Rural districts are quicker to return to in-person learning

About 42 percent of rural school districts in the U.S. offered fully in-person instruction as of February, compared with only 17 percent for urban districts, according to a new RAND Corporation survey of school district leaders. The opposite pattern held for fully remote learning: 29 percent of urban districts offered fully remote instruction compared with 10 percent of rural districts and 18 percent of suburban districts.

The choice of in-person versus remote learning has important implications. More than one-third of all U.S. school districts offering some form of remote instruction in early 2021 had shortened the school day, and a quarter had reduced instructional minutes.

“This survey shows how the choice of remote instruction has ramifications that extend beyond longstanding concerns about the lower quality of remote instruction,” said Heather Schwartz, lead author of the report and director of the Pre-K to 12 educational systems program at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “Rural districts–which were primarily fully in-person or hybrid–did not decrease instructional minutes as often as urban districts, which means that urban students of color have likely lost more instructional time this school year than their white counterparts in rural districts.”…Read More

The top places to study video game design–for credit

Are you a high school student who dreams of inventing the next Wii or Kinect sensation, or the next “Call of Duty”? For the second year in a row, Princeton Review and GamePro Media, the publisher of GamePro magazine, a video-gamers’ bible, have joined forces to handicap what they consider the “Top 10” undergraduate and graduate programs in video game design, reports the Choice…

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How much do college students learn, and study?

While The Choice tends to focus on the process of applying to college, we also consider it within our mission to ask how much learning and studying students generally do once they enroll. A new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” (University of Chicago Press) by a professor at New York University and another at the University of Virginia, attempts to answer questions like these in a systematic way–and, as its title suggests, its findings suggest reason for concern. In the book, and in an accompanying study being released Tuesday, the authors followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at two dozen universities, and concluded that 45 percent “demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college.”

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Your college major may not be as important as you think

Many students encounter tremendous pressure from their parents to adopt “practical” majors, and I’ve talked to a handful of students whose parents flatly refused to provide for their educational expenses unless they majored in something career-oriented. With less than half of recent college graduates landing jobs that require a college degree, this concern is understandable, says Zac Bissonnette of The Choice for the New York Times. But it’s misguided. In recent years, research into the importance of choice of major has led to a surprising conclusion: it’s really not all that important. A study conducted by PayScale Inc. found that history majors who pursued careers in business ended up earning, on average, just as much as business majors. Ramit Sethi, a blogger and the author of “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” is also a fan of “impractical majors.” He studied in the Sciences, Technology, and Society Program at Stanford…

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