When professional sports teams use big data and analytics, their objective is to improve player performance and win more games. That approach is paying off in a major way. For instance, after the Golden State Warriors became one of the first NBA teams to invest in analytics, the team subsequently won league championships in 2015, 2017 […] … learn more→

Starting school is an important event for children and a positive experience can set the tone for the rest of their school experience. Some children are excited to attend school for the first time, yet others feel anxious. Back to school anxiety is a widely accepted phenomenon, but there is no data on exactly how many children feel […] … learn more→

Across Canada, children with disabilities are disadvantaged when it comes to the support they receive in schools. While Canada espouses a commitment to inclusive education, the right to it remains elusive for some students. Our research team at the University of Manitoba revealed another grave problem that needs redress: The shocking use of physical restraint and seclusion spaces, which […] … learn more→

What have been the main talking points among academics as we’ve adapted to online teaching this year? The logistics of managing Zoom or Teams? Developing curriculum content? Making learning sessions engaging? At my own institution, much of the conversation has been about something quite different: what one colleague called “death by blank screen”. Why, colleagues […] … learn more→

The education minister for Wales, Kirsty Williams, has announced that Welsh school pupils will not take GCSE and A-level exams in 2021. Instead, externally set and marked classroom assessments, which can be taken within a broad window of time, will be used to grade students. Scotland has already made a similar decision for for its National 5 assessments taken […] … learn more→

To borrow a well-known aphorism, one of the first casualties of a pandemic is the truth. More precisely, the bending of language by university managers to suit their desired goals in the face of Covid-19 is where the line between truth and falsehood has been blurred. Language matters in a pandemic because it can have […] … learn more→

An overarching criticism of the recent federal budget is that it overlooked the workers hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, namely women. However, the budget includes one promising, albeit small, initiative that focuses on this group. The government announced a cadetship program to help women to upskill in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), or to build a STEM […] … learn more→

Early childhood education and care is widely regarded as helping children’s academic, cognitive and social development. Our study, published in the journal Behavior Genetics, looked into whether attending preschool or childcare influences later academic achievement. We found no statistically significant difference between the literacy and numeracy scores of school children who had attended preschool or childcare and children […] … learn more→

The metaphor of learning as a product of a transmission still determines a common way of understanding training processes. By the general public, but also in university settings. Thus, the image of the teacher who transmits knowledge to students remains in force, who write down the knowledge in the form of notes. Taking the model to an […] … learn more→

I’m a professor who has spent the last 10 years preparing new teachers to enter the workforce. I also study how race, culture and power influence education and childhood development at a time when more than half of the roughly 50 million children who attend U.S. public schools are nonwhite, unlike most of their teachers. About four […] … learn more→