If you have ever tried to figure out what a homework assignment is trying to accomplish and why is it taking so many hours, then you’ve taken the first step in wrestling with the homework dilemma.
The Redesigned SAT
At last the new redesigned SAT was formerly announced on 5 March 2014 ending months of speculation about its content.
The new test content will be first administered in the fall 2015 PSAT, with the SAT launch in ‘spring 2016.’
The New SAT will eliminate the quarter point guessing penalty, obviate ‘obscure vocabulary’ from its reading sections—stressing discovery of meaning through context, and require students to support their answers to reading questions from evidence supplied in the passage.
On the mathematics front, the New SAT will focus on problem solving and data analysis (ratios, percentages, and proportions), linear equations and systems, and something that sounds a bit daunting, “Passport to Advanced Math” which deals with ‘manipulation of complex equations’. In essence the New SAT will be narrowing its math focus to the three aforementioned areas
Questioning the Value of the Bachelor’s Degree
The confluence of rising tuition, increasing student debt, and declining employment opportunities for recent graduates is raising questions about the value of a bachelor’s degree. These concerns have been around for years, but the good news is there are rays of hope in the form of tuition rates beginning to freeze or even contract. Better still, over the next five years, expect the use of online classes to snowball across the postsecondary universe. Institutions that fail to respond will, in all likelihood, start to fall to the wayside—unless the size of their endowments insulates them.
The Science of Teaching Science: It’s the Method not the Teacher that Matters
If you were to discover a method to almost double the learning from the same amount of time spent in class and on homework, chances are you’d want to use this method across all your studies. Research just published in the Science journal by Louis Deslauriers and Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist at the University of British Columbia (UBC), showed that a method called “deliberate practice” produced dramatic results.