A recent storm has emerged over reports of secret government memos detailing complaints of bullying and racism at Steiner schools in the UK. Steiner schools, built around the philosophy of Austrian educationalist…
How can there be such high profile disagreement about an issue as extensively researched and important as the teaching of reading to young children? In July, a group of teachers and phonics consultants…
Many of the genes for maths and reading overlap.
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I disliked and feared maths for most of my school career and dropped it as soon as I possibly could. My mother recalls me crying as a five-year-old because: “I can’t do the people-on-the-bus sums”. If…
Be it personalised gifts, personalised cosmetics services or personalised shopping recommendations, we have become the centre of the products we use like never before. And the trend is now more and more…
When we want what we write to be clearly communicated to a reader, we generally try to use a typeface that is clear to read. But few people realise how quickly your choice of typeface affects that process…
Tap on me, click on me, publish me! We live in an era of a digital selfie obsession. There is a growing tendency to create self-centred digital environments. You only need to look at a few Facebook profiles…
Don’t panic, she still likes books too.
Todd Morris
A furious debate has been raging for some years now between adults. Are you a Kindle lover or a devotee of the good, old-fashioned book? As the e-book spreads into children’s publishing, some look in terror…
Forget the daily grunt… can we learn more vocab today?
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Every few months a story appears about the declining speech and language skills of children arriving in primary school. The epithet “the daily grunt” was invented by one newspaper to capture the lack of…
I have often argued that I would not let any teacher into a school unless – as a minimum – they had read, carefully and well, the three great books on education: Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Émile and…
Here’s an eye opener: you can now read a novel on your lunch break. But how much will you really take in?
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Most adults read about 200-250 words per minute (wpm), but Spritz, a new reading application that is attracting considerable social media attention, claims that most people can easily double or triple…
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Done. NEXT!
radarxlove
A new app is about to come on the market with promises to dramatically increase the speed at which you read. Spritz is a text streaming technology that allows you to read a sentence, one word at a time…
There has been huge investment into research seeking to understand dyslexia in recent years. This has led to the development of tests that can be used to diagnose dyslexia and interventions to help children…
The problem mightn’t be with the equations, but the language in the questions.
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There has been a lot of hand-wringing about mathematics lately. According to national and international testing we are not getting any better at it and plenty of good reasons have been offered for why…
Making words make sense.
Ben Birchall/PA Archive/Press Association Images
Some children arrive at school already able to read. They have enjoyed books with their parents and understand the exciting route that reading takes them into the wonderful world of stories. They may well…
New tech open avenues for dyslexic readers.
thequietlibrary
Using an e-reader may help some dyslexic students understand what they read more effectively, researchers at Harvard University argue. In a paper published in the journal PLOS One, the authors found that…
Two new international reports on school performance should be put into perspective.
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The recent release of Australia’s performance in the TIMMS (2011) and PIRLS (2011) test results has sparked much media comment about what this means for the quality of Australian education. The focus so…
The latest results of international testing in maths, science and reading means Australia’s education outlook does not look good.
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Sue Thomson, Australian Council for Educational Research
Prime Minister Julia Gillard in September set an ambitious goal for Australian education: to be ranked as a top-five country in reading, mathematics and science by 2025. Clearly she is hoping to lift Australia…
Bookshelves towering floor to ceiling filled with weighty tomes, or one book-sized device holding hundreds of “books” in electronic form: which one of these options for the voracious reader creates the…
Struggling to read? You may not be using your brain effectively.
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Almost half of all Australians aged 15-74 years had literacy skills below the level required to participate effectively in our society, according to a 2008 study from the Australian Bureau of Statistics…