NPR (Neag School professors and a student weigh in on arming school staff in response to the school shootings)

UConn’s baseball coach, Jim Penders, is the prime example of a coach who is very high on player development and the numbers don’t lie. Under his belt are numerous appearances in the NCAA tournament including a Super Regional appearance in 2011, three conference titles and a total of 43 players either drafted or signed by professional baseball clubs.

According to Neag School psychology researchers James Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto, little-c creativity has been useful for addressing common misconceptions about creativity.

“This is the first look at this issue in a significant way,” says Rashea Hamilton, a research associate in the National Center for Research on Gifted Education (NCRGE), part of UConn’s Neag School of Education. “We were able to make connections between higher proportions of free or reduced lunch students and availability of gifted programs and percentage of gifted students.”

Can we train an athlete to make them look like, seem like, act like a hummingbird? Probably not,” Jaci VanHeest said. But, she speculates, with some cellular or genetic tweaks, “can we get more than 4%? Maybe.”

“As Fitbits and other wearable activity monitors change how regular people exercise and track their activity, they’re having similar effects on how Olympians train and recover between workouts,” says Jaci VanHeest, an associate professor in the Neag School of Education at UConn.

Associate Professor Thomas Levine in the Neag School’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction has been named an associate editor of Teaching and Teacher Education (TATE), an international, multidisciplinary journal concerned primarily with teachers, teaching, or teacher education

Kimberly Lawless, associate dean for research in the College of Education, believes that science literacy is a tool, and like any tool, be it a hammer, screwdriver or wrench, you need to learn what it is, what it does and when to use it.

For Wei ‘Toby’ Xinhai, the road to UConn spanned nearly 8,000 miles, but the distance doesn’t faze him. While he may be separated from his family in Hong Kong, S.A.R. China by a full ocean, the dream of being a teacher has transcended any homesickness he has felt in Storrs. Wei, a pre-teaching freshman in the Neag School of Education, who is working toward a career as a math educator in the school’s five-year Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s Teacher Education Program, keeps his eye on his ultimate goal.

Behind the artistry of today’s Olympic figure skaters lies some serious science. A new book by UConn professor Jaci Van Heest will make the research underlying elite skaters’ training accessible for the first time to coaches and athletes everywhere.