Among other distinctions, Kristen DiCerbo can lay claim to being one of the first people on the planet to come face-to-face with the educational potential of generative artificial intelligence. In the fall of 2022, months before the public got a glimpse of ChatGPT, DiCerbo, a learning scientist and chief learning officer at Khan Academy, got...

Over the past few years, millions of educators have embraced the science of reading, in many cases radically transforming how the youngest students learn how to read. But a new book argues that the current approach remains deeply flawed. Though phonics instruction has emerged as a key component of reading lessons, stagnant NAEP scores, among...

Are U.S. public schools lagging behind other countries like Singapore and South Korea in preparing teachers and students for the boom of generative artificial intelligence? Or are our educators bumbling into AI half-blind, putting students’ learning at risk? Or is it, perhaps, both? Two new reports, coincidentally released on the same day last week, offer...

For more than a decade, Benjamin Riley has been at the forefront of efforts to get educators to think more deeply about how we learn. As the founder of Deans for Impact in 2015, he enlisted university education school deans to incorporate findings from cognitive science into teacher preparation. Before that, he spent five years...

Like many parents who homeschool their children, Jolene Fender helps organize book clubs, inviting students in her Cary, North Carolina, co-op to meet for monthly discussions. But over the years, parents have struggled to find good opening questions.  “You’d search [the Internet], you’d go on Pinterest,” she said. “A lot of the work had to...

In the annals of artificial intelligence, Feb. 16, 2011, was a watershed moment. That day, IBM’s Watson supercomputer finished off a three-game shellacking of Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Trailing by over $30,000, Jennings, now the show’s host, wrote out his Final Jeopardy answer in mock resignation: “I, for one, welcome our computer...

South by Southwest Edu returns to Austin, Texas, running March 3-7. As always, the event offers a wealth of panels, discussions, film screenings and workshops exploring emerging trends in education and innovation. Keynote speakers this year include Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone, Carol Dweck of Stanford University, who popularized the idea of “growth mindset,”...

As schools continue to recover from the pandemic, there’s one troubling COVID symptom they can’t seem to shake: record-setting absenteeism. In the 2021-22 school year, more than one in four U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of school days. Before the pandemic, it was closer to one in seven, the Associated Press reported, relying...

Artificial intelligence now has a daily presence in many teachers’ and students’ lives, with chatbots like ChatGPT, Khan Academy’s Khanmigo tutor and AI image generators like Ideogram.ai all freely available. But nearly a year after most of us came face-to-face with the first of these tools, a new survey suggests that few states are offering educators substantial guidance on how to...

Steven Van Zandt is not only one of the busiest men in show business. The composer, arranger, guitarist and longtime Bruce Springsteen sideman is also a transformational educator. A record producer and music historian, Van Zandt has been a member of two well-known rock bands: Springsteen’s legendary E Street Band and the influential Southside Johnny...