect two-parent families, and those in which a parent is in jail or deployed overseas. Many of the children were strapped in their child safety seats when they died, indicating that parents were compliant with laws intended to protect their children.
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The director of EDC’s Sudan Radio Service, which broadcasts to that country from Nairobi, Groce had been on the scene during the election as part of a Sudanese voting observation team that included other journalists and government officials. With Sudan’s first national election scheduled for 2009, the team hoped to learn from Kenya’s experience. In February, Groce reflected on the election and its troubled aftermath.
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More than 80 primary schools and communities in Egypt are taking part in this two-year environmental education initiative. Known as the Egyptian Environmental Education and Outreach Program (E3OP), the initiative engages schools and communities in exploring environmental issues and introduces experiential, active-learning methods into Egyptian classrooms.
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Oceans may separate two communities in Jamaica and India that exist in the shadows of popular tourist destinations, but these communities are joined by the challenges they face in providing educational and economic opportunities for their youth.
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An EDC-sponsored after-school project where girls produce videos about careers in science and engineering recently received a donation of “flip cameras.” The cameras will enable the girls to produce Web-based personal vignettes in which they explore their dream careers.
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In the Umkhanyakude district of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, learning conditions are bare bones. As many as 100 students cram into a classroom in schools that have little water or electricity. Noises distract, from the wooden chairs against cement floors to rain hammering on the corrugated roof.
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Blogs, wikis, social networking sites—these and other online tools are rapidly becoming as familiar to students as pens and pencils. Now, a new EDC Web workshop is helping teachers keep up by enabling them to learn more about safe and effective use of these tools in the classroom.
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EDC researchers are analyzing what works in online professional development programs by studying Teachers’ Domain, a program for high school science teachers. Offered by PBS TeacherLine, the program uses science materials and multimedia resources to deepen teachers’ knowledge of science content and enhance their teaching skills.
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Chicago Public Schools—the third largest school district in the United States—is embarking on a comprehensive high school reform effort and has turned to EDC. A mathematics program developed by EDC will be a central part of the 100-high-school reform effort.
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Students who live in low-income, urban communities face a heightened risk of dropping out of school. Without a diploma, job opportunities are scarce. Lower literacy, poorer health, and reduced income all create more problems.
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Many Islamic schools in Ghana lag behind the formal education system. “They are resource-lean operations,” says EDC’s Helen Boyle. USAID Ghana and the Ghanaian government are drawing on Boyle’s expertise in Islamic education as they improve education across the country.
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In communities around the world, school fees can be so prohibitive for families that many students enroll late, drop out, or fail to attend at all. And when, as in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the government is not able to support the schools, communities and families must resort to creative ways of generating income so that children can attend school.
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.
Education Development Center, Inc.
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Boston - Chicago - New York - Washington, DC
43 Foundry Avenue Waltham, MA 02453-8313, USA
Boston - Chicago - New York - Washington, DC