Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Accountability without autonomy is tyranny

When educational research reaches the public through the corporate media, the consequences are often dire, explains P.L. Thomas for the Daily Kos. Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff released “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood” and immediately The New York Times pronounced in “Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gains”. The simplistic and idealistic headline reflects the central failure of the media in the education reform debate…

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Use multiple news channels to reach ‘on-the-go’ consumers

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40 percent of 'on-the-go' news consumers are parents of young children.

School officials need to share information via a variety of media platforms in order to reach today’s “on-the-go” news consumers, a new study suggests.

According to the study from the Pew Internet and American Life project, while 99 percent of American adults access news daily, only 7 percent use just one media platform to do so. The majority—six in ten Americans—use a combination of online and offline sources.

This also means school communicators who haven’t expanded their efforts to include social media networks, micro sites, and other non-traditional methods probably are missing a significant swath of the population, particularly those under age 30.…Read More

Girls might learn math anxiety from female teachers

Having a female teacher who is anxious about math might reinforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls.
Having a female teacher who is anxious about math might reinforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls.

Young girls might learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers, new research suggests.

Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in some areas of math achievement, and the question of why has provoked controversy. Now, a study of first- and second-graders suggests what might be part of the answer: Female elementary school teachers who are concerned about their own math skills could be passing that concern along to the girls they teach.

Young students tend to model themselves after adults of the same sex, and having a female teacher who is anxious about math might reinforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls, explained Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago.…Read More