Author: Nelson Rosario

Scientists talk about a time in a child’s life that seems to happen very quickly. It opens when you are born. Around age three, it starts to get narrower. A lot of the things that a child’s brain will learn have already been built by the time they start kindergarten, or have not been built yet. In a very important report from 2017, UNICEF gave this time frame a number: the first 1,000 days. The agency says that what happens during that time affects everything from how well someone does in school to how much money they make in their…

Take a moment to think about this. There are two kids inside an MRI machine. Two numbers are shown on a screen to both of them. Both of them press the right button. They both get it right. But something very different is going on inside their heads. That is the main point of a study from Stanford Medicine that was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. It sounds like a simple finding, but it makes us think about how we think about kids who have trouble with math in a really uncomfortable way. The study looked at 87 kids…

When students are really into something, there’s a certain kind of silence that fills the room. The kind of silence you get when you’re bored or just sitting there staring at a screen. A group of twelve-year-olds are trying to figure out why their cardboard bridge keeps falling apart. The sound is focused and almost electric. That silence is clear to anyone who has been to MIT’s Day of Design. The program, which came about because MIT has always believed in project-based problem-solving, brings real-life design problems into K–12 classrooms all over the US. If you write down the idea,…

If you walk into almost any high school in the United States right now, you’ll notice that something has changed. It happened quietly, without a report or policy memo. When students sit down with their laptops and type a few words into a browser tab that isn’t the school’s learning portal, a full paragraph shows up right away. There was no rule that said this was okay. Also, no one really said it wasn’t. This is where American education is right now: that gap, that long, cold silence. Based on surveys done between June 2024 and June 2025, new research…

Patricia Snyder, who studies young children at the University of Florida, still thinks about a certain scene. A young mother pushing a stroller through an airport while she was waiting for her flight caught her eye. The baby, who was about four months old, was clearly hungry and crying in a way that any parent would recognize as trouble getting worse. The mom had a bottle. She had a buggy for babies. The only thing she didn’t have was attention. She had her phone out. He said it was painful to watch what happened over the next ten minutes. The…

It’s interesting that teachers from thousands of miles away are now looking at the calendar of a Spanish organization before making plans for their own school year. It’s not flashy. There is no summit declaration or UN mandate behind it. OMEP Spain’s annual activities calendar is just a calendar, but for more and more early childhood educators in Latin America, it’s becoming more and more like a professional compass. A lot of countries have their own chapters of OMEP, which stands for the World Organization for Early Childhood Education. Spain’s chapter has been active for a long time, but something…

A certain version of this story sounds like it’s been told before. A parent gives their kid a tablet to keep them busy. A few months go by. All of a sudden, the child is talking about words, videos, and ideas that the parent doesn’t understand. You should find out where all of that came from. What people don’t know or don’t talk about as much is how early this is happening. Ofcom’s most recent study on kids’ media use in the UK shows that kids ages five to seven use social media more than ever, going from 30% to…

A certain kind of talk takes place in Swedish preschools that most people who are not in early childhood education have never given much thought to. A teacher sits down with a small group of three or four-year-olds and asks them what they think happens to a rubbish bottle when it is thrown away. The kids answer with a level of seriousness that surprises. Some aren’t right. Some of them are amazingly close. Some of them say things that make the teacher stop what they’re saying.This is not an accident. Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson says that this is exactly the point.…

Somewhere in rural England, America, or really anywhere rural, there is a classroom where worksheets are still being copied by hand. At a nearby private school with lots of money, a coworker uses AI to make personalized lesson plans, write letters to parents, and make tests for students in a lot less time. They are both trying to do the same thing. Most of the people in charge aren’t paying nearly enough attention, but the gap between them is getting bigger. It’s hard to take your eyes off the numbers. The Sutton Trust in the UK did research that showed…

Every July, a new set of numbers starts to spread through school boards, counseling offices, and worried family chat rooms. The College Board shares AP exam score distribution data, which includes percentages of 1s through 5s for each subject. The patterns that show up reveal where students are doing well, where they’re having trouble, and where the ground may have moved under everyone’s feet. No changes were made to the 2026 AP exam score distribution data. In fact, it is more telling than usual in some ways. Start with AP Calculus BC, which is probably the most interesting number in…