June 6, 2006  Like the United States and many other countries around the world, New Zealand has been stymied for decades by achievement gaps between students of different ancestry. In New Zealand’s case, concern centers on students who are Maori, members of tribes that inhabited its islands hundreds of years before Capt. James Cook put them on the map in the 1700s.

April 25, 2006  A recent study compares the licensing and training processes that elementary and secondary teachers undergo in the United States and five Asian nations—China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand—as well as Hong Kong.

March 21, 2006  A just-launched project will review education reports released by private think tanks for the quality of their research, methodology, and conclusions, using expert academic reviewers.

March 21, 2006  The certification pathway that New York City teachers took to their classrooms seemed to have little relationship to how effective they were in raising students’ scores, concludes a study that matched some 10,000 teachers with six years of test results.

February 14, 2006  One researcher has found that non-traditional teaching techniques that draw on popular urban culture may be an effective way to help disadvantaged black students master complex literature in the classroom.

January 10, 2006  Simplifying test questions so that they avoid unnecessarily complex English is the best way for states to include English-language learners in large-scale testing, according to the most prominent researcher on testing accommodations for such students.

November 15, 2005  When it comes to documenting what goes on in classrooms, education scholars tend to fall in two camps. On one side are researchers who send in paid observers, usually graduate students, to meticulously track the goings-on, like proverbial flies on the wall. In the other camp are those who go the cheaper—but less accurate—route of surveying teachers once a year or so.

October 11, 2005  Anyone who has ever seen movies like “The Paper Chase”and “Legally Blonde” can picture what goes on in a law school classroom. The routine, repeated in law schools throughout the country, calls for an instructor to stand at the center of a semicircle of desks and pepper individual students with questions based on assigned readings of legal cases or statutes. There are no such trademark practices, however, for preparing teachers.

September 7, 2005  A small but growing cadre of researchers is taking a close look at the gestures people make and the role that they play in the classroom.

June 7, 2005  Researchers say the old “Mozart makes you smarter” studies asked the wrong questions and used measurements too narrow to capture arts learning’s full range of benefits.

April 26, 2005  In an unusual collaboration, faculty members and students from Harvard University’s graduate school of education have teamed up with educators from the Boston school system to write a book on how to use data to improve instruction.

March 22, 2005  The differences between boys and girls is one of the hottest research topics around. But a group of Duke University researchers suggests that, at least when considering the youths’ overall well-being, there’s not much difference at all.

February 15, 2005  Promising results from research on two-way language-immersion programs have pumped up the popularity of such programs in recent years.

January 11, 2005  Most educators and parents know, without the aid of science, how volatile teenagers can be: placid one moment, a stick of dynamite the next. But a recent book by a psychologist—and former high school teacher and school counselor—takes the conclusions from scientific studies of the adolescent brain and turns them into practical advice.

November 16, 2004  To help children distinguish between real and imaginary violence, the National PTA has for years promoted a school-based workshop called “Taking Charge of Your TV.” Among other goals, the program aims to help parents and educators talk with children about what they see on television.