Congratulations to our Neag School alumni, faculty, staff, and students on their continued accomplishments inside and outside the classroom. If you have an accolade to share, we want to hear from you! Please send any news items and story ideas to neag-communications@uconn.edu.

This April in New York City, the American Educational Research Association (AERA)’s Annual Meeting will feature the work of more than 60 faculty researchers, graduate students, and alumni from UConn’s Neag School of Education. An audience of 15,000 scholars, policy experts, practitioners, and AERA members will convene April 13 to 17 for a program that will include upwards of 2,500 sessions focused on the theme of “The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Public Education.”

Preston Green’s paper (co-authored by Kevin Welner) offers some interesting insights. He offers this summary: The past fifteen years have seen an explosion of private school voucher programs. Half of US states now have some type of program that spends or otherwise subsidies private schooling

This past month, human rights education groups submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council a joint stakeholder report — based on research done through the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Neag School of Education — in anticipation of the U.S. mid-term review process for the Universal Periodic Review. Glenn Mitoma was among the researchers who prepared the report.

Joshua Hyman, a researcher at the University of Connecticut, studied the effects of mandatory ACT tests in Michigan’s public high schools and found that the policy led to many more low-income students not only taking the test, but performing well.

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

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

UConn gifted education specialists have published the first study to demonstrate a link between student poverty, institutional poverty, and the lower identification rate of gifted low-income students.

“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.”