For Rachael Manzer, a doctoral candidate in the Neag School of Education, life-transformative education takes many forms. Manzer is a five-year volunteer of the UConn 4-H Program, a leader with the Granby 4-H Club, a member of the NASA Network of Astronaut Teachers (NEAT), and a candidate for commercial space flight through Teachers in Space, Inc. In 2019, Manzer received the UConn College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR) 4-H Leadership Award, and was recently selected as the 2021 Northeast 4-H Volunteer of the Year Award.

Neag School assistant professor of learning sciences, Ido Davidesco, has received a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a month-long computational thinking unit in high school biology classes. Davidesco will work with Neag School colleagues Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead, Christopher Rhoads, and John Settlage, as well as Aaron Kyle from Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Kiana Foster-Mauro’s mother, grandmother and great-grandmother watched with the 22-year-old elementary education major as she became the first in her family to graduate college. Nadeige Bailey, another first-generation graduate, said she cried on her couch last May as she watched her name flash across her computer screen “for like two seconds.” That was the culmination of her two-year, sports management graduate program.

At Connecticut’s State Education Resource Center (SERC) Dismantling Systemic Racism conference, West Hartford Public Schools Director of Equity Advancement Roszena Haskins was honored with the 2021 George Coleman Excellence in Equity award for her successful and ongoing district-wide work.

.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona praised new University of Connecticut graduates for their work in helping to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and urged them to use their uniqueness as their “superpower” to accomplish their career and life goals, in a recorded speech played Saturday at a virtual 2021 commencement. Cardona, Connecticut’s former education commissioner who earned graduate degrees at UConn, taped the speech Friday at UConn’s football stadium in East Hartford, the site of Saturday’s ceremony. The school awarded nearly 8,200 degrees.

“Teachers have new fluency and technology,” says Michael Young, who coordinated the educational technology program at UConn’s Neag School of Education. “Students have new fluency. Society and legislatures have a sense that this is doable now, because we did it for a year.”

Allison Lombardi, an associate professor in the Department of Education Psychology, discusses College and Career Readiness for Transition (CCR4T), a five-year measurement study that aims to evaluate high school students’ preparation for their next steps.

It’s a bit of a mystery what goes on inside the brain when students learn. But thanks to relatively new breakthroughs in portable EEG devices, which can measure the brain’s electrical activity in what are known as brainwaves, researchers are able to run experiments in classrooms as never before.

A group of UConn researchers have received a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a network to address knowledge gaps on the topic of emotional wellbeing, an emerging public health concern. This project is one of six, totaling more than $3.13 million in year one funding from the NIH.

“From preschool aged children up to Individuals who are students in graduate or professional schools, if each and every day we could spend time—20 minutes, 30 minutes, or even longer—with the goal of playing of being active, of interacting, the benefits to our physical, our emotional, our spiritual health would be life-changing.”