Author: Nelson Rosario

An elementary school teacher knows this moment well. The child looks at a row of numbers, thinks about the question, and comes up with the right answer. They got the same answer as the kid next to them. There is something different about the child’s work, speed, and the way they get back up after falling. A brand-new study from Stanford Medicine backs up that feeling with real science, and what it finds is very important to pay close attention to. The study, which was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, used 87 second and third graders and gave them…

Watching a five-year-old sort through a pile of trash can reveal some things about them. There should be no doubt or hesitation. Just knowing in your heart that putting the glass bottle in the wrong bin is wrong. The adults in the room are almost embarrassed, but in the best way possible. OMEP, which stands for the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, has spent years looking into how young children can think about the environment. They have found more than just something sweet. It really is instructive. Children who are just starting to learn are not passively taking in…

There is something quietly amazing about seeing a teenager calmly explain how their device can spot a stroke in progress and show a bystander what to do before the paramedics get there. That’s not an idea for a TED Talk. A high school student built, tested, and showed that project to a group of judges at Saginaw Valley State University on April 25. Fifteen high schools from Bay, Midland, and Saginaw counties sent 20 teams to the 13th annual A.H. Nickless Innovation Award competition. The teams were all competing for a chance to win up to $77,500 in college scholarships…

As strange as it may seem, things have been going badly in American public schools for the past twenty years. At the same time that more kids are overweight, more teachers are saying that kids can’t focus, and youth anxiety has become a real public health issue, school districts across the country have been cutting recess without anyone noticing. Not switching it out. Cutting it. Most of the time, the same reasons are given: students need more time to study, their test scores need to go up, or there aren’t enough resources to watch their free play. At first glance,…

There is a certain kind of quiet that settles into the office of a school counselor. It has a smell of old carpet and cheap coffee. A motivational poster on the wall is most likely not straight. In some part of that plain little room, a teen finds the words to say something they’ve never said out loud before. People are now asking AI chatbots to copy that moment, which was fragile, specific, and human. Take a moment to think about that. It wasn’t a sudden idea to bring AI mental health tools into schools. Almost half of people who…

When schools make budgets or annual reports, they don’t always show this kind of gap. It really does live in the hallways, where a teacher is trying to give a reading test to a six-year-old while passing classes make noise in the other hallways. It’s not exciting. It’s not easy to make the news. A new study from MIT, on the other hand, suggests that this quiet problem may be robbing thousands of kids of a unique chance to learn how to read. The study was led by MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and published in the Annals of…

Six hours. Not every week. Not every month. Every year. That’s about how long students in a big study led by Stanford spent on a mastery-based math platform on average, and it was enough to make a difference. This is the kind of finding that sounds almost too small to be important. Still, when researchers looked at data from more than 200,000 students over three school years, they saw a clear, roughly linear pattern: students who spent more time on the platform did better on math tests given by outside sources. Scores tended to drop when there was less use.…

For a long time, people who run preschools and daycares have been in a strange professional middle ground. Under most state laws, they are not quite teachers. They are not doctors, even though science has known for a long time that a child’s first five years affect his or her health for the rest of their lives. Many policymakers see them as babysitters—a temporary fix for parents who need to work—not as an important part of public infrastructure. It has been a long time since the CDC made it clearer that people who work in early care and education are…

A number in this year’s Stanford HAI AI Index Report is so interesting that it’s hard to put down once you read it. Six percent of teachers say that the AI policy at their school is not clear. Not not good enough or not enforced well enough; just really clear. This is the year when four out of five high school and college students in the U.S. are already using AI for schoolwork. The difference between what students are doing and what institutions are ready for feels less like a lag and more like a slow-moving structural failure. Stanford’s Institute…

In every advocacy movement, there comes a time when people who have been working quietly in clinics and research centers for years decide they can’t keep doing nothing any longer. That moment seems to have come in Argentina, and it’s most clear in the way that the work of the country’s top child psychologists is becoming more in line with OMEP’s goals. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP) has long seen itself as more than just a network for professionals. But when it became a part of the Advisory Council for the UN Fund for Sustainable Development Goals…