Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

5 essential STEM education reads

STEM education is a critical part of a comprehensive K-12 education–it helps students build and improve critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, and it teaches students to be persistent when presented with a challenge.

And while STEM education is essential, it’s not always accessible–underrepresented groups, including female students and minority students–often lose interest in STEM subjects as the subjects grow more challenging and as they move through school.

Representation is another obstacle to more ubiquitous STEM participation. When students don’t see STEM professionals who look like them represented in advertising, on TV and in movies, or in classroom resources, they have a harder time envisioning themselves in STEM careers.…Read More

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How plagiarism makes the literacy gap worse

Plagiarism is becoming ubiquitous in academia as an increase in AI-powered writing tools become more advanced and available to students. As a result, educators are faced with preventing, identifying, and stopping plagiarism even as plagiarism becomes increasingly harder to detect.

But why should educators even continue to tackle plagiarism? What are the documented and potentially long-lasting impacts of students plagiarizing their work?

According to a recent study, there was a marked increase globally in paraphrasing and text replacement during the pandemic in 2020 compared to 2019. The average similarity score, which is the score that comes from detecting what content was paraphrased versus what is original, increased from 35.1 percent to 49.6 percent. This is especially troubling considering the already negative effects the pandemic had on education. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that the pandemic erased over two decades of progress with drops in both mathematics and reading scores for students at record highs. …Read More

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Problem solving skills: The value added by maker spaces

What are the characteristics of great problem solvers?

problem-solvingFor the past couple of months, I have been working on adapting the Workshop Model of Reading and Writing instruction to design a course I will offer in our school’s new maker space next year. What I especially like about the workshop model is that it deemphasizes content in favor of building the strategies and habits of mind that make a student an effective reader. The whole “give a man a fish…” metaphor looms large here.

It became very clear to me that it could be adapted to almost any subject. It is a really strong model for student-centric, problem-based learning, and I wanted to see if I could apply it to teaching electronics and programming. But the habits of effective readers didn’t make much sense in this context. What are the strategies and habits of mind that I want to impart to my students in an electronics course?

I realized it isn’t the content, but the strategies, which are most important. I want my students to be great problem solvers. I want them to learn how to learn. I wrote the following Strategies for Effective Problem Solvers, which will be the primary learning objectives of my 7th and 8th grade Physical Computing course next year.…Read More

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