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 The outdated, transmission model, through which teachers transmit factual knowledge to students via lectures and textbooks, remains the dominant approach to compulsory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…

Many countries face challenges with regard to maintaining an existing school building stock to acceptable standards of quality. Providers of education have a responsibility to ensure the health, safety, and security of children and spaces for learning. But educational spaces must also be fit for purpose in terms of their capacity to support the needs of the curriculum, pedagogy, and innovation. In addition to making recommendations to improve programs such…

These U.S. National Center for Education Statistics use data from the first follow-up of the 2008 Baccalaureate and Beyond study to display a wide range of information on demographic characteristics, educational experiences, and student loan borrowing of 2007–08 first-time bachelor’s degree recipients. In addition to undergraduate experiences, tables display information on employment, community service, postbaccalaureate enrollment, and student loan debt one year after bachelor’s degree completion. Results are shown by…

Research on academic achievement has revealed wide variation in teachers’ qualifications and experiences across schools. These U.S. National Center for Education Statistics web tables present the demographic characteristics and teaching preparation, including undergraduate course taking and certification, of 2007–08 baccalaureate degree recipients who taught at the K–12 level within a year of completing their bachelor’s degree. The analysis also compares teachers across a number of key characteristics of the schools…

This is one in a series of data briefs developed by the Delta Cost Project at AIR using data from the IPEDS Analytics: Delta Cost Project Database 1987-2010, which was released on August 14, 2012, by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. The intent of this series is to update key tables and figures from Trends in College Spending.  This data brief focuses on institutional revenues between 2000 and…

This report summarizes the highlights of a national survey of college and university faculty conducted by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) in the 2010–11 academic year. In terms of faculty norms, the report discusses: Top Sources of Stress among Faculty Student-centered Pedagogical Practices Declines in Time Spent Teaching Part-Time Faculty: A Growing Phenomenon Training the Next Generation of Faculty

This is one in a series of data briefs developed by the Delta Cost Project at AIR using data from the IPEDS Analytics: Delta Cost Project Database 1987-2010, which was released on August 14, 2012, by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. The intent of this series is to update key tables and figures from Trends in College Spending. To understand how spending patterns may have shifted, this brief looks at…