Recently I was contacted by an individual seeking spiritual counsel about, among other things, a strange phenomenon he was experiencing. Per my usual policy, I’m not going to identify this individual.

One of the arguments of cultural-literacy folks make for a curriculum that identifies knowledge everybody must learn and books everybody must read is that those core materials are necessary for ...

The purpose of going to school is to learn, but students may find certain topics difficult to understand if they don't have the necessary background knowledge. This is one of the conclusions of a ...

Fire Ants. What do you know about them? Turn and talk to the person sitting next to you." My face flushed as I turned to the middle-aged stranger sitting beside me in the workshop. “Um..they sting? Or ...

The study was published in the journal -- Psychological Science. “Background knowledge plays a key role in students’ reading comprehension. Our findings show that if students don’t have sufficient ...

Adeyemi Stembridge, Ph.D., provides technical assistance for school improvement with a specific focus on equity. He works with districts around the country to identify root causes of achievement gaps ...

The latest in our series on the achievement gap. Could the problem be the nation’s focus on teaching skills rather than actual knowledge? Sarah Webb, fifth and eighth grade English Langue Learner ...

In classrooms across the country, teachers are rethinking how students build reading comprehension — not just how they decode words, but how they make meaning from text. That shift is part of a larger ...