In this policy brief, doctoral student Shannon Kelley presents a brief overview of early childhood literacy including its importance for future literacy achievement. She details six best practices for preschools of all types, discuss the importance of family literacy, and offers three high-leverage strategies parents and guardians can use with their children.

“Parents who want their kids to be more creative may be tempted to enroll them in arts classes or splurge on STEM-themed toys. Those things certainly can help, but as a professor of educational psychology who has written extensively about creativity, I can draw on more than 70 years of creativity research to make additional suggestions that are more likely to be effective – and won’t break your budget,” says James Kaufman, a professor of educational psychology at UConn’s Neag School of Education.

With a General Election just around the corner, the so-called “sleepy” town of Guilford has made national headlines, gripped by a polarizing debate over what’s being taught in schools.
Guilford High School English Chair George Cooksey and Superintendent Paul Freeman explain that while critical race theory is not itself taught in the K-12 environment in Guilford, “dimension” and diversity of source material is still a priority. Neag School’s Saran Stewart also served as a panelist, along with Freeman and others.

Sponsored by CEA and California Casualty, the second-annual CEA Teacher Appreciation Day at Rentschler Field featured complimentary hot breakfast for CEA members and guests, along with music, a fan photo booth, and games of cornhole, football toss, and ladder golf. Teachers were also treated to dozens of prizes that included CEA and UConn Neag School of Education swag, as well as tickets to concerts and Broadway shows at Waterbury’s Palace Theater, a CEA Member Benefits partner.

UConn said the president Joe Biden will join former U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd and other dignitaries for the dedication of The Dodd Center for Human Rights. The center has been known as The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center since it opened in 1995 and UConn said that UConn’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously in August to authorize its dedication as The Dodd Center for Human Rights.

Symone James was struggling. At the time, the fifth-grade teacher at Roger Sherman Elementary School in Meriden had a class that she said, “needed a lot of love and patience.” “I fell into a place where I was not sleeping and constantly thinking about work and my students,” she recalled. “At night, I’d lay awake going over anticipated behaviors and situations, and tasks of that day.”

Our new study, just published in AERA Open, provides evidence that increasing the financial support offered to potential Ph.D. students offers a promising approach for attracting a more diverse pool of doctoral students. Along with co-authors Christopher Bennett, H. Kenny Nienhusser, and Milagros Castillo-Montoya, we studied Ph.D. student application and enrollment patterns at a large public research university in the Northeast. We were interested in how the diversity of the Ph.D. students changed corresponding to a change in the financial support offered to doctoral students.

“Creativity is not mysterious or magical, but something everybody can do,” says James C. Kaufman, Ph.D., a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut. Within psychology, creativity is usually understood as the ability to produce things or objects that are new (at least to the person creating the work) and useful, or appropriate for the situation or purpose, says John Kounios, Ph.D., a professor of psychological and brain science at Drexel University. However, he prefers to define creativity as a way of reorganizing the elements of a situation or a thought.

“The dedication of the building is a wonderful opportunity for the campus and the wider community to come together and celebrate what we’ve accomplished over the past 25 years,” says Glenn Mitoma, director of UConn’s Dodd Human Rights Impact and an assistant professor in the Neag School of Education. “Going forward, this building will be a place where students, faculty, and the broader community can come together to address the most pressing human rights challenges we face. It will be a place of knowledge, of truth, but also of democracy, of shared values, and of building capacity to solve problems together, in a way that allows us all to enjoy the basic dignity we know we deserve.”

White public schools have always gotten more money than Black public schools. These funding disparities go back to the so-called “separate but equal” era – which was enshrined into the nation’s laws by the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. The disparities have persisted even after Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered the desegregation of America’s public schools.