Education

The admissions test for the Indian Institutes of Technology, known as the Joint Entrance Examination or JEE, may be the most competitive test in the world. In 2012, half a million Indian high school students sat for the JEE. Over six grueling hours of chemistry, physics, and math questions, the students competed for one of ten thousand spots at India’s most prestigious engineering universities. When the students finish the exam, it is the end of a two plus year process. Nearly every student has spent four hours a day studying advanced science topics not taught at school, often waking up...

Scott Stearns interviews Aung San Suu Kyi at VOA in Washington D.C. VOA’s Scott Stearns interviews Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi at VOA in Washington D.C., Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012. (VOA/A. Klein) STEARNS: Thank you for being with us this afternoon. Our time is short, we’ll get right to the questions. Political and economic reforms in Burma are clearly not yet complete. What needs to happen next?   ASSK: We need to just go on with the process. We need to find out what we have to do in order to keep the democratization process on track.  Economic...

Some students seem to breeze through their school years, whereas others struggle, putting them at risk for getting lost in our educational system and not reaching their full potential.  Parents and teachers want to help students succeed, but there is little guidance on which learning techniques are the most effective for improving educational outcomes. This leads students to implement studying strategies that are often ineffective, resulting in minimal gains in performance. What then are the best strategies to help struggling students learn? Fortunately for students, parents, and teachers, psychological scientists have developed and evaluated the effectiveness of a wide range...

If students can only focus for 15-minute intervals, shouldn’t we devote precious class time to something more engaging? Each school day, millions of students move in unison from classroom to classroom where they listen to 50- to 90-minute lectures. Despite there being anywhere from 20 to 300 humans in the room, there is little actual interaction. This model of education is so commonplace that we have accepted it as a given. For centuries, it has been the most economical way to “educate” a large number of students. Today, however, we know about the limitations of the class lecture, so why does...

A desire to produce well-rounded graduates, an influx of Chinese students, heartburn over university rankings: Such universal topics were among the subjects of discussion at the three-day annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education in Seoul, South Korea, which ended March 20. Several university presidents and vice chancellors from Asia lamented an overemphasis in higher education on graduates’ employability. There is too great a focus, they said, on imparting a narrow set of skills rather than on educating students broadly. Are modern universities, asked Inwon Choue, president of Kyung Hee University, in Seoul, “begetting academic excellence without soul?”...

We know that students plagiarize. We suppose that plagiarism, as well as academic dishonesty in general, has increased over the past few years, decades, or century—depending on which academic ax we choose to grind. The caveats are familiar: Perhaps cheating just is easier than it used to be (most honors students who are caught plagiarizing say they did so because it was “easy”). Perhaps we are better at detecting plagiarism because of software such as Google and Turnitin. Or perhaps we forget that every generation, at least since the ancient Romans and Greeks, complains that the next one is composed...