Christy Bosch, curriculum coordinator at Ohio’s Logan-Hocking School District, is in charge of creating a course of study that will not only best educate the students of that district, but will also enable them to succeed on Ohio’s Graduation Proficiency Test. The test—a recent upgrade from the Ninth Grade Proficiency Test used for the last…
We’ve seen no small amount of hoopla over the suggestion, first made in the journal Nature in 1993, that listening to Mozart might improve spatial-temporal reasoning abilities. This news set off a series of events that might best be described as a sort of hysteria. What came to be known as the Mozart Effect was…
“There are always some students who can’t get the motor running,” says Gregory Downs, an instructor at DePaul University and former high school teacher. “Some of them have been up until one in the morning, and they struggle to be alert. Others go to sleep at a normal hour but need 10 or 12 hours…
Few scenarios have seemed more promising for the unraveling of human mystery than the research pot of gold that many believe identical twins to be. Unlike the rest of the actual, messy human world, monozygotic twins represent an almost perfect study-in-the-making: two identical copies of the same genetic makeup placed into the world at nearly…
Many children eagerly enter their first classroom excited and a little nervous. It is perfectly natural, after all, to feel jittery when confronting something so new as school. But some children come bearing more than a normal amount of trepidation; some, in fact, are deathly afraid of saying good bye to their mothers. “I had…
In the relatively short time since the massacre at Columbine High School in April 1999, the incident has grown to embody the need for educational and gun-control reform in the United States. But it has also focused attention on how dangerous and stressful places schools can be—and not just the ones in which children are…
