This report from the Alliance for Excellent Education identifies four key challenges that U.S. public school district leaders must systemically address in the next two years and outlines the essential elements for developing a comprehensive digital strategy. The report is part of a major effort by the Alliance to help district leaders make smart, far-reaching decisions about implementing education technology that support teachers and improve student outcomes in K-12 public…

These web tables published by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics provide an overview of classes taken and credits earned by a nationwide sample of first-time beginning postsecondary students based on data from the Postsecondary Education Transcript Study (PETS) of the 2004/09 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study. PETS collected transcripts from all the postsecondary institutions students attended, providing a complete six-year record of students’ course taking and credit accumulation….

For students to learn 21st-century skills, they must be taught differently than in the past. The outdated, transmission model, through which teachers transmit factual knowledge to students via lectures and textbooks, remains the dominant approach to compulsory education in much of the world, yet it is not the most effective way to teach 21st-century skills. Students are not developing 21st-century skills because they are not explicitly taught and because they…

Decision making is rarely taught in high school, even though improved decision skills could benefit young people facing life-shaping decisions. While decision competence has been shown to correlate with better life outcomes, few interventions designed to improve decision skills have been evaluated with rigorous quantitative measures. This RAND publication discusses a randomized study showing that integrating decision making into U.S. history instruction improved students’ history knowledge and decision-making competence, compared…