James Traub in the NY Times making the point that, whatever you think of the particular curricular choices that Texas has made, they are taking the right approach on curriculum to support students' reading comprehension and critical thinking. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...

Opinion | What Blue States Can Learn From the Texas Book List (Gift Article)

Educational traditionalism is not the same as political conservatism.

nytimes.com

Large dataset from chess.com shows much better improvement from deliberate practice than from game play. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

AI changes feedback on student writing when it knows student race, gender www.edweek.org/technology/a...

“To learn how to teach and test yourself brings much comfort and is not as dangerous as shaving yourself; everyone should learn it at a certain age for fear of one day becoming the victim of an ill-guided razor.” —Georg Lichtenberg

Robert Pondiscio: 19 reasons that knowledge-rich curricula have not been broadly adopted in the US, despite strong research support. I'd add this one: "educators underestimate what young children can learn, and the joy with which they will learn it." thenext30years.substack.com/p/why-knowle...

What to do with the kids this summer? "Every day, do something for your mind, something for your body, and something for the family." www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

Perspective | How to help kids exercise their brains and become more independent this summer — even during covid-19

From two veteran educators -- one a Montessori teacher and the other a cognitive scientist.

washingtonpost.com

Small study shows surprisingly encouraging results of a critical thing college class in reducing four biases psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

People are more transported by stories they hear, rather than read. For storytellers, the opposite is true. myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

New research on providing information to parents who are selecting a school: information and social factors matter. Via @mattbarnum.bsky.social www.chalkbeat.org/2026/05/19/l...

Can better data help families choose schools? Only if it spreads.

In Los Angeles, individual letters about student growth barely changed families’ decisions. But when enough parents got them, choices shifted — and students benefited.

chalkbeat.org

When students are anxious/depressed, one method of remediation might be TEACHING THEM TO DO SCHOOL BETTER. Just got this message from a college mental health professional.

Call for papers: Symposium in Toronto on teaching art history. Hope to see you there! arthistory.utoronto.ca/news/call-pa...

Call for Papers - How Art History Teaches: Images, Infrastructure, Cognition

arthistory.utoronto.ca

Do Students Today Have Reduced Attention Spans? In this American Educator article, I argue they don't. (This piece is mostly a reprint of the one I published last year in Education Next.) www.aft.org/ae/spring202...

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Do Today's Kids Have Reduced Attention Spans?

aft.org

“Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched.” —Nabokov

The main teachers' union in NY state took on the job of educating in-service teachers in the science of reading. They blew it. hechingerreport.org/new-york-ten...

New York promised to center phonics in reading instruction, but new course for teachers sidelines science of reading

A New York State course intended to help educators use phonics and the science of reading effectively doesn’t do so and could impede students’ progress, literacy experts say.

hechingerreport.org

New article from E. D. Hirsch and me on (1) the evidence for the importance of knowledge in reading; (2) why it’s taken so long for people to acknowledge the evidence; (3) what we predict if the role of knowledge is taken seriously. www.educationnext.org/rediscoverin...

Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading

Two champions of knowledge-rich instruction reflect on its current momentum

educationnext.org

I still hear this justification re: AI in classrooms: “It’s out there & we can't be left behind.” Friendly challenge: which happens more often? 1. Schools regretted waiting too long to adopt a technology. 2. Schools regretted adopting a technology before they fully understood how to use it.

"During the first 1,000 days, the brain builds itself at a breathtaking pace, forming up to a million neural connections per second..." news.virginia.edu/content/qa-w...

Q&A: Why are a child’s first 1,000 days so critical for brain building?

Many parents think the school years matter most for neurological development, but a UVA expert says the biggest gains start much earlier.

news.virginia.edu

Generative AI has been adopted in US workplaces more rapidly than PCs or the internet pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Sending babies to nursery (daycare, for Americans) completely changes their microbiome www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Sending babies to nursery completely reshapes their microbiomes

Socializing at a young age helps to develop greater diversity in children’s microbiota, according to an analysis of baby-to-baby transmission of gut bacteria.

nature.com

Executives say AI is a huge time-saver. Their employees disagree. (link is WSJ gift article) www.wsj.com/lifestyle/wo...

CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story.

How much time workers say the technology saves them on the job is vastly different from what executives report.

wsj.com

It's not the case that children with dyslexia need identical instruction as typically developing kids, just a higher dose: Mark Seidenberg explains www.seidenbergreading.net/blog/oexqqvu...

That New Yorker article

The New Yorker article “Alphabet Soup” (Dec 29/Jan 5 issue) did a good job of conveying the complexity of dyslexia, the frustrations of dyslexics and their families, and the promise of schools such as...

seidenbergreading.net

Contra predictions of a decade ago, physical bookstores and sales of paper books are doing well www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/b...

Dragons, Sex and the Bible: What Drove the Book Business This Year

nytimes.com

Decades of lab evidence show spacing effect but S's self-report spaced study doesn't correlate w grades. Why? Bes E asked about study sessions, not whether same material was repeated in spaced sessions. When you ask that Q, you see predicted correlation. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

@mattbarnum.bsky.social with a sensible take on declining test scores...no one knows what's going on, and it's probably complicated. cbnewsletters.chalkbeat.org/p/what-expla...

Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about declining test scores

Experts (and everyone else) have theories but no definitive answers just yet.

cbnewsletters.chalkbeat.org

Data from 117 grad programs at one university indicate that making applications GRE-optional did not increase diversity of applications. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

I'll no longer review for journals that use an editorial platform. If I provide free a service to publishers, I think 1) they should care about my convenience, and these platforms are a pain 2) the data use statement should simply say "we don't" but, predictably, it doesn't.

New meta-analysis concludes that prequestions confer an advantage to content relevant to the prequestions, but the advantage does not bleed over to other content. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

In the face of chatbot cheating, more professors turning to oral exams. Not really an option in my class of 350... www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

To AI-proof exams, professors turn to the oldest technique of all

A small but growing number of educators are experimenting with oral exams to circumvent the temptations presented by powerful AI platforms.

washingtonpost.com

New American Educator article with Eric Turkheimer @ent3c.bsky.social on what IQ scores mean. www.aft.org/ae/winter202...

New article with Eric Turkheimer: "What Do IQ Scores Mean?" www.aft.org/ae/winter202...

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: What Do IQ Scores Mean?

aft.org