Research

That Matters

Learning Across the Lifespan

Introduction
The College of Education has dedicated this issue of Research That Matters to an expansive and timely topic: learning across the lifespan. Understanding education from inside and outside school walls, as well as across a lifetime, enables our researchers to design smart, system-wide strategies for closing the achievement gap that plagues our nation. This gap is unacceptable and has profound consequences for the health of the American democratic endeavor.

A Wide World of Learning
“Informal” learning occupies more than 80 percent of young learners’ waking hours. But does it have any place in their “formal” brick-and-mortar K-12 school setting? Researchers at the UW LIFE Center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) argue that it does.

Early Childhood – A Jump Start for Head Start
An early start should be a fair start for America’s children, say two UW researchers leading an ambitious national project to improve pre-school teaching and learning. The researchers face high expectations, huge responsibilities. Their decisions could affect the outcomes of more than 900,000 of America’s most vulnerable young children.

Elementary School—Making Science Matter
UW researchers are working to broaden children’s conceptions of science. In partnership with a high-diversity, multilingual elementary school in the Seattle area, the researchers have designed new curricula intended to link children’s everyday knowledge to authentic scientific disciplines. Their goal is to make science accessible, make it relevant, and make it matter by bringing the outside world, in all its cultural complexity, inside the classroom.

High School – Knowledge in Action
"When am I ever going to use this?” lament high school students. “What does this have to do with anything? What does it have to do with me?” The information, lying flat on the page or flashed onscreen in a PowerPoint, often seems inert, boring, irrelevant, a “waste of time.” It’s something to read, memorize, spit out on a test, and forget for the rest of your life.

"May It Please The Court…"
The high-school high court is called to order, and a lively session begins. Does Christmas music with Christian themes have any place in a public school? Clearly not, argues a teenage lawyer who describes "Silent Night" as a prayer
set to music.

College Prep - How Dreams Are Derailed for Multicultural Students
New reports from UW researchers show that most of our state’s young Latinos, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and other racial/ethnic minorities hold high expectations for a college education. But those dreams often disintegrate into lower test scores, lower self-esteem, and lower high-school graduation rates and enrollment rates at four-year universities.

Latinos Left Out of the Loop
Less than 25 percent of Latinos graduate from high school college-ready. Almost half drop out of high school, some as early as 9th grade, already certain there will be no college in their future. What’s behind this troubling pattern? How do so many Latinos end up on education’s sidelines?

‘Invisible’ Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
The popular image is that they are all whiz kids. They all go to the best universities, have the highest grade-point averages, get the top SAT scores, excel in mathematics and science and, thanks to Tiger Moms, most have mastered at least one musical instrument by the age of 10. Why is this racial stereotype of Asian Americans as a "model minority," all alike and all academically successful, not true?

Student Profile – Connecting Two Worlds
Jeannette Marie Sepulveda was a top-achieving Latina. She knew the ropes. As an International Baccalaureate student, she was in rigorous college-prep classes with other honor students, almost all of them white. Where were her Latino peers?

Adult Training – Building a Workforce to Support Children with Autism
No one knows the cure. No one knows the cause. And nothing can blunt the impact when parents get the diagnosis: Their quiet little baby, who’d rather not cuddle and avoids eye contact, has ASD, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, a chronic neurodevelopmental disability that will require a lifetime of supports and services. Parents may be stressed and bewildered. Where are all those supports and services?