“Teacher preparedness has been the focus of a great deal of (at times) impassioned debate in the last thirty years,” says Dr. Suzanne Wilson, Neag Endowed Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Connecticut and Chair of Curriculum and Instruction in the Neag School. “The teacher workforce is the largest profession in the U.S.; preparing close to four million teachers to be high quality is challenging.”

Betsy McCoach, Professor of Measurement, Evaluation, and Assessment program in the Department of Educational Psychology discusses how students in poverty are less likely to be identified as gifted.

The underrepresentation of high-poverty and minority populations in gifted programs has troubled education analysts and reformers for decades. One finding in this winter’s Fordham report on gifted programming gaps was that although high-poverty schools are as likely as low-poverty schools to have gifted programs, students there are less than half as likely to participate in them. This is complemented by a recent University of Connecticut finding that school poverty has a negative relationship with the percentage of students identified as gifted.

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.