News

  • September 25, 2020

    Data science is a large and expanding field, and the issues it confronts vary greatly with each domain of application. To understand issues within each applied domain, one cannot simply read a book on education theory to comprehend it. Therefore, it is important to have a rich immersion and dialogue with the empirical domain. In doing so, one quickly realizes education is different from medicine, business, or the digital humanities. Not only are the problems of education different, but so are the ethical concerns, stakeholder interests, and the phenomena in question. To make data science of value to educational problems, there is a strong need for substantive immersion and dialogue across data science and education.

  • September 24, 2020

    Impact of School Learning Losses. Hoover Institute Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, has estimated that the lifetime economic cost of learning losses associated school shutdowns in the U.S. alone already exceeds $14 trillion.

    In short, mortality losses of $200 billion to $1 trillion evidently are only the tip of a sizable iceberg.

     

  • July 30, 2020

    Deborah Stipek, Ph.D., a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, said that may not be the right question to ask. “I think a more useful one is, ‘How do we ensure that our children get the best possible opportunities to learn under these challenging circumstances?’” she said.

    For preschoolers, that starts with prioritizing the crucial social-emotional skills that form the building blocks of learning, said Elisabeth Jones, a preschool teacher at the Child Development Center at Texas State University. When kids go back to school, she said, “they’ll be expected to wait their turn and share materials, and many aren’t getting the opportunity to practice that right now.”

  • July 27, 2020

    As the pandemic continues, families are preparing for a new school year in which distance learning is also likely to continue, at least to some extent. How can caregivers support their young ones' learning during this time of uncertainty?

    Jelena Obradović, an associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education and director of the Stanford Project on Adaptation and Resilience in Kids (SPARK), has compiled a series of tips to help caregivers support young children as distance learning resumes.

  • July 23, 2020

    Waiting can have benefits, particularly for children who have trouble self-regulating, said Thomas Dee, Ph.D., an economist who studies education policy at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Some research, including a study he conducted with Hans Henrik Sievertsen at the University of Bristol, suggests that holding off on formal schooling can give those children time to get better at controlling their behavior, handling emotions and pursuing long-term goals — as long as they spend the year in an intellectually engaging, developmentally appropriate, play-based environment, such as a high-quality preschool.

  • July 22, 2020
  • July 09, 2020

    The racial achievement gap on test scores between black and white students has narrowed in the past four decades, but remains at roughly two to four years of learning. Mr Pearman’s research has documented that poor neighbourhoods adversely affect students’ maths scores even if their schools are good. Black students who get to college are less likely than others to complete their courses; black men have an especially poor chance of making it to graduation. In 2016 only 29% of black adults above the age of 25 had an associate degree or higher, compared with 44% of white adults. At a time when the premium that a degree adds to lifetime earnings has increased a lot, this disparity is a big economic disadvantage.

  • April 08, 2020

    "Demand for higher education is surging in the digital economy we now live in, but the price of a college education has ballooned and we don't have enough people to teach these courses, especially in more rural areas," said Kizilcec, co-author of "Online Education Platforms Scale College STEM Instruction With Equivalent Outcomes at Lower Cost," which published April 8 in Science Advances. "This new study offers the best available evidence to judge whether online learning can address issues of cost and instructor shortages, showing that it can deliver the same learning outcomes that we're used to, but at a much lower cost."

  • February 06, 2020

    Students of color are suspended at disproportionately higher rates than white students and, on average, perform more poorly on standardized tests. But no peer-reviewed nationwide research has documented a link between the two disparities—until now.

    A new Stanford-led study published in AERA Open finds that an increase in either the discipline gap or the academic achievement gap between black and white students in the United States predicts a jump in the other. Similarly, as one gap narrows, so does the other. 

  • January 23, 2020

    Pearman examined neighborhoods in urban and suburban areas across the U.S. He considers a neighborhood as subject to gentrification if, in 2000, it had a low average household income and had seen relatively little new housing built in the previous decades. Then he examined whether, by 2014, a neighborhood had seen an influx of college-educated residents and an increase in real housing values

  • January 23, 2020

    While many studies have examined the impact of gentrification on urban neighborhoods and housing, relatively few have examined its effects on local schools.

    new study led by Stanford University’s Francis Pearman provides the first national evidence on patterns and relations of gentrification with respect to urban schooling, finding links between race, socioeconomic status and enrollment in neighborhood schools.

  • January 15, 2020

    “Socioeconomic disparities or characteristics are only rough approximations of the unique lived experiences of Black and Brown students,” says Dr. Francis Pearman, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University.

    “Those are the types of realities that can only be captured by way of policies, practices and procedures that acknowledge and foreground the role and reality of race in not only the students’ lives, but also campus life in general,” adds Pearman.

  • January 10, 2020

    The 2020 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings are unveiled and CEPA faculty and alumni* score high marks on the list. Of the 200 education scholars ranked, 12 faculty and alumni* made the list: Eric Hanushek, Martin Carnoy, Michael W. Kirst, Sean Reardon, Thomas Dee, Caroline Hoxby, Rob Reich, Jason Grissom*, Eric Bettinger, Daphna Bassok*, Eric Taylor*

  • December 05, 2019

    Across the country, states and school districts have devised their own systems of letter grades and color-coded dashboards based on test scores and graduation rates. But arguably the most visible and influential school rating system in America comes from the nonprofit GreatSchools, whose 1-10 ratings appear in home listings on national real estate websites Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin. Forty-three million people visited GreatSchools’ site in 2018, the organization says; Zillow and its affiliated sites count more than 150 million unique visitors per month.

  • October 28, 2019

    The first rigorous evaluation of one of the larger programs came out in October 2019 and found some promising results. Stanford University researchers studied a special class expressly for black teenage boys in Oakland, California, called the Manhood Development Program. They found that black boys were less likely to drop out of high school if the class was offered at their school compared to black boys at schools where it wasn’t offered. In a high school with 60 black boys in ninth grade, only three students dropped out, on average, instead of five students in schools that didn’t offer the course.

  • October 21, 2019

    A new study led by Thomas S. Dee, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), provides the first evidence that access to the program significantly reduced the number of black males who dropped out of high school. The study found smaller reductions in the number of black females who dropped out as well, suggesting a possible spillover effect.

    “Many historically marginalized students experience schools as highly alienating spaces,” said Dee. “The targeted design of this program, and the evidence of its impact, challenges us to radically reconsider how we think about promoting equity in education.”

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