Education Next – Martin West

“Today’s Wall Street Journal reports on a new Education Next study showing that, at least in New York City, attending a standalone middle school rather than a K-8 school has a big negative impact on student achievement and attendance rates. “(more)

BBC – Staff Writer

“Girls believe they are cleverer, better behaved and try harder than boys from the age of four, research suggests.”(more)

Time – John Cloud

“As biologist and emeritus Harvard professor Edward Wilson has written, a prevailing view — one promoted by the famed developmental theorist Jean Piaget — has long been that very young children are “reflex-dominated” and “egocentric”: in other words, they see little outside themselves until they reach the age of reason (usually considered to be about 7). But a paper published recently in the journal Psychological Science shows that very young children can be far more attuned to the “desires, preferences, beliefs [and] emotions” of others, including adults, than the Piaget theory assumes.”(more)

Education Next – Frederick Hess

“Check out my new study, America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents, coauthored with the talented Stafford Palmieri and Janie Scull and published today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. It reports the fruits of an extensive effort to gauge reform environments by rating the nation’s 25 biggest cities (and five smaller cities touted as reform hotbeds) in the areas of human capital, financial capital, quality control, municipal environment, charter school environment, and school district environment.”(more)

Mercury News – Lisa M. Krieger

“In a stunning example of the power of the Internet to attract and connect the smartest minds on earth around the most difficult problems, scholars at UC Berkeley and Stanford have created a free website, called MathOverflow, which is transforming math research.”(more)

The New York Times – Tara Parker-Pope

“Now new research offers a surprisingly simple, and affordable, solution to the summer reading slide. In a three-year study, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, found that simply giving low-income children access to books at spring fairs — and allowing them to choose books that most interested them — had a significant effect on the summer reading gap.”(more)

The Sydney Morning Herald – Ainslie MacGibbon

“New research shows some types of optimistic daydreaming are productive, improve IQ and inspire resolve, writes Ainslie MacGibbon.”(more)

The Washington Post – Valerie Strauss

“In short, our education policies don’t align with the latest science on how and when children learn. American public education is out of whack.”(more)

PRI – Staff Writer

“Part of the reason why creativity scores are dropping may be because “there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children,” Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write for Newsweek. Schools are focusing more on rote memorization and nationalized testing than instilling the value of creativity.”(more)

The Star – Louise Brown

“But a surprising new bottom-line look at early learning suggests how much you learn in kindergarten — and whether you had a seasoned teacher — can help determine how rich and educated you will be as a grown-up, and even whether you will be married before age 30.”(more)