Category: VOA Education Report

Professors have lectured for centuries. But how effective is lecturing to students compared to working with them? A new study compared two classes of a beginning physics course at the University of British Columbia in Canada. There were more than two hundred sixty students in each section. Both were taught by popular and experienced professors. …

Last week, we told you about a call for American educators to do more to protect students from sexual violence on campus. The government recently sent a letter telling schools, colleges and universities that such violence is a form of sex discrimination. That means it violates a nineteen seventy-two law against discrimination on the basis …

Federal officials in the United States are telling schools that they need to do a better job of preventing sexual violence and helping victims.The Obama administration has released the first guidance on how schools should deal with the problem under a nineteen seventy-two law. That law is known as Title Nine. It bars discrimination on …

About one-fifth of Americans age six to nineteen are considered overweight. To reduce that number, some schools are teaching children to make better food choices. The EW Stokes Public Charter School in Washington has started to include food topics in its third-grade math and English programs. The school formed a partnership with Seedling Projects, an …

America’s recession ended in June of two thousand nine but recovery has been slow. Many states face budget problems and have cut spending in areas including education. In California, thousands of teachers have lost their jobs. Sixty percent of the teachers at the Mariposa-Nabi primary school in Los Angeles have received dismissal notices.Salvador Rodriguez, the …

A few years ago, a university researcher was having problems with an experiment that involved medical imaging. His adviser and his friends had no solutions. The researcher was Ijad Madisch at Harvard in Massachusetts. “I was so frustrated,” he says. His solution was to start a scientific network for researchers. It lets them connect with …

India was once a colony in the British Empire. But now Indian tutors are helping to teach math to some British children over high-speed Internet connections. Early results suggest that online tutoring may improve student performance. But not everyone is happy at this so-called outsourcing of tutors. Students at Raynham Primary School in London gather …

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the American state of South Dakota is home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe. It’s also where Nicky Oulette is in her first year as the journalism teacher at Little Wound High School. Ms. Oulette teaches the twelve students on the school newspaper, the Mustang News. She helps them choose …

Cranes are large birds with long legs and necks. In Japan and other East Asian cultures, they represent luck and long life. Japanese tradition says a person who folds one thousand paper cranes gets the right to make a wish. Some schoolchildren in the United States have been folding cranes. They want to show they …

The Intel Science Talent Search is the top science competition for high school students in the United States. The forty finalists were honored in Washington in March. They met with scientists and politicians. President Obama welcomed them to the White House. These forty students were selected from almost two thousand contestants nationwide. They had to …

In Giles County, Virginia, the school board has removed displays of the Ten Commandments in its schools. The county thought that posting the Ten Commandments, along with the first part of the United States Constitution, might help increase moral values. There had been few complaints since the Commandments were posted almost twelve years ago. But …

The International Primary Curriculum is an idea that began in Britain eight years ago. Today this curriculum is taught in more than one thousand primary schools in fifty-eight countries, including the United States.Educator Martin Skelton co-wrote the International Primary Curriculum, or IPC. He says for children to learn and succeed, they need a program that …

March first was the fiftieth anniversary of the Peace Corps. President John Kennedy began the program in nineteen sixty-one. The Peace Corps sends American volunteers to provide technical assistance in education and other areas in developing countries. Amanda Pease is one of almost forty volunteers serving in rural schools in Sierra Leone.Ms. Pease teaches science …

On July ninth, South Sudan becomes the world’s one hundred ninety-third nation. In January, almost ninety-nine percent of voters chose independence from the north. South Sudan will also be one of the world’s least developed nations. This follows years of war and neglect by the Sudanese government in Khartoum. South Sudan is about the size …

The Southeast Asian English Olympics were held in February in Jakarta, Indonesia. High school and university students competed to demonstrate their English skills at the Anggrek campus of Binus University. The Bina Nusantara English Club at the university started the English Olympics in two thousand five. The yearly competition was formerly known as the Nationwide …

Some American parents might think their children need better educations to compete with China and other countries. But how much do the parents themselves need to change? A new book called “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” by Amy Chua has caused a debate about cultural differences in parenting. Ms. Chua is a professor at …

President Obama talked a lot about education in his State of the Union speech in January. He said: “We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.”If Americans want to “win the future,” he said, then they also have to win the race to educate their children.The president said: “Over the next …

Some students get so nervous before a test, they do poorly even if they know the material. Sian Beilock is a psychology professor at the University of Chicago in Illinois. She has studied these highly anxious test-takers. She says students might even start worrying about whether this exam is going to prevent them from getting …

A mentor is someone who teaches or advises a younger person with less experience. January was National Mentoring Month in the United States. This was a time for calling attention to the value of mentoring. Some mentoring programs connect adults with children who need guidance. Researchers say mentoring can reduce drug and alcohol use and …