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Our Best Education Articles of 2022

Our most popular education articles of 2022 explore how to help students feel connected to each other and cultivate character strengths like curiosity and humility, amid the many stressors and pressures that young people are facing today. They also offer support for educators’ and school leaders’ well-being, and reflect on hopes for transformative change in education. 

If you are looking for specific activities to support your students’ and colleagues’ social and emotional well-being in 2023, visit our  Greater Good in Education  website, featuring free research-based practices, lessons, and strategies for cultivating kinder, happier, and more equitable classrooms and schools. For a deeper dive into the science behind social-emotional learning, mindfulness, and ethical development, consider our suite of self-paced  online courses  for educational professionals, including our capstone course,  Teaching and Learning for the Greater Good . Or join one of our new communities of practice that focus on educator well-being, offering space for rest, reflection, togetherness, and hope—and some science, too!

Here are the 12 best education articles of 2022, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.


Six Ways to Find Your Courage During Challenging Times , by Amy L. Eva: Courage doesn’t have to look dramatic or fearless. Sometimes it looks more like quiet perseverance.

Calm, Clear, and Kind: What Students Want From Their Teachers , by Jenna Whitehead: Researchers asked students what makes a caring teacher—and these same qualities may help support your well-being as an educator.

How to Help Teens Put Less Pressure on Themselves , by Karen Bluth: Self-compassion can help teens who are struggling with toxic perfectionism. Five Ways to Support the Well-Being of School Leaders , by Julia Mahfouz, Kathleen King, and Danny Yahya: Burnout rates are high among principals. How can we fight burnout and promote self-care?

How to Help Your Students Develop Positive Habits , by Arthur Schwartz: Small habits repeated regularly can help students cultivate character strengths like patience, gratitude, and kindness.

Can We Make Real, Transformative Change in Education? , by Renee Owen: A new program is preparing leaders to facilitate systemic change in education in order to better serve all students.

Five Ways to Help Students Feel Connected at School Again , by Jennifer de Forest and Karen VanAusdal: According to students themselves, they are yearning for opportunities to connect with friends and peers as they head back to school.

How to Prepare for the Stresses of College , by Erin T. Barker and Andrea L. Howard: Researchers explain the most common causes of stress and distress at college, and what students can do to thrive during a big life transition.

How Humility Can Make Your Students the Best People Ever , by Vicki Zakrzewski: Simple ways for educators to help students move from “me” to “we.”

Four Ways to Inspire Humble Curiosity in Your Students , by Amy L. Eva: Humility and curiosity can encourage students to be passionate about learning and open to others’ perspectives.

What Middle Schoolers Can Teach Us About Respect , by Sara E. Rimm-Kaufman and Lia E. Sandilos: Teens are developing a nuanced understanding of what respect means. Here are some ideas for cultivating more of it in the classroom.

Why Teachers Need Each Other Right Now , by Amy L. Eva: Here are four simple ways to find social support as an educational professional.

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Best Education Articles of 2020: Our 20 Most Popular Stories About Students, Remote Schooling & COVID Learning Loss This Year

This is the latest roundup in our “Best Of” series, spotlighting top highlights from this year’s coverage as well as the most popular articles we’ve published each month. See more of the standouts from across 2020 right here .

A ny student will forever remember 2020 as the year that the classrooms and campuses closed down. As coronavirus cases surged in the spring — and then again in the autumn — educators, families and district leaders did their best to pivot to a socially-distanced Plan B, building a new system of remote instruction overnight in hopes of maintaining learning and community.

Any education journalist will remember 2020 as the year that all the planned student profiles, school spotlights and policy investigations got thrown out the window as we scrambled to capture and process the disorienting new normal of virtual classrooms. Here at The 74, our top stories from the past nine months were dominated by our reporting in this area, by features that framed the challenges and opportunities of distance learning, that surfaced solutions and innovations that were working for some districts, and that pointed to the bigger questions of how disrupted back-to-back school years may lead to long-term consequences for this generation of students.

As we approach the new year, we’re continuing to report on America’s evolving, patchwork education system via our coronavirus education reporting project at The74Million.org/PANDEMIC . With school campuses open in some states and not others, with some families preferring in-person classes or remote learning alternatives, and with some individual classrooms being forced to close in rolling 14-day increments with new coronavirus breakouts, it’s clear that our education system will begin 2021 in a similar state of turmoil. (Get our latest reporting on schools and the pandemic delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for The 74 Newsletter )

But with the first vaccines being administered this month, we’re seeing our first glimpse of a light at the end of this chaotic tunnel — hope that the virus will quickly dissipate, that schools will fully reopen, and that we’ll then find a way to help all of America’s 74 million children catch up. Here are our 20 most read and shared articles of the year:

New Research Predicts Steep COVID Learning Losses Will Widen Already Dramatic Achievement Gaps Within Classrooms / By Beth Hawkins

Learning Loss: In the days immediately following the pandemic-related closure of schools throughout the country this past spring, researchers at the nonprofit assessment organization NWEA predicted that whatever school looks like in the fall, students will start the year with significant gaps. In June, they also began warning that the already wide array of student achievement present in individual classrooms in a normal year is likely to swell dramatically . In 2016, researchers at NWEA and four universities determined that on average, the range of academic abilities within a single classroom spans five to seven grades, with one-fourth on grade level in math and just 14 percent in reading. “All of this is in a typical year,” one of the researchers, Texas A&M University Professor Karen Rambo-Hernandez, told Beth Hawkins. “Next year is not going to look like a typical year.” Read the full story .

The issues of ‘COVID Slide’, learning loss and classroom inequity appeared regularly on the site through 2020. A few other notable examples from the year:

— Even Further Ahead: New data suggest pandemic may not just be leaving low-income students behind; it may be propelling wealthier ones even further ahead ( Read the full story )

— Teaching Time: How much learning time are students getting? In 7 of America’s largest school districts, less than normal — and in 3, they’re getting more ( Read the full story )

— Missing Students: Lost learning, lost students — COVID slide is not as steep as predicted, NWEA study finds, but 1 in 4 kids was missing from fall exams ( Read the full story )

— Learning Loss Research: Students could have lost as much as 232 days of learning in math during first four months of largely virtual schooling ( Read the full story )

— What History Tells Us: What lasting academic (and economic) effects could coronavirus shutdowns have on this generation of students? Some alarming data points from research on previous disasters ( Read the full analysis )

Parents (and Lawyers) Say Distance Learning Failed Too Many Special Education Students. As Fall Approaches, Families Wonder If Their Children Will Lose Another School Year / By Linda Jacobson

Special Education: A number of special education parents said their children didn’t receive services during school closures in the spring. That’s why, as Linda Jacobson reported over the summer, organizations such as the School Superintendents Association believed lawsuits and due process complaints were on the horizon, and that’s why they asked Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to waive federal special education laws as long as schools are trying to teach students remotely . But experts warned The 74 that there’s no proof districts are facing more complaints than usual and that as long as districts communicate frequently with families they’re more likely to avoid complaints — even if schools remain closed. Boston University’s Nathan Jones, an expert on special education, also stressed that going into this fall, it was important to focus on strong academic interventions to help students regain what they’ve lost. Read the full story .

— From March: ‘Absolutely, I’m worried’ — For children with special needs, unprecedented coronavirus school closures bring confusion, uncertainty ( Read the full story )

When the Point of the Pod Is Equity: How Small Grants Are Empowering Parents of Underserved Students to Form Pandemic Microschools / By Beth Hawkins

Remote Learning: A six-child school with a focus on Black girl magic. Bilingual materials for a living-room preschool in an English-only state. Lessons rich with art and self-expression for six foster kids. A curriculum built for kids affected by incarceration. The first round of microschool grants announced by the National Parents Union are nothing like the pandemic pods described in one news story after another last summer: Wealthy parents banding together to hire a teacher or take turns overseeing distance learning. The young organization’s inaugural grants were intended to support families often failed by traditional schools , so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that many of the winning proposals center on celebrating underserved students’ heritage or meeting specific, frequently overlooked needs. Beth Hawkins talks to several grantees about their kids and their plans. Read the full story .

— Case Study — Pods to Augment Remote Learning: In parks, backyards and old storefronts across Los Angeles, small groups offer children some of what they’ve lost in months of online instruction ( Read the full feature )

How Missing Zoom Classes Could Funnel Kids into the Juvenile Justice System — And Why Some Experts Say Now is the Time to Reform Truancy Rules / By Mark Keierleber

Discipline: In communities across the country, social workers are walking door to door in search of millions of students their schools have deemed “missing” — a stark reality as districts combat an absenteeism crisis amid the coronavirus pandemic. Despite longstanding “compulsory education” laws that require students to attend school or face punishment — including fines and incarceration in some states — many districts have avoided pushing students into the juvenile justice system for truancy during the pandemic. But as growing evidence suggest that such an approach is counterproductive, some experts worry about what could come next . “Pretty soon, I think that folks are going to start relying on the stick more than they have been,” said Rey Saldaña, CEO of the nonprofit Communities in Schools. “That’ll be the completely wrong conversation to have because these students don’t need truancy court, they don’t need fines.” Rather than being willfully defiant, truant students are often suffering from homelessness or violence, he said. “They need interventions, they don’t need to be seen by a judge.” Read the full report . 

— Related: Research shows changing schools can make or break a student, but the wave of post-COVID mobility may challenge the systems in ways we’ve never seen ( Read the full report ) 

— School Finance: Phantom students, very real red ink — Why efforts to keep student disenrollment from busting school budgets can backfire ( Read the full story )

— Disenrollment: As families face evictions & closed classrooms, data shows ‘dramatic’ spike in mid-year school moves ( Read the full story ) 

— Catholic Schools: A glimmer of hope in pandemic for nation’s ailing Catholic schools, but long-term worries persist ( Read the full story )

DeVos on the Docket: With 455 Lawsuits Against Her Department and Counting, Education Secretary is Left to Defend Much of Her Agenda in Court / By Linda Jacobson

Department of Education: No education secretary has ever been sued as much as Betsy DeVos. In four years, over 455 lawsuits have been filed against either DeVos or the U.S. Department of Education, according to The 74’s analysis of court filings and opinions. Many of the cases, involving multiple states and advocacy organizations, were filed in response to Trump administration moves to reverse Obama-era rules in the areas of civil rights and protections for student loan borrowers. DeVos has always been outspoken about lightening Washington’s footprint in education. But in her department’s effort to grab what one education attorney called “quick political wins,” judges — even Trump appointees — are finding flaws in its approach. One exception might be the revised Title IX policy, which has already sparked four lawsuits, but might be hard for a future administration to tear down. Linda Jacobson has the story .

A 2020 EDlection Cheat Sheet: Recapping the 48 Key Races, Winners and Campaign Issues That Could Reshape America’s Schools and Education Policy / By The 74 Staff

EDlection: A first-ever ballot proposition on sex education in Washington state that critics decried as “school porn” but voters approved. A school board election in New Orleans, in part a referendum on closing failing schools, that remained largely undecided the week after Election Day. A victory by former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, whose education background runs deep and who is one of the few Democrats to unseat a GOP incumbent for U.S. Senate. While a historic presidential race — and a test of our democracy — fixated the nation, education was on the ballot this unprecedented election cycle . Elected officials, particularly at the state level, will play a pivotal role in steering schools through the public health and economic crises of the pandemic. That’s why we’ve curated 48 federal, state and local races with key implications for students, teachers and families. Here’s the full rundown of the 2020 votes that mattered most to education, plus a full archive of our Election Week livechat, which included rolling updates on candidates, votes and the national conversation. Read the full roundup .

As COVID Creeps into Schools, Surveillance Tech Follows / By Mark Keierleber

Student Privacy: When an Ohio school district saw a “significant increase” in COVID-19 cases among students and staff, officials made the difficult call of reverting to remote learning. But when kids return to class, they’ll be wearing badges that will track their every move — part of a pilot program in contact tracing that allows the Wickliffe district to follow students for up to a month and identify who comes into contact with infected classmates. The badges and other high-tech gizmos, including UV light air purifiers and thermal-imaging cameras that purport to detect fevers, have come under fire from student privacy advocates. But company executives and school leaders made clear they’re not likely to go away anytime soon — even after the pandemic subsides . “After the initial pushback, people are going to adapt and deal with it,” Superintendent Joseph Spiccia told The 74’s Mark Keierleber. “Some people would be angry, and after that anger dissipates, I think people generally will end up complying and falling in line.” Read the full story .

— Case Study: ‘Don’t get gaggled’ — Minneapolis school district spends big on student surveillance tool, raising ire after terminating its police contract ( Read the full story )

An Education System, Divided: How Internet Inequity Persisted Through 4 Presidents and Left Schools Unprepared for the Pandemic / By Kevin Mahnken

Student Access: When the COVID-19 pandemic spread into American communities, schools adapted by switching to online classes. But millions of families with no or limited home internet can’t manage that transition, drastically diminishing educational opportunities for the students who need them most. Local leaders have embraced creative solutions, loaning out thousands of devices and dispatching Wi-Fi-equipped school buses into low-connectivity neighborhoods. But the question remains: Three decades after the internet’s emergence as a boundary-breaking technology, how are vast swaths of the United States still walled off from the social, economic and educational blessings that the internet provides ? The answer, told to The 74 by experts and policymakers who have worked around communications access since the birth of the internet, implicate both the public and private sectors in a prolonged failure to extend the benefits of modern technology to countless Americans. “I think the large-scale tolerance for inequity in this country gave rise to an inequitable telecommunications system,” said one. Read Kevin Mahnken’s report .

New Poll Reveals Parents Want One-on-One Distance Learning Support From Teachers — but Aren’t Getting Much of It / By Beth Hawkins

Parent Priorities: Polling data released this past May from the national nonprofit Learning Heroes found parents were engaged in their kids’ distance learning but wanted more contact with teachers, both for their kids and for themselves as at-home learning coaches. Nearly half of more than 3,600 parents surveyed said personal guidance would be extremely helpful, but just 15 percent have gotten it . Only 39 percent said they had a clear understanding of teachers’ expectations, and few were getting the texts and phone calls they said are the most effective means of communication. The poll illustrated new implications of a longstanding, fundamental lack of information, which previous Learning Heroes surveys have found feeds parents’ near-universal belief that their children are doing far better in school than they really are. As schools plan for eventual reopening, Learning Heroes President Bibb Hubbard told Beth Hawkins, they should carefully consider what parents say is working for them — because while families are giving schools and teachers the benefit of the doubt now, that may not last. “There’s a lot of grace right now,” Hubbard says. “But I think that’s going to change next fall.” Read the full report .

Displaced: The Faces of American Education in Crisis / By Laura Fay, Bekah McNeel, Patrick O’Donnell & Taylor Swaak

Displaced: No two experiences of this pandemic have been the same, particularly when it comes to school communities. When we launched this project in late May, it had been several months since COVID-19 shuttered districts across the country. In what would have been the final months of the 2019-20 academic year, tens of millions of students, educators and parents saw their lives upended overnight. Still half of America’s school employees aren’t teachers. When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, millions of other workers integral to the American education system were similarly uprooted . As the country (and its school communities) continued to navigate its way through a disaster for which it was grossly unprepared, a team from The 74 set out to track how life and work has changed for the diverse universe of characters who make our classrooms work. From parents to teachers, counselors and even district warehouse managers, the pandemic has been a time of unprecedented hardships and challenges. Here: Eight faces and unforgettable stories from across the country that begin to capture the real story of the pandemic’s impact on the wider community. See all eight profiles .

New Report Estimates School Closures’ Long-Term Impact on the U.S. Economy at More Than $14 Trillion / By Linda Jacobson

Skills Gap: A paper from economists Eric Hanushek of Stanford University and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich presents a sobering prediction of how school closures could impact the U.S. economy for the next 80 years. The paper estimates that the shutdowns could ultimately lead to losses ranging from $14.2 trillion for a third of the school year to almost $28 trillion for two-thirds . That’s because “learning loss will lead to skill loss, and the skills people have relate to their productivity,” writes international education expert Andreas Schleicher, of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S., Schleicher said, was actually better positioned than many other nations to make the transition to remote learning. But looking ahead, he said the country could do a better job of directing education spending toward quality instruction and the students who need resources the most. Read our full report .

Exclusive: NYC Teachers Union Launches Its Own Investigation of School Building Air Quality Amid COVID Threat, UFT President Says / By Zoë Kirsch

School Safety: Looking to spur the New York City Department of Education to take preventative action on airborne COVID transmission in schools, the United Federation of Teachers announced this past summer that it was taking the longstanding issue of poor ventilation into its own hands. President Michael Mulgrew told The 74’s Zoë Kirsch in an exclusive interview this past August that the union was sending its own health and safety workers into 30 “red flag” schools with the worst ventilation systems to do their own air quality testing. The move came as the UFT escalated its criticism of the city’s school reopening plan, saying it failed to meet student and staff safety standards on several fronts. Less than half of New York City’s roughly 1,400 school buildings are equipped with heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, which maintain indoor air quality. “One of the biggest risk factors is time spent in underventilated spaces indoors. You want to control the emissions and removal,”said Joseph Allen, who runs the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health and estimates that 90 percent of U.S. schools are underventilated. A 2000 NYC report said, “The UFT receives more complaints from its members about poor indoor air quality in schools than about any other health and safety issue.” Read the full report .

Texas’s Missing Students: Weeks After Closures, Schools in San Antonio Still Couldn’t Locate Thousands of Kids. How One Band Director Finally Tracked Down His Musicians / By Bekah McNeel

Absenteeism: In its race to locate every student before school adjourned for summer, San Antonio Independent School District relied on faculty members like high school band director Alejandro Jaime Salazar to track them down. It became a daily task for Salazar, as he used every tool at his disposal and relied on relationships forged before coronavirus shut the schools . That included asking student section leaders to make contact with other kids. Once located, Salazar said, “my main priority was to keep in contact with these kids every day.” He and other educators told The 74’s Bekah McNeel that the hunt for “missing” students revealed the increasing importance of student-teacher connection, engagement and relationships. Read the full profile .

The Achievement Gap Has Driven Education Reform for Decades. Now Some Are Calling It a Racist Idea / By Kevin Mahnken

Equity: For decades, education policy has been shaped largely by an extended discussion of racial achievement gaps, and the lingua franca of that discourse is testing data. A reform coalition of educators, politicians and activists has labored to narrow the academic disparity between white students and students of color, placing the goal at the heart of media debates and state accountability plans alike. But in recent years, influential figures have begun to shift away from the achievement gap. Some say it’s more responsible to focus on resource disparities between student groups, even if standardized testing is still a necessary component in school improvement efforts; others go even further, arguing that the notion of an achievement gap is a racist throwback to the age of eugenics . As reformers choose whether to preserve or abandon the idea, some in the Democratic Party — including former educator and soon-to-be-congressman Jamaal Bowman — have grown louder in their calls to abolish high-stakes testing. Read the full report .

New Data: College Enrollment for Low-Income High School Grads Plunged by 29% During the Pandemic / By Richard Whitmire

Higher Education: Author and 74 contributor Richard Whitmire describes the cratering of college enrollment rates among 2020 high school graduates as a tragedy whose outline is just becoming visible. That picture grew clearer and more distressing in December with the release of new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center showing college enrollment declined for low-income students at nearly double the rate of higher-income students — 29.2 percent versus 16.9 percent. The decrease for all 2020 high school grads, measured for the first time since COVID-19 wreaked havoc on the nation’s schools, is also alarming: a nearly 22 percent drop this year versus a 2.8 percent drop for the class of 2019. The crucial difference, Whitmire writes, is that those from more affluent and middle-class backgrounds will likely make their way back to college once the pandemic subsides, while the trajectory for low-income students may have changed forever. Read the full report .

A Time of Reckoning for Race & Education in America: 5 Case Studies in How Students and School Leaders Are Pushing for Culturally Relevant Curriculum Amid the Pandemic / By Emmeline Zhao

Curriculum: The American education system was not designed to operate — much less thrive — without physical, in-person interaction. And when the novel coronavirus forced indefinite emergency school closures this spring, concern ballooned over how to educate America’s 74 million school-age children from afar. That, coupled with this summer’s protests demanding social justice, led The 74’s Pandemic Reporting Initiative to dispatch correspondents across the country to take a hard look at how existing curricula may not be conducive to closing the achievement gap , particularly from afar; how some schools are addressing these issues to adapt to changing times and challenging learning circumstances; and how educators are tackling these tough but critical issues. Read our full series that dives into curriculum in light of the pandemic and social justice movement, with reports out of New York, New Orleans, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, D.C. See the full series here .

Youth Suicide: The Other Public Health Crisis / By Mark Keierleber

Mental Health: Brad Hunstable believes his son died of the coronavirus — just not in the way one might expect. As COVID-19 shuttered schools nationwide and put students’ social lives on pause, Hayden committed suicide just days before his 13th birthday. His father blames that pandemic-induced social isolation — and a fit of rage — for his son’s death. Though the national youth suicide rate has been on the rise for years, students say the unprecedented disruption of the last few months has taken a toll on their emotional well-being . Researchers worry that a surge in depression and anxiety could drive a spike in youth suicide. Sandy Hook Promise, which runs an anonymous reporting tool, has seen a 12 percent increase in suicide-related reports since March. The issue became a political football ahead of this year’s election, with President Donald Trump and others citing rising rates of depression and suicide as reasons to relax COVID-19-related restrictions on in-person classes. Read the full report .

Using Tutors to Combat COVID Learning Loss: New Research Shows That Even Lightly Trained Volunteers Drive Academic Gains / By Kevin Mahnken

Personalized Learning: With a return to full-time, in-person schooling still weeks away in many areas, families are searching for any solution to deal with their children’s COVID-related learning losses. Now, a working paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that tutoring programs — whether led by certified teachers, paraprofessionals, even parents — could play a significant role in getting students back on track . It’s a strategy that has already been embraced by parents blessed with the money and bandwidth to create small-scale learning pods, but experts suggest that supplementary instruction could be scaled up dramatically through the use of lightly trained volunteers and virtual learning platforms. Still, both the cost and the organizational challenges of expanding tutoring are great. “The logistics of setting this up on the kind of scale we need to to address the problem is more complicated than we initially realized,” said co-author Philip Oreopoulos of the University of Toronto. Read the full report .

Cleveland Schools Considering Bold Plan to Confront Coronavirus Learning Loss: A ‘Mastery’ Learning Initiative That Would Scrap Grade Levels, Let Kids Learn at Own Pace / By Patrick O’Donnell

Mastery Education: At the beginning of the summer, educators were grappling with the fact that when students come back to school, they will be at vastly different academic levels. So how can schools fairly decide which grade kids should be in? They can’t, said Cleveland school district CEO Eric Gordon — and maybe they shouldn’t try. His draft plan for reopening the district’s schools would instead put students in multi-age “grade bands,” under a mastery approach that lets them work at their own speed. Students would then have time to relearn skills they have lost and catch up without feeling like failures or being held back a grade. “We’ve got opportunities here to really test, challenge and maybe abandon some of these time-bound structures of education that have never really conformed to what we know about good child development,” Gordon said. Read the full report .

When Siblings Become Teachers: It’s Not Just Parents Who Find Themselves Thrust Into the Demanding Role of At-Home Educators / By Zoë Kirsch

Homeschooling: When the pandemic shuttered New York City schools, 22-year-old Lillian Acosta of Queens found herself suddenly relating to the experiences of her co-workers with kids, as they talked about the challenges inherent in remote learning. Lillian isn’t a parent, but for the last few weeks, she’s been assuming the responsibilities of one , spending hours a day — and paying $90 a day to a tutor — to make sure her 14-year-old brother gets through school. She isn’t alone: In Brooklyn, 17-year-old Melisa Cabascango coaches her little brother, and in the Bronx, Sarshevack “Sar” Mnahsheh sets up a makeshift classroom in his family’s apartment every morning. “I try to wake up early enough to check up on the little things,” says Sar, who works the night shift at a local grocery store. “I don’t try to be overbearing because I’m not a parent, but I have to make sure they’re up to par on the things they’re doing.” Lillian, Melisa and Sar are working overtime to fill the gap between what their siblings need and what the district is providing in this moment of crisis. They’re three of thousands of young people who are shouldering that burden in cities and towns across the country — and those in low-income communities of color are getting hit the hardest. Read the full feature .

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The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2021

From reframing our notion of “good” schools to mining the magic of expert teachers, here’s a curated list of must-read research from 2021.

It was a year of unprecedented hardship for teachers and school leaders. We pored through hundreds of studies to see if we could follow the trail of exactly what happened: The research revealed a complex portrait of a grueling year during which persistent issues of burnout and mental and physical health impacted millions of educators. Meanwhile, many of the old debates continued: Does paper beat digital? Is project-based learning as effective as direct instruction? How do you define what a “good” school is?

Other studies grabbed our attention, and in a few cases, made headlines. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University turned artificial intelligence loose on some 1,130 award-winning children’s books in search of invisible patterns of bias. (Spoiler alert: They found some.) Another study revealed why many parents are reluctant to support social and emotional learning in schools—and provided hints about how educators can flip the script.

1. What Parents Fear About SEL (and How to Change Their Minds)

When researchers at the Fordham Institute asked parents to rank phrases associated with social and emotional learning , nothing seemed to add up. The term “social-emotional learning” was very unpopular; parents wanted to steer their kids clear of it. But when the researchers added a simple clause, forming a new phrase—”social-emotional & academic learning”—the program shot all the way up to No. 2 in the rankings.

What gives?

Parents were picking up subtle cues in the list of SEL-related terms that irked or worried them, the researchers suggest. Phrases like “soft skills” and “growth mindset” felt “nebulous” and devoid of academic content. For some, the language felt suspiciously like “code for liberal indoctrination.”

But the study suggests that parents might need the simplest of reassurances to break through the political noise. Removing the jargon, focusing on productive phrases like “life skills,” and relentlessly connecting SEL to academic progress puts parents at ease—and seems to save social and emotional learning in the process.

2. The Secret Management Techniques of Expert Teachers

In the hands of experienced teachers, classroom management can seem almost invisible: Subtle techniques are quietly at work behind the scenes, with students falling into orderly routines and engaging in rigorous academic tasks almost as if by magic. 

That’s no accident, according to new research . While outbursts are inevitable in school settings, expert teachers seed their classrooms with proactive, relationship-building strategies that often prevent misbehavior before it erupts. They also approach discipline more holistically than their less-experienced counterparts, consistently reframing misbehavior in the broader context of how lessons can be more engaging, or how clearly they communicate expectations.

Focusing on the underlying dynamics of classroom behavior—and not on surface-level disruptions—means that expert teachers often look the other way at all the right times, too. Rather than rise to the bait of a minor breach in etiquette, a common mistake of new teachers, they tend to play the long game, asking questions about the origins of misbehavior, deftly navigating the terrain between discipline and student autonomy, and opting to confront misconduct privately when possible.

3. The Surprising Power of Pretesting

Asking students to take a practice test before they’ve even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they’d just be guessing.

But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies. Surprisingly, pretesting even beat out taking practice tests after learning the material, a proven strategy endorsed by cognitive scientists and educators alike. In the study, students who took a practice test before learning the material outperformed their peers who studied more traditionally by 49 percent on a follow-up test, while outperforming students who took practice tests after studying the material by 27 percent.

The researchers hypothesize that the “generation of errors” was a key to the strategy’s success, spurring student curiosity and priming them to “search for the correct answers” when they finally explored the new material—and adding grist to a 2018 study that found that making educated guesses helped students connect background knowledge to new material.

Learning is more durable when students do the hard work of correcting misconceptions, the research suggests, reminding us yet again that being wrong is an important milestone on the road to being right.

4. Confronting an Old Myth About Immigrant Students

Immigrant students are sometimes portrayed as a costly expense to the education system, but new research is systematically dismantling that myth.

In a 2021 study , researchers analyzed over 1.3 million academic and birth records for students in Florida communities, and concluded that the presence of immigrant students actually has “a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students,” raising test scores as the size of the immigrant school population increases. The benefits were especially powerful for low-income students.

While immigrants initially “face challenges in assimilation that may require additional school resources,” the researchers concluded, hard work and resilience may allow them to excel and thus “positively affect exposed U.S.-born students’ attitudes and behavior.” But according to teacher Larry Ferlazzo, the improvements might stem from the fact that having English language learners in classes improves pedagogy , pushing teachers to consider “issues like prior knowledge, scaffolding, and maximizing accessibility.”

5. A Fuller Picture of What a ‘Good’ School Is

It’s time to rethink our definition of what a “good school” is, researchers assert in a study published in late 2020.⁣ That’s because typical measures of school quality like test scores often provide an incomplete and misleading picture, the researchers found.

The study looked at over 150,000 ninth-grade students who attended Chicago public schools and concluded that emphasizing the social and emotional dimensions of learning—relationship-building, a sense of belonging, and resilience, for example—improves high school graduation and college matriculation rates for both high- and low-income students, beating out schools that focus primarily on improving test scores.⁣

“Schools that promote socio-emotional development actually have a really big positive impact on kids,” said lead researcher C. Kirabo Jackson in an interview with Edutopia . “And these impacts are particularly large for vulnerable student populations who don’t tend to do very well in the education system.”

The findings reinforce the importance of a holistic approach to measuring student progress, and are a reminder that schools—and teachers—can influence students in ways that are difficult to measure, and may only materialize well into the future.⁣

6. Teaching Is Learning

One of the best ways to learn a concept is to teach it to someone else. But do you actually have to step into the shoes of a teacher, or does the mere expectation of teaching do the trick?

In a 2021 study , researchers split students into two groups and gave them each a science passage about the Doppler effect—a phenomenon associated with sound and light waves that explains the gradual change in tone and pitch as a car races off into the distance, for example. One group studied the text as preparation for a test; the other was told that they’d be teaching the material to another student.

The researchers never carried out the second half of the activity—students read the passages but never taught the lesson. All of the participants were then tested on their factual recall of the Doppler effect, and their ability to draw deeper conclusions from the reading.

The upshot? Students who prepared to teach outperformed their counterparts in both duration and depth of learning, scoring 9 percent higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24 percent higher on their ability to make inferences. The research suggests that asking students to prepare to teach something—or encouraging them to think “could I teach this to someone else?”—can significantly alter their learning trajectories.

7. A Disturbing Strain of Bias in Kids’ Books

Some of the most popular and well-regarded children’s books—Caldecott and Newbery honorees among them—persistently depict Black, Asian, and Hispanic characters with lighter skin, according to new research .

Using artificial intelligence, researchers combed through 1,130 children’s books written in the last century, comparing two sets of diverse children’s books—one a collection of popular books that garnered major literary awards, the other favored by identity-based awards. The software analyzed data on skin tone, race, age, and gender.

Among the findings: While more characters with darker skin color begin to appear over time, the most popular books—those most frequently checked out of libraries and lining classroom bookshelves—continue to depict people of color in lighter skin tones. More insidiously, when adult characters are “moral or upstanding,” their skin color tends to appear lighter, the study’s lead author, Anjali Aduki,  told The 74 , with some books converting “Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige.” Female characters, meanwhile, are often seen but not heard.

Cultural representations are a reflection of our values, the researchers conclude: “Inequality in representation, therefore, constitutes an explicit statement of inequality of value.”

8. The Never-Ending ‘Paper Versus Digital’ War

The argument goes like this: Digital screens turn reading into a cold and impersonal task; they’re good for information foraging, and not much more. “Real” books, meanwhile, have a heft and “tactility”  that make them intimate, enchanting—and irreplaceable.

But researchers have often found weak or equivocal evidence for the superiority of reading on paper. While a recent study concluded that paper books yielded better comprehension than e-books when many of the digital tools had been removed, the effect sizes were small. A 2021 meta-analysis further muddies the water: When digital and paper books are “mostly similar,” kids comprehend the print version more readily—but when enhancements like motion and sound “target the story content,” e-books generally have the edge.

Nostalgia is a force that every new technology must eventually confront. There’s plenty of evidence that writing with pen and paper encodes learning more deeply than typing. But new digital book formats come preloaded with powerful tools that allow readers to annotate, look up words, answer embedded questions, and share their thinking with other readers.

We may not be ready to admit it, but these are precisely the kinds of activities that drive deeper engagement, enhance comprehension, and leave us with a lasting memory of what we’ve read. The future of e-reading, despite the naysayers, remains promising.

9. New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

Many classrooms today still look like they did 100 years ago, when students were preparing for factory jobs. But the world’s moved on: Modern careers demand a more sophisticated set of skills—collaboration, advanced problem-solving, and creativity, for example—and those can be difficult to teach in classrooms that rarely give students the time and space to develop those competencies.

Project-based learning (PBL) would seem like an ideal solution. But critics say PBL places too much responsibility on novice learners, ignoring the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction and ultimately undermining subject fluency. Advocates counter that student-centered learning and direct instruction can and should coexist in classrooms.

Now two new large-scale studies —encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students.

In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia , elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms, or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.

10. Tracking a Tumultuous Year for Teachers

The Covid-19 pandemic cast a long shadow over the lives of educators in 2021, according to a year’s worth of research.

The average teacher’s workload suddenly “spiked last spring,” wrote the Center for Reinventing Public Education in its January 2021 report, and then—in defiance of the laws of motion—simply never let up. By the fall, a RAND study recorded an astonishing shift in work habits: 24 percent of teachers reported that they were working 56 hours or more per week, compared to 5 percent pre-pandemic.

The vaccine was the promised land, but when it arrived nothing seemed to change. In an April 2021 survey  conducted four months after the first vaccine was administered in New York City, 92 percent of teachers said their jobs were more stressful than prior to the pandemic, up from 81 percent in an earlier survey.

It wasn’t just the length of the work days; a close look at the research reveals that the school system’s failure to adjust expectations was ruinous. It seemed to start with the obligations of hybrid teaching, which surfaced in Edutopia ’s coverage of overseas school reopenings. In June 2020, well before many U.S. schools reopened, we reported that hybrid teaching was an emerging problem internationally, and warned that if the “model is to work well for any period of time,” schools must “recognize and seek to reduce the workload for teachers.” Almost eight months later, a 2021 RAND study identified hybrid teaching as a primary source of teacher stress in the U.S., easily outpacing factors like the health of a high-risk loved one.

New and ever-increasing demands for tech solutions put teachers on a knife’s edge. In several important 2021 studies, researchers concluded that teachers were being pushed to adopt new technology without the “resources and equipment necessary for its correct didactic use.” Consequently, they were spending more than 20 hours a week adapting lessons for online use, and experiencing an unprecedented erosion of the boundaries between their work and home lives, leading to an unsustainable “always on” mentality. When it seemed like nothing more could be piled on—when all of the lights were blinking red—the federal government restarted standardized testing .

Change will be hard; many of the pathologies that exist in the system now predate the pandemic. But creating strict school policies that separate work from rest, eliminating the adoption of new tech tools without proper supports, distributing surveys regularly to gauge teacher well-being, and above all listening to educators to identify and confront emerging problems might be a good place to start, if the research can be believed.

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New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

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The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2022

Education Next

Our annual look back at the year’s most popular Education Next articles is itself a popular article with readers. It’s useful as an indicator of what issues are at the top of the education policy conversation.

In both the Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2021 and the Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2020 , race and the pandemic dominated the discussion. This year, as President Biden declared the pandemic over (while still using the emergency as a reason to pause student loan repayments), readers seem to have moved on to a new set of topics.

For years, too, technology has been seen as an educational cure-all. This year, the pendulum swung back, as readers focused on the downsides of new technology. Our most-read article of the year was a piece by Doug Lemov, “ Take Away Their Cellphones ,” about the negative effects of cellphones and social media on student mental health, and how schools can adjust their policies to respond. It was a pandemic response and recovery article, too, in a way, but as Lemov traced, “The pandemic occurred amid a broader epidemic. Long before Covid-19, the psychologist Jean Twenge had found spiraling levels of depression, anxiety, and isolation among teens…. This historic downturn in the well-being of young people coincided almost exactly with the dramatic rise of the smartphone and social media.”

Technology also exposed schools to cyberattacks, a phenomenon explored by Eileen Belastock in another well-read article, “ Our Biggest Nightmare Is Here .”

Not all the tech coverage was negative. Our executive editor Michael B. Horn’s exploration of how the metaverse might “create educational experiences that are otherwise impossible in a traditional environment,” “ Meet the Metaverse ,” also made the top 20 list. The company that owns Facebook announced its name-change to Meta in late 2021.

While technology trends shape student and teacher experiences over the long run, the school environment in America is also shaped by elected or appointed representatives serving on school boards. Parent frustration over pandemic closures and controversy over race-related and gender-related education was often directed at school boards. Two articles probing those issues, “ Schoolboard Shakeup in San Francisco ” and “ Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing ” also made the top 20 list.

Education Next senior editor Paul E. Peterson had three articles on the top 20 list, narrowly edging out Robert Pondiscio and executive editor Michael J. Petrilli, who had two each. Congratulations to them and to all of our authors, and best wishes to all of our readers for the year ahead.

1. Take Away Their Cellphones … So we can rewire schools for belonging and achievement By Doug Lemov

2. Homeschooling Skyrocketed During the Pandemic, but What Does the Future Hold? It may be less of an either-or option, as homeschooling is combined with online experiences, neighborhood pods, cooperatives, or joint undertakings with public and private schools By Daniel Hamlin and Paul E. Peterson

3. Every Student Needs 21st-Century Data-Literacy Skills Forum: Rethinking Math Education By Steven D. Levitt and Jeffrey Severts

4. Deadline Looms for Borrowers Seeking Public Service Loan Forgiveness As the Biden administration debates loan forgiveness, some 3 million student borrowers—many of them teachers—are eligible for more than $100 billion in debt relief. But do they know? By Sarah Turner

5. School Board Shakeup in San Francisco Arrogance, incompetence, and woke rhetoric trigger successful recall effort By Joanne Jacobs

6. A Half Century of Student Progress Nationwide First comprehensive analysis finds broad gains in test scores, with larger gains for students of color than white students By M. Danish Shakeel and Paul E. Peterson

7. What I Learned Leading America’s First Public School A culture of urgency, grounded in love, is essential, at “high-performing” and “underperforming” schools alike. And try to find a way to refill your cup. By Rachel Skerritt

8. Time to Pull the Plug on Traditional Grading? Supporters of mastery-based grading say it could promote equity By Patricia Alex

9. Bringing College into High Schools Bard’s High School Early Colleges offer a model for students to earn an associate degree by the end of 12th grade By Wayne D’Orio

10. Meet the Metaverse A New Frontier in Virtual Learning By Michael B. Horn

11. Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing Pandemic stress-tested school governance, revealing many flaws By Vladimir Kogan

12. “How’d You Do It?” Mississippi’s Superintendent of Education Explains State’s Learning Gains “Data and accountability will drive the behaviors that you want to see,” Carey Wright says in exit interview By Robert Pondiscio

13. “Our Biggest Nightmare Is Here” Cyberattacks are targeting school districts. How can schools respond to keep data and systems secure? By Eileen Belastock

14. The Costs of Canceling Darwin Fewer scientists, more skepticism of science in states that limit evolution instruction By Benjamin W. Arold

15. What Next for New York Charter Schools? The era of explosive growth of network-run, “no excuses” charter schools is over. Tentatively emerging: “community-based” charter schools. By Robert Pondiscio

16. School Superintendents Head for the Exits In big districts, brand-new leaders fill vacancies By Greg Toppo

17. First, Know Thyself. Then, Pick a Career Path The potential of helping students see their potential By Michael J. Petrilli

18. The Case for Kindergarten Tests Starting NAEP in 4th grade is much too late By Michael J. Petrilli

19. The Bigger Picture of Charter School Results A National Analysis of System-Level Effects on Test Scores and Graduation Rates By Douglas N. Harris and Feng Chen

20. Partisan Rifts Widen, Perceptions of School Quality Decline Results of the 2022 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion By David M. Houston, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West

— Education Next

P.S. You can find the Top 20 Education Next articles of 2021 here , 2020 here , 2019 here , 2018 here , 2017 here , 2016 here , 2015 here , 2014 here and 2013 here .

P.P.S. You can find the Top 10 Education Next blog posts of 2022 here.

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20 great articles and essays about education, the university has no clothes by daniel b. smith, learning by degrees by rebecca mead, in the basement of the ivory tower by professor x, bad education by malcolm harris, lost in the meritocracy by walter kirn, the future of college by graeme wood, laptop u by nathan heller, the order of things by malcolm gladwell, the teaching class by rachel riederer, the world might be better off without college for everyone by bryan caplan, getting in by malcolm gladwell, the early- decision racket by james fallows, the dean’s daughter gets a thin envelope by jennifer britz, see also..., 20 great articles about raising kids, building a better teacher by elizabeth green, the revolution that could change the way your child is taught by ian leslie, everything you've heard about failing schools is wrong by kristina rizga, schooled by dale russakoff, choosing a school for my daughter by nikole hannah-jones, the growth of diy education by linda perlstein, surviving high school by tom junod, dumb kids' class by mark bowden.

About The Electric Typewriter We search the net to bring you the best nonfiction, articles, essays and journalism

Short articles

Nov 03,2022

"Apart from developing literacy, it has also had a positive impact on students who have had a pleasant experience while going through the pandemic." In this reader submission, Anisah Khoridatul, Grade 6 Teacher SD Ar-Ridha Al Salaam, Depok, shares the details of a student diary project in place at the school.

Sep 28,2022

In this reader submission, teacher at SMA Lokon St. Nikolaus Tomohon in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, Martha Goni, shares the details of a Retreat Program the school has implemented, and the positive impact it is having on Year 12 students.

Aug 31,2022

A recent longitudinal study in the Philippines has followed a cohort of 4,500 public elementary school students for 5 years. The study found that children who attended preschool consistently outperformed those who did not in literacy, mathematics and social-emotional skills.

Jul 20,2022

New research has shown that while the use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) increases student enjoyment and presence in a task, when used on its own it does not improve procedural or declarative knowledge when compared to the more traditional learning activity of watching a video.

Jul 18,2022

Education systems across the world have taken different approaches to addressing the challenges of the pandemic. Jaylene S Miravel – a teacher at Lal-lo North Central School in the Philippines – shares how she is supporting students who are falling behind in reading during this prolonged period of remote learning.

May 18,2022

Satyam Mishra was one of two educators from India to make it into the prestigious Global Teacher Prize Top 50 for 2021. In today’s article, he shares practical examples for making mathematics more engaging and relevant for students.

May 04,2022

A new framework for learning through play has been developed to support teachers in the classroom and help guide policy and practice in the early years of schooling. The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and the LEGO Foundation have worked together to develop the framework.

Apr 20,2022

Students have a diverse range of personal and contextual factors that influence their access to and achievement in their education. A new global study calls for a re-evaluation of education systems to promote personalised education.

Apr 05,2022

After investing a lot of time and emotion into applying for a new job or promotion, finding out the position is not yours can have a negative impact on your confidence. In this reader submission, Dr Poppy Gibson and Dr Robert Morgan from the UK share their three steps for moving forward after being an unsuccessful candidate for a new position.

Mar 16,2022

How can you and your colleagues help students better prepare for the challenges and opportunities they’ll face in the future? A major new report looks at the global ‘megatrends’ shaping education. We’ve picked out 10 discussion points and suggestions for possible learning activities to inspire you and your colleagues, and get the conversation started.

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Page 1 of 10

Understanding science data literacy: a conceptual framework and assessment tool for college students majoring in STEM

In the era defined by the fourth paradigm of science research, the burgeoning volume of science data poses a formidable challenge. The established data-related requisites within science literacy now fall short...

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The impact of changing engineering perceptions on women’s attitudes and behavioral intentions towards engineering pursuits

Women are underrepresented in the field of engineering within academic and professional settings. Based upon premises outlined by social role theory and goal congruity theory, a key factor that contributes to ...

Influence of career awareness on STEM career interests: examining the roles of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and gender

The studies of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career interests have progressed substantially over the recent years. However, the influence of career awareness on STEM career interests...

When perceived similarity overrides demographic similarity: examining influences on STEM students’ developmental mentor networks

While dyadic faculty–mentored relationship research currently saturates the mentoring literature, recent developments suggest the need for a broader consideration of a student's mentor network. Research taking...

Science teacher identity research: a scoping literature review

Science teacher identity significantly influences teacher professional development, practices, and attitudes, which in turn impacts student learning outcomes. With an increased number of studies on science tea...

Beyond performance, competence, and recognition: forging a science researcher identity in the context of research training

Studying science identity has been useful for understanding students’ continuation in science-related education and career paths. Yet knowledge and theory related to science identity among students on the path...

Prior experiences as students and instructors play a critical role in instructors’ decision to adopt evidence-based instructional practices

There has been a growing interest in characterizing factors influencing teaching decisions of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instructors in order to address the slow uptake of evidenc...

Promoting STEM learning perseverance through recognizing communal goals: understanding the impact of empathy and citizenship

Previous research has indicated that placing emphasis on communal goals within the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education can yield beneficial learning outcomes. However, t...

Correction: Pre-service elementary teachers’ science and engineering teaching self-efficacy and outcome expectancy: exploring the impacts of efficacy source experiences through varying course modalities

The original article was published in International Journal of STEM Education 2024 11 :4

Beyond STEM attrition: changing career plans within STEM fields in college is associated with lower motivation, certainty, and satisfaction about one’s career

Research and policy often focus on reducing attrition from educational trajectories leading to careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but many students change career plans within STE...

Systemic advantage has a meaningful relationship with grade outcomes in students’ early STEM courses at six research universities

Large introductory lecture courses are frequently post-secondary students’ first formal interaction with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Grade outcomes in these courses ar...

Using collaborative autoethnography to investigate mentoring relationships for novice engineering education researchers

The National Science Foundation Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) program aims to increase research capacity in the field by providing funding for technical engineering faculty to learn to co...

Students’ perspectives on the ‘STEM belonging’ concept at A-level, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels: an examination of gender and ethnicity in student descriptions

Women and ethnic minorities have historically been underrepresented in some STEM fields. It is therefore important to understand the factors influencing students’ persistence in STEM fields, and what STEM belo...

Strategies and difficulties during students’ construction of data visualizations

Data visualizations transform data into visual representations such as graphs, diagrams, charts and so forth, and enable inquiries and decision-making in many professional fields, as well as in public and econ...

Characteristics of departments with high-use of active learning in introductory STEM courses: implications for departmental transformation

It is well established in the literature that active learning instruction in introductory STEM courses results in many desired student outcomes. Yet, regular use of high-quality active learning is not the norm...

Single-paper meta-analyses of the effects of spaced retrieval practice in nine introductory STEM courses: is the glass half full or half empty?

Undergraduate STEM instructors want to help students learn and retain knowledge for their future courses and careers. One promising evidence-based technique that is thought to increase long-term memory is spac...

Effects of a first-year undergraduate engineering design course: survey study of implications for student self-efficacy and professional skills, with focus on gender/sex and race/ethnicity

Students’ academic self-efficacy maximizes likelihood for success and retention, yet prior research suggests that historically underrepresented (minoritized) undergraduate students in higher education and in c...

The effects of educational robotics in STEM education: a multilevel meta-analysis

Educational robotics, as emerging technologies, have been widely applied in the field of STEM education to enhance the instructional and learning quality. Although previous research has highlighted potentials ...

Can training and apprentice programs in STEM increase worker life satisfaction and optimism?

Despite the significant relationship between life satisfaction and education, less is known about the connection between life satisfaction and informal learning in the context of training and apprenticeship pr...

Gender patterns in engineering PhD teaching assistant evaluations corroborate role congruity theory

The body of work regarding gender bias in academia shows that female instructors are often rated lower by students than their male counterparts. Mechanisms are complex and intersectional and often associated w...

Pre-service elementary teachers’ science and engineering teaching self-efficacy and outcome expectancy: exploring the impacts of efficacy source experiences through varying course modalities

Teacher efficacy is one of the most influential components for effective instruction, highlighting the importance of providing preservice teachers (PSTs) with opportunities to learn how to teach engineering du...

The Correction to this article has been published in International Journal of STEM Education 2024 11 :16

The implementation of peer assessment as a scaffold during computer-supported collaborative inquiry learning in secondary STEM education

Computer-supported collaborative inquiry learning (CSCiL) has been proposed as a successful learning method to foster scientific literacy. This research aims to bridge the knowledge gap surrounding the role of...

Persisting in tough times across Hong Kong, mainland China, and the Philippines: grit, achievement goal orientation, and science engagement

Past studies of grit's educational benefits, such as science engagement, showed mixed results across cultures. So, we elaborated the prior model of grit (perseverance of effort, consistency of interest) with adap...

STEM learning opportunities and career aspirations: the interactive effect of students’ self-concept and perceptions of STEM professionals

Students’ positive perceptions of scientists or engineers have been reported to be positively related to their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career aspirations. However, other resear...

Nine years of development in establishing the journal as a learning and research hub in STEM education

From August 2014 to July 2023, the International Journal of STEM Education went through nine publication cycle years. In this editorial, I provide a brief summary of the journal’s development up to and including ...

Using intensive longitudinal methods to quantify the sources of variability for situational engagement in science learning environments

Situational engagement in science is often described as context-sensitive and varying over time due to the impact of situational factors. But this type of engagement is often studied using data that are collec...

STEM education institutional change projects: examining enacted approaches through the lens of the Four Categories of Change Strategies Model

Enacting STEM education reform is a complex task and there are a variety of approaches that might be selected by change agents. When working on an institutional change project to impact multiple parts of the S...

ChatGPT and its ethical implications for STEM research and higher education: a media discourse analysis

With the increasing demand brought on by the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution in the period of post-digital education and bio-digital technology, artificial intelligence (AI) has played a pivotal ...

Motivational climate predicts effort and achievement in a large computer science course: examining differences across sexes, races/ethnicities, and academic majors

The motivational climate within a course has been shown to be an important predictor of students’ engagement and course ratings. Because little is known about how students’ perceptions of the motivational clim...

Exploring the multifaceted roles of mathematics learning in predicting students' computational thinking competency

There exist shared competencies between computational thinking (CT) and mathematics, and these two domains also mutually benefit from various teaching approaches. However, the linkages between mathematics and ...

Correction: How are primary school computer science curricular reforms contributing to equity? Impact on student learning, perception of the discipline, and gender gaps

The original article was published in International Journal of STEM Education 2023 10 :60

Authentic STEM education through modelling: an international Delphi study

The literature asserts that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education needs to be authentic. Although models and modelling provide a basis from which to increase authenticity by bridgi...

Integrating artificial intelligence into science lessons: teachers’ experiences and views

In the midst of digital transformation, schools are transforming their classrooms as they prepare students for a world increasingly automated by new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). During...

How are primary school computer science curricular reforms contributing to equity? Impact on student learning, perception of the discipline, and gender gaps

Early exposure to Computer Science (CS) and Computational Thinking (CT) for all is critical to broaden participation and promote equity in the field. But how does the introduction of CS and CT into primary sch...

The Correction to this article has been published in International Journal of STEM Education 2023 10 :63

Gender differences in high school students’ interest in STEM careers: a multi-group comparison based on structural equation model

Females are underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields all over the world. To encourage more girls to choose STEM majors and careers, it is critical to increase their i...

Gender gap in STEM pathways: the role of secondary curricula in a highly differentiated school system—the case of Chile

STEM fields are instrumental in increasing the technological and innovative capacity of the economy. As women are underrepresented in the STEM workforce, diverse strategies have been implemented to boost their...

Teamwork dynamics in the context of large-size software development courses

Effectively facilitating teamwork experiences, particularly in the context of large-size courses, is difficult to implement. This study seeks to address the challenges of implementing effective teamwork experi...

The role of media in influencing students’ STEM career interest

Digital media are pervasive in the lives of young people and provide opportunities for them to learn about STEM. Multiple theories argue that the STEM media environment may shape how youth see a STEM career in...

Validity, acceptability, and procedural issues of selection methods for graduate study admissions in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: a mapping review

This review presents the first comprehensive synthesis of available research on selection methods for STEM graduate study admissions. Ten categories of graduate selection methods emerged. Each category was cri...

Game-based learning in computer science education: a scoping literature review

Using games in education has the potential to increase students’ motivation and engagement in the learning process, gathering long-lasting practical knowledge. Expanding interest in implementing a game-based a...

Possibilities and pitfalls of practitioners in trying to apply change theory as viewed through the lens of Reinholz, White, and Andrews “Change theory in STEM higher education: a systematic review”

The original article was published in International Journal of STEM Education 2021 8 :37

Precision education via timely intervention in K-12 computer programming course to enhance programming skill and affective-domain learning objectives

In the realm of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematic (STEM) education, computer programming stands as a vital discipline, amalgamating cross-disciplinary knowledge and fostering the capacity to sol...

Limited or complete? Teaching and learning conceptions and instructional environments fostered by STEM teaching versus research faculty

An instructor’s conceptions of teaching and learning contribute to the establishment of learning environments that may benefit or hinder student learning. Previous studies have defined the continuum of teachin...

Embracing a culture of talk: STEM teachers’ engagement in small-group discussions about photovoltaics

Small-group discussions are well established as an effective pedagogical tool to promote student learning in STEM classrooms. However, there are a variety of factors that influence how and to what extent K-12 ...

Math anxiety affects career choices during development

Links between math anxiety and the choice of a math-intensive career might change over development and differ by gender. The study included three research populations: primary school ( N  = 87, 48 females, mean age...

Exploring senior engineering students’ engineering identity: the impact of practice-oriented learning experiences

Engineering identity reflects students' acceptance and recognition of engineering, which has a great influence on their willingness to enter and stay in the engineering field. Existing studies have shown that ...

Fostering computational thinking through unplugged activities: A systematic literature review and meta-analysis

Unplugged activities as a low-cost solution to foster computational thinking (CT) skills seem to be a trend in recent years. However, current evidence of the effectiveness of unplugged activities in promoting ...

Pathways of opportunity in STEM: comparative investigation of degree attainment across different demographic groups at a large research institution

We used an opportunity gap framework to analyze the pathways through which students enter into and depart from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees in an R1 higher education institu...

How well-intentioned white male physicists maintain ignorance of inequity and justify inaction

We present an analysis of interviews with 27 self-identified progressive white-male physics faculty and graduate students discussing race and gender in physics. White cis men dominate most STEM fields and are ...

The relation of representational competence and conceptual knowledge in female and male undergraduates

Representational competence is commonly considered a prerequisite for the acquisition of conceptual knowledge, yet little exploration has been undertaken into the relation between these two constructs. Using a...

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Articles on Physical education

Displaying 1 - 20 of 36 articles.

New government guidance for PE lets teachers and pupils down

David Grecic , University of Central Lancashire ; Alan Thomson , University of Central Lancashire , and Andrew Sprake , University of Central Lancashire

Is exercise really good for the brain? Here’s what the science says

Matthieu P. Boisgontier , L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa and Boris Cheval , Université de Genève

Girls should get the chance to play football at school – but PE needs a major rehaul for all students

Shrehan Lynch , University of East London

School playgrounds are getting squeezed: here are 8 ways to keep students active in small spaces

Brendon Hyndman , Charles Sturt University ; Jessica Amy Sears , Charles Sturt University , and Vaughan Cruickshank , University of Tasmania

Outdoor education has psychological, cognitive and physical health benefits for children

Jean-Philippe Ayotte-Beaudet , Université de Sherbrooke and Felix Berrigan , Université de Sherbrooke

London’s Olympic legacy: research reveals why £2.2 billion investment in primary school PE has failed teachers

Vicky Randall , University of Winchester and Gerald Griggs

How sport can help young people to become better citizens

Vaughan Cruickshank , University of Tasmania and Casey Peter Mainsbridge , University of Tasmania

Missing out on PE during lockdowns means students will be playing  catch-up

Jora Broerse , Victoria University ; Cameron Van der Smee , Federation University Australia , and Jaimie-Lee Maple , Victoria University

Disabled children still face exclusion in PE – here’s what needs to change

Tom Gibbons , Teesside University and Kevin Dixon , Northumbria University, Newcastle

Taking the circus to school: How kids benefit from learning trapeze, juggling and unicycle in gym class

Marion Cossin , Université de Montréal

Thinking of choosing a health or PE subject in years 11 and 12? Here’s what you need to know

Brendon Hyndman , Charles Sturt University and Vaughan Cruickshank , University of Tasmania

Aussie kids are some of the least active in the world. We developed a cheap school program that gets results

Taren Sanders , Australian Catholic University ; Chris Lonsdale , Australian Catholic University ; David Lubans , University of Newcastle ; Michael Noetel , The University of Queensland , and Philip D Parker , Australian Catholic University

When men started to obsess over  six-packs

Conor Heffernan , The University of Texas at Austin

PE can do much more than keep children fit – but its many benefits are often overlooked

David Grecic , University of Central Lancashire ; Andrew Sprake , University of Central Lancashire , and Robin Taylor , University of Central Lancashire

Distance learning makes it harder for kids to exercise, especially in low-income communities

Katelyn Esmonde , Johns Hopkins University and Keshia Pollack Porter , Johns Hopkins University

Kids need physical education – even when they can’t get it at school

Collin A. Webster , University of South Carolina

Learning through adventure: the many skills that can be taught outside the classroom

Gary Stidder , University of Brighton

Kids aren’t getting enough exercise, even in sporty Seattle

Julie McCleery , University of Washington

Bushwalking and bowls in schools: we need to teach kids activities they’ll go on to enjoy

Vaughan Cruickshank , University of Tasmania ; Brendon Hyndman , Charles Sturt University , and Shane Pill , Flinders University

How children who dread PE lessons at school can be given a sporting chance

Kiara Lewis , University of Huddersfield

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Senior Lecturer in Health and Physical Education, University of Tasmania

Lecturer in Physical Education & Sport / Course Leader MA in Physical Education and School Sport, University of Central Lancashire

Senior Manager, Brisbane Catholic Education & Associate Professor of Education (Adjunct), Charles Sturt University

Reader in Sports Science (Clinical Physiology), University of Essex

Professor of Sport and Physical Education, University of Central Lancashire

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, The University of Queensland

Lecturer in Developmental Psychology, The University of Edinburgh

Assistant Professor of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political Science

Associate Professor in Physiology, Exercise and Nutrition, University of Stirling

Senior Research Fellow, Australian Catholic University

Senior Lecturer, School of Sport, Exercise & Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Birmingham

Senior Lecturer in Physiology, Exercise and Nutrition, University of Stirling

Professor, Medical Research Future Fund Emerging Leader, University of South Australia

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A Guide to Special Education Terms

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The number of students in special education has increased steadily in the last four decades , with parents more readily seeking additional support and more students being diagnosed with conditions, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder.

In the wake of the pandemic, though, districts struggle to hire and—more importantly—keep their special education teachers, who are often beleaguered by stressful working conditions and a lack of resources.

Even as the field shifts to address workforce shortages, with some states considering extra pay for special education and others eyeing how artificial intelligence could lessen the burden of increased workloads, students with disabilities make up roughly 13 percent of the school population, said Natasha Strassfeld, an assistant professor in the department of special education at the University of Texas at Austin.

These are key terms educators should know.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act , or IDEA , is a federal law that establishes the rights of students with disabilities and their families.

First passed in 1975 and most recently reauthorized in 2004, the act provides grant funding to states that agree to the federal government’s vision for educating students with disabilities, said Strassfeld.

Students must be identified, evaluated, and deemed as IDEA eligible for the state to use federal money to educate that child. There are 13 categories under which a student could be eligible, including physical and intellectual disabilities.

There are about seven million students served under IDEA, said Strassfeld.

An Individualized Education Program , or IEP , is a legally binding contract between a school district and a family with a child with a disability. Under IDEA, students are afforded an IEP, said Dia Jackson, senior researcher for special education, equity, and tiered systems of support at the American Institutes of Research.

IEPs spell out what area a student has a disability in, how it impacts learning, and what the school will do to address those needs, such as providing speech or occupational therapy, more intensive instructional supports, and accommodations, including for standardized tests and other learning goals.

The number of IEPs is increasing in schools as conditions, like autism spectrum disorder, or ADHD, are being diagnosed more readily.

All students with disabilities are protected under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which requires schools to make “reasonable accommodation” for students with disabilities.

Educators don’t have to make specially designed instruction plans under a 504, but students can get certain accommodations, like elevator passes if a student is in a wheelchair, Jackson said.

“It’s a slightly different focus, but both play out in schools,” Jackson said.

Individualized family services plans , or IFSPs, are developed for children up to age 3 who need help with communication, social-emotional skills, and physical needs, Strassfeld said.

Like an IEP, the plan is made in collaboration with a parent or guardian, along with professionals such as a child care provider, religious leaders, or doctors. The document outlines a plan for families to help seek services—such as speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, medical services, and more—but is focused more on the family’s goals rather than strictly educational goals, Strassfeld said.

“While they’re focusing on pre-education goals, primarily at that age, we’re thinking about that child as being a part of a component of a family,” she said.

The right to a Free Appropriate Public Education , or FAPE , means that for every IDEA-eligible student, services must be provided at no cost to the student or their family, must be appropriate for the needs of the child, and have to be education oriented, Strassfeld said.

With FAPE, there is also the concept of least restrictive environment, or LRE, Jackson said. Students should be included to the fullest extent possible in mainstream classrooms and be challenged but appropriately supported, alongside their general education peers.

That’s not without its challenges, however, Strassfeld said.

“IDEA essentially is premised on the philosophical notion that it is that easy. It’s a real challenge for school districts,” she said, adding that as parents and advocates examine special education through disability justice and disability studies lenses, there are more critiques of the model.

Jackson said that she’s heard criticism along these lines: When students with disabilities aren’t prepared for a general education environment, or when general education teachers don’t have training on special education.

Response to intervention , or RTI , came as an amendment to IDEA in 2004 to help earlier identify students who are struggling before they begin failing, Jackson said, and begin giving them additional support through a tiered process. Generally, all students receive “tier I” instruction on grade-level standards. Then, students who need additional help get more intensive supports. That could look like a teacher working one-on-one, or in small groups, helping target specific areas to improve learning.

Intervention is an evidence-based program meant to address a specific learning or social-emotional need. It can be done in a general education classroom, and looks like regular teaching, Jackson said, but it uses particular materials and involves collecting data on progress.

The term RTI has evolved into multitiered system of supports , or MTSS , which is also a preventative framework, but goes beyond academics to consider the infrastructure districts need to implement MTSS, Jackson said.

“The shift to MTSS is meant to be more inclusive of the infrastructure as well as inclusive of social-emotional learning as well as academics,” she said.

A functional behavior assessment , or FBA , is a way for educators to collect data on student behavior, and what is triggering certain unwanted behavior, Jackson said.

For instance, she said, if a teacher has a student who has autism and, when they get upset, they throw a chair, an FBA could be conducted.

Once that analysis is collected, a behavior intervention plan , or BIP , is developed, describing what the behavior is, how often it happens, and what will be done to address it.

FBAs and BIPs are not without concerns, however, as students with disabilities—especially students of color—are more likely to face exclusionary discipline, such as suspension and expulsion.

“A lot of times, it is a subjective judgment call if a student is exhibiting ‘appropriate behavior’ or not,” Jackson said. “There’s a lot of potential bias that goes into discipline of students and behavior management.”

It’s one example of disproportionality , where an ethnic or racial group is over- or under-represented in certain areas. For instance, Jackson said, students of color with disabilities are over-represented in discipline, on being identified as having a disability, and being placed in more restrictive environments.

Restraint and seclusion are practices used in public schools as a response to student behavior that limits their movement and aims to deescalate them, by either physically limiting their movement (restraint) or isolating them from others (seclusion), according to previous EdWeek reporting .

The practice of physically restraining students with disabilities or placing them in isolation has been heavily scrutinized, but is still used in some states.

It should only be used in extreme cases when a student is at risk to harm themselves or others, Jackson said, but never as a behavior management technique, or as punishment. Students have been harmed, or even killed, as a result of restraints , Jackson said. Students of color are over-represented in the population who are restrained and isolated, Jackson added.

Even still, there are educators who don’t want to see the practices completely banned, Jackson said.

“Teachers have been hurt by students or they’ve been hurt in the midst of a restraint so they still want to have the option available,” she said. “It’s an issue of not having training in another alternative, so they feel like: ‘This is the only way I can handle this particular student, or type of student, because I don’t know anything else.’”

Strassfeld said that there’s been more focus on the practice alongside excessive force in law enforcement.

“There’s been discussion that disability advocates have had about criminalization of behaviors that a person has no control over, and this type of force seems to deny the humanity of people who perhaps are exhibiting behaviors they are not able to control,” she said.

Education Issues, Explained

Vanessa Solis, Associate Design Director contributed to this article.

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May 23, 2024

VCU special education major connects life, school, work and a passion to serve others with disabilities

In addition to his studies, Chad Lowery works at a local law firm that shares his perspective – and the vision of VCU’s Rehabilitation Research and Training Center.

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By Lucian Friel

As Chad Lowery continues his undergraduate studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, he also is finding his way in the working world – and proving a point.

“You need to really know a person as they are,” he said, “instead of what they look like.”

Lowery, who has cerebral palsy, is a student in VCU’s School of Education , majoring in special education. He also is a legal assistant at a local law firm specializing in disability rights and advocacy – a position he secured through VCU’s Rehabilitation Research and Training Center .

“I have a passion for helping other individuals with disabilities,” Lowery said. “I feel like people – or society, rather – doesn’t expect individuals like myself to have the desire of having a job, going to school, having a career, having a family someday. And I think RRTC is a good resource to show society you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

After graduating from high school in Chesterfield County in 2018, Lowery joined the RRTC’s Business Connections program the following year. Specialists with the supported employment service provider help Richmond-area clients with disabilities in finding competitive, integrated employment in the community and provide ongoing support.

Mallary McEvoy , an RRTC employment specialist, met regularly with Lowery to review his strengths and interests, such as advocacy for disability rights, supported employment and special education, as well as a chance to work with individuals with disabilities. And she helped highlight his potential as a job candidate, which included previous work experience as a communications and data assistant.

“We were able to create, through the support of his job coaches here, a visual résumé that played into his strengths,” McEvoy said. “One of those things was that Chad had some really awesome artwork. He had a modeling gig at one point, and we were able to put some of those modeling pictures on his visual résumé and just allow that alternative format to show Chad as a whole person. That person-centered approach helped him build confidence but also stick out as a candidate.”

The approach highlighted Lowery’s communication, computer and technology abilities, plus his strong personality, friendly demeanor, and outgoing and collaborative approach to work.

“And from the start at BeneCounsel , Matt saw possibility instead of disability for Chad,” McEvoy said.

Matt Bellinger had started BeneCounsel in 2014. The Richmond law firm, which specializes in disability benefits and legal services such as guardianships and powers of attorney, developed from personal experience: the barriers and difficulties of navigating disability benefits for his child.

“I was trying to figure out Medicaid waiver services, getting really confused, threw my pen down and literally thought to myself, ‘You’d have to quit your job and do this full time to figure it out’ – and I was an attorney,” Bellinger said. “That’s where the lightbulb went off. If I need help, so do other parents.”

In 2022, as the firm’s caseload had grown, he began searching for legal assistants. He decided to hire individuals with disabilities.

“I was thinking, I could go the standard route and hire a paralegal. But then I started thinking, well, that’s typically how you would do it, but is that really what I should do?” Bellinger said. “Why don’t I hire a person with a disability, because that’s who I serve? The more I thought about that, the idea grew, so that’s what we did.”

Bellinger was familiar with VCU’s RRTC through a family member who had used its Business Connections program. He sent the job description and application process to a number of organizations, and Lowery was among the applicants. Bellinger hired him in 2023 – and has high praise for his colleague.

“Chad is super focused,” Bellinger said. “Chad does all of our guardianship documents. Chad writes the powers of attorney and recently started doing trusts and wills. So it’s not just clerical work. We’re ahead on guardianship cases. Chad is doing the work.” 

Lowery relishes the connection that develop through his work.

“I really like collaborating with our clients or just people,” Lowery said.  “I’m very interpersonal. I like building relationships and expanding my network of people.”

Lowery uses assistive technology in his everyday work. A joystick and Bluetooth connection from his wheelchair allow him to use a dwell clicker to highlight part of a computer screen and click on items. A screen-based keyboard with some word prediction helps him type more efficiently. Lowery played a key role in establishing what technology he would need to be successful.

“He’s really on top of it with his tech, and he was able to self-advocate and say, ‘Here’s what I need, here’s what I don’t need,’” McEvoy said. “His employer was super involved in the process, which made it so much more helpful because Matt, from the start, was willing to be a part of that conversation rather than just be told what to do.”

Bellinger’s engagement on such issues reflect a big-picture perspective he brings to his work and his colleagues.

“The benefits to my organization, and I think any organization that successfully hires persons with disabilities, is that you become a better organization,” Bellinger said. “In order for it to work, you really have to focus on the employees – what are their needs, anticipate the accommodations they may need – and that has a carry-over effect on your other employees, too. If you’re focusing on your employees with disabilities to make them successful, you’re also going to be focusing on your employees without disabilities to make them successful.”

Lowery added, “I may have a disability and I may need accommodations, but it doesn’t mean you have to change the whole process and protocol or the job description. I want to normalize individuals with disabilities [being employed].”

As he continues his education at VCU and his work at BeneCounsel, Lowery looks forward to a future framed by helping others with disabilities.

“I want to do something in the area of special education,” he said. “It could be a teacher, it could be a college professor, but I know that I want to be a voice of the community.”

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Houstonians worried most about crime, housing, and economy, Kinder Institute study shows

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Rice University released the 2024 Kinder Houston Area Survey on Monday, revealing much about how Houstonians feel about the region's past, present, and future.

More than 5,300 respondents participated in the survey's 43rd year, which chronicled the changes in southeast Texas and provided a blueprint for the future.

ABC13 learned Houstonians are really concerned about three key things: crime and safety, housing affordability, and the economy.

Despite crime going down since 2020, concerns about crime have risen.

With regard to housing affordability, one in five say it's their biggest concern, and Houston is now a majority-renter city at 60%.

Regarding the economy, 46% of Houstonians said they don't have enough money to cover a $400 emergency, which is up 4% in a year.

One other interesting note about our recent reporting on public education funding , 70% of those surveyed said public schools need more money. Most school districts in Harris County are underfunded.

It's important to note that the survey happened before the HPD scandal regarding the lack of personnel code and before the intense, damaging storms and flooding of the past month.

The survey's results are free to view on the Kinder Institute's website.

For updates on this story, follow Tom Abrahams on Facebook , X and Instagram .

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Crime and Public Safety | Woman loses job after spat in restaurant over…

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Crime and public safety | woman loses job after spat in restaurant over teen’s short skirt, video of confrontation was posted on social media, and she was charged with sexual battery.

The latest development was reported by TV station KSL , which said newly released documents indicate Ida Lorenzo was fired by the state attorney general’s office on April 25 — the day she was charged with misdemeanor sexual battery against the young woman in the restaurant.

The confrontation took place on the evening of April 20, a Saturday, in the lobby of Sakura Japanese Steakhouse in St. George, in Utah’s southwest corner.  In the alleged battery, Lorenzo — a 48-year-old secretary — reportedly tugged on the skirt of a 19-year-old woman who was standing with her friends.

Video posted on social media shows the immediate aftermath: The young woman and her friends express outrage, and Lorenzo tells them, “I happen to work for the state, and if I have to watch your … cheeks hanging out again, I will call CPS.”

The police were not called to the restaurant, but the department said Lorenzo called 911 a few hours later and then went to the police station to complain about the skirt and about the “harassment” she had suffered because of the video’s posting.

On April 23, the young woman contacted the police to tell her side of the story, and on April 24, the police — having seen surveillance video from the restaurant — arrested Lorenzo.

A booking affidavit quoted by KSL said Lorenzo claimed that the young woman’s “explicit clothing” had drawn the attention of a 10-year-old boy in the restaurant and that Lorenzo “felt that it was her responsibility to address the female by approaching her, and attempted to pull down the female’s skirt to cover what Ida explained to be exposed genitalia.”

Lorenzo said she did not touch the woman, only the skirt, but the young woman later told police she was startled when she felt “cold hands” on her.

Records released to KSL on Wednesday, May 22, indicate that Lorenzo had been hired March 4 as a legal secretary in the attorney general’s office in St. George and was told on April 25 that she had not passed her probation and was “being separated from state employment.” The notice did not specifically mention the restaurant incident; it cited only “noncompliance with policies and standards related to performance.”

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Americans have mixed views about how the news media cover Biden’s, Trump’s ages

At age 81, Joe Biden is already the oldest president in American history . But former President Donald Trump, who will turn 78 in June, will become the oldest person ever elected president – surpassing Biden – if he wins back the White House this year.

It’s no surprise, then, that the ages of the candidates have been a major topic of conversation in news coverage of the 2024 presidential election. A new Pew Research Center survey finds that Americans have mixed feelings about the way news organizations are handling the issue for each candidate, with views sharply divided by political party.

To examine Americans’ perceptions of news coverage of the 2024 U.S. presidential candidates, Pew Research Center surveyed 8,709 U.S. adults from April 8 to April 14, 2024.

Everyone who completed the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

Here are the  questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey  methodology .

Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This is the latest analysis in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Overall, similar shares of U.S. adults believe news organizations are giving too much attention (32%) or too little attention (29%) to Biden’s age. An additional 38% think the media cover Biden’s age about the right amount.

By comparison, Americans are less likely to say the news media are overemphasizing Trump’s age (19%) and more likely to think that news organizations give it about the right amount of attention (49%).

The same survey found that a larger share of American voters express confidence that Trump has the physical and mental fitness needed to be president than say the same about Biden.

Americans’ opinions on news coverage are split along party lines. Each party’s supporters tend to say that the opposing candidate’s age is getting too little attention.

Nearly half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (46%) say news organizations are giving Trump’s age too little attention, compared with just 14% of Republicans and GOP leaners.

The numbers are virtually flipped when it comes to Biden: 48% of Republicans say Biden’s age is getting too little attention, while only 12% of Democrats say the same. 

When it comes to coverage of their own party’s candidate, patterns within each party differ. While 48% of Democrats say that Biden’s age is getting too much attention, far fewer Republicans (23%) hold this view about Trump. Instead, most Republicans (63%) say Trump’s age is getting about the right amount of attention.

Any differences between older and younger Americans are much smaller than the gaps between partisans. Among Americans ages 65 and older, for example, 34% say news organizations give Biden’s age too little attention. That compares with 29% of those ages 50 to 64, 27% of those ages 30 to 49 and 26% of adults under 30.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology . Senior Researcher Kirsten Eddy and Research Assistant Emily Tomasik contributed to this analysis.

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• Election 2024
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Katerina Eva Matsa is a director of news and information research at Pew Research Center .

Michael Lipka is an associate director focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center .

Use of anonymous sources uncommon in early Biden coverage, least likely in outlets with right-leaning audiences

Covid-19 was pervasive in the media’s early coverage of the biden administration, trump mentioned in about half of biden stories during early weeks in office, but less so over time, immigration was a top focus of early biden coverage, especially among outlets with right-leaning audiences, at 100 day mark: coverage of biden has been slightly more negative than positive, varied greatly by outlet type, most popular.

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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