A 2020 study from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Hussman School of Journalism and Media found that since 2004 over one-quarter of U.S. newspapers have disappeared. This reduction has left many people, especially those in poor rural areas, living in news deserts, where access to professionally vetted information is limited, if not…

The abundance of information available to us every day continues to increase, largely because of society's reliance on the internet. While the internet provides access to a wealth of information, information may be inaccurate or irrelevant because anyone can publish content on the internet. As a result, it is critical for individuals to develop…

BEAM is a schema for categorizing the rhetorical positions of authors according to the author's intention or purpose of the information. This Innovative Practices piece critiques common methods of teaching source evaluation and proposes that instruction librarians teach BEAM to students who may struggle using a source once they have located it. A…

The National Academy of Education (NAEd) undertook this consensus report on the evaluation and improvement of teacher preparation programs (TPPs). Specifically, this consensus report aims to (1) identify and disseminate best practices for evaluating and improving TPPs to promote teacher effectiveness and student achievement; (2) provide…

In the age of fake news, teachers in every subject area should redouble their efforts to help students distinguish between credible and deceptive sources of information. The author calls attention to a few key resources, including the CRAAP guidelines developed at California State University, Chico, and promoted by the American Library Association.

One of the main responsibilities of school librarians is to teach students to evaluate the credibility of information. There is little evidence to suggest that students are being explicitly taught how to evaluate news obtained through social media. As avenues for giving and getting information evolve, so must ways of teaching students so that they…

The primary message of the Supreme Court's ruling in "Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District" (hereinafter "Endrew F.," 2017) was that school districts are obligated to "offer an IEP [individualized education program] that is reasonably calculated to enable the child to make progress appropriate in light of the…

Creating information literate students and future employees is an expected outcome of a tertiary education. This paper shares insights from a successful collaboration between an academic and three university librarians to create an online learning module designed to develop students' professional information literacy capability: identifying…

School ratings are a ubiquitous feature of the U.S. educational system. Alongside state-mandated measures of school performance, non-state organizations such as GreatSchools.org and Niche have created consumer-oriented systems of school ratings that draw on publicly available information about schools. Claiming the purpose of their rating systems…

Student ratings are not leaving today or anytime soon. However, as the title of this article indicates, student ratings are not the only option to provide evidence in the evaluation of teaching. There is a broad range of alternatives to consider beyond student ratings in the delicate decision-making processes to improve teaching and determine the…

Widespread participation in collaborative writing and public discourse on blogs, news sites, Wikipedia and other online information sources is creating a new class of information literacy skills. In a series of qualitative studies, I examined high school students' information assessment practices as they helped build a collaborative online…

This report describes an initiative undertaken from 2016-2017 by the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution and Education International (EI) to develop tools to measure the breadth of learning opportunities to which children and youth are exposed in an education system. The Breadth of Learning Opportunities (BOLO)…

Today 195 countries exist in the world. The purpose of this review was to provide a global picture of the services and opportunities for individuals with dyslexia. The intent was not to provide an exhaustive review of each topic, but rather to provide examples of what is occurring in different countries around the world. Through an Internet…

Like high-stakes student assessment, high-stakes teacher evaluation threatens to be an occasional event that is disconnected from day-to-day teaching and learning, producing results that do not help teachers improve their performance and placing teachers in a passive role as recipients of external judgment. For several years, the authors have…

The author reports on the debate about "value added" measures of teaching which may be the most divisive topic in teacher-quality policy today. It has generated sharp-tongued exchanges in public forums, in news stories, and on editorial pages. And it has produced enough policy briefs to fell whole forests. But for most of the nation's teachers,…