By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” –William Butler Yeats In education, almost everything changes. Almost. Technology changes. 30,000 years ago, the height of technology was painting on cave walls near the village of Montignac in southwest France. It was sophisticated and, ...

By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark While reading difficulties have been studied extensively in the last few decades, difficulties learning math have received less attention. Math disabilities, however, are as common as reading disabilities at 5 to 8 percent of the population. Like reading disabilities, math disabilities may have multiple causes and dimensions. Moreover, as ...

By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark Back in 2011, researchers at University College London offered dramatic, direct evidence that intelligence can change after early childhood.  The study was characterized as providing “new hope for boosting the brain’s abilities.” In the study, there was no purposeful intervention or attempt to change the participants’ intelligence, but some teens experienced ...

By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark A 17-year-old high-school student recently walked into a high-stakes test without the accommodations that he had received for years. This was not an arbitrary administrative decision; it was his choice. “All my life,” he said, “they have been giving me everything modified, adapted or adjusted. In 10th grade, I ...

By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark It may seem trite to say the brain is where learning takes place and therefore we need to know about the brain when we consider how to improve learning outcomes. But until the late twentieth century, the brain seemed more like a black box than an organ whose processing ...

By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark Schools are exploring new ways to address the impact that Covid-19 has had and continues to have on students. As leadership teams around the country consider the most effective options to help close the learning gap for their students, it is helpful to recognize that, as the Kennedy Forum, has ...

By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark There continues to be controversy regarding cognitive training (sometimes called brain training) programs, and there continue to be many skeptics. Skepticism is generally a healthy attitude, particularly when health and wellbeing are involved. It also means that the skeptic is open to a variety of possibilities. Here are some comments and ...

By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark In Part One of this series, we envisioned a world where vastly greater numbers of students could improve their cognitive skills so that they score at the 70th percentile or higher.  Why the 70th percentile? Because students who perform at the 70th percentile and above generally can learn what ...