By Sherman Dorn on February 4, 2019
I was scheduled to travel in December with one of our Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College doctoral students to the University of Maryland special collections (archive) to study some of the history of educational broadcasting. It’s part of a new project we have. Five days before we left, one of the archivists sent me a […]
Posted in History, Research | Tagged Sesame Street
By Sherman Dorn on April 23, 2018
A few weeks ago there was a minor flamewar on Twitter about the alleged abuse of the term causality in various social-science fields, and after the destruction of a small galaxy or two, it ran out of fuel. But this semester I directed an undergraduate honors thesis that used a difference-in-difference approach to a policy question, and […]
Posted in Research
By Sherman Dorn on March 10, 2018
Betsy DeVos got slammed on Twitter Tuesday after posting a tweet from SXSWEdu that included the following: Everything about our lives has moved beyond the industrial era. But American education largely hasn’t. Last time that I checked, that tweet had 629 likes, 194 retweets, and about 5200 replies, most of which read something like the following: […]
Posted in Education policy, History, Research
By Sherman Dorn on January 7, 2018
A quarter century ago, the History of Education Quarterly accepted my first article, on when and why people in the United States began to use dropping out as the dominant term for people who left school without a high school diploma. Spoiler: we started using the term not because dropping out was a growing problem in the 1960s […]
Posted in Education policy, History, Research
By Sherman Dorn on November 26, 2017
Twitter is burning up with discussion of Sue Dynarski’s November 22 NYT column on laptop use in class. Dynarski summarizes some of the research on how laptops affect students in classes heavy in formal presentations (such as many economics classes) and explains why she generally bans electronic device use in her classes as a result. Loads […]
Posted in Research, Teaching, The academic life
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