Sometimes it takes a great book to get students to fall in love with a field of study. If you are trying to motivate students to become interested in careers in science, technology, engineering or math – STEM – here are some books that could do the trick. Read more
Career and Technical Education Month, or CTE Month, is a public awareness campaign that is sponsored every February by The Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE). It’s a great annual event, and this year’s promises to be the best one ever, with a variety of stimulating programs to help high school students get more from their Technical Education studies and prepare for their careers. Read more
We are pleased to let you know that this year’s SkillsUSA Week is coming up soon February 2-8 2020. It’s not too late for your students and your school to get involved. Read more
Are you a high school student who is interested in preparing for a career in a STEM field after you start college? Or are you a parent or a teacher of students who are?
If so, it is worth knowing about an article, “Trends for STEM Careers in 2020: Space and Life Sciences” that Anna Powers published in Forbes on December 31, 2019. Ms. Powers, who writes about science for Forbes, highlights two areas that she predicts will see the greatest growth in STEM activity in the coming years. Read more
There are many career and aptitude tests online. But what about creativity tests? Are any worth recommending to students, or worth taking yourself?
We recently took four online creativity tests, and here is what we found. Read more
Research Findings . . .
If you are a teacher, you know how exciting it is to hear one of your students say, “I want to become a teacher someday.”
Those words tell you that a lot of things have gone right with that student’s education. He or she finds learning exciting, believes in the classroom experience, wants to give something back to the world by teaching young people . . . and also admires you and the work you are doing.
Those are all great messages to be getting from a student you have influenced.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study tested 600,000 15-year-old students in 79 countries on reading, science and mathematics.
What did the OECD study find? One troubling finding was that during the last 10 years, students’ reading skills have not improved significantly in poorer countries, but only in countries that are increasing their spending on education. Those stronger countries include Canada, China, Estonia, Ireland, Finland and Singapore. Read more
What STEM jobs offer the highest pay and the best chances of long-term employment?
“Explore Top Stem Careers,” an article that Susannah Snider and Rebecca Koenig published in U.S. News and World Report on April 22, 2019, offers some suggestions and provides food for thought. In compiling their list of careers, the authors accessed U.S. News’s own best jobs rankings and added data about projected job growth from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read more
In a post she wrote for the Greatschools.org blog on March 10, 2014 (“Does our approach to teaching math fail even the smartest kids?”) Carol Lloyd notes that according to a study conducted by UCLA, as many as 60% of all college students who start a STEM major in college drop out. Read more