School’s out for the summer — and so begins a long few months of parents’ and teachers’ worrying about all the things their children will forget before the fall. The fractions they won’t be able to multiply. The state capitals they won’t be able to identify. “Learning loss” is the name for it.​

In the minds of many, the South Side of Chicago has descended into a type of madness. 

In education circles, testing has become the villain of the day. Kids declare exams to be a waste of time while educators argue that the anxiety around tests produces a “toxic environment.” 

In a small classroom, Keoni Scott-Reid provided his opening statement. Scott-Reid had been assigned to argue against mass surveillance programs in an Urban Debate League tournament in Washington, D.C., and standing in the front of the room, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, he spoke in rat-tat-tat bursts like a teenage cattle auctioneer.

A technician snapped a stretchy electrode cap onto my head, and I felt a cold pinch as she affixed each sensor to my scalp with a dose of icy gel. 

​We all want for our kids to have optimal learning experiences and, for ourselves, to stay competitive with lifelong learning. But how well do you think you understand what good learning looks like?

Slate featured this excerpt from Learn Better about how, in order to get better at something, people need to know what they're doing wrong.

Ulrich wrote this piece for  ThinkProgress about the need to focus education debates around improving everyday classroom practice. 

Vox recently featured an excerpt from Ulrich's new book Learn Better. 

Policymakers and the public often talk about how important education is for the economy, saying that schooling promotes higher incomes, better jobs, and more growth.

When it comes to learning, people often describe the mind as a computer. But that’s not quite right because the analogy makes it seem like human brains are robotic in their ability to absorb information, that data enters the brain and then automatically becomes stashed away in a mental hard drive.

Earlier this month, the Reboot Foundation released a fascinating new study on critical thinking, a skill which more than 95 percent of Americans think necessary in today’s world.

At the Learning Agency, we strongly believe in the power of active learning also known as "retrieval practice" or the "generation effect" when it comes to learning effectively.
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A new study shows that many teachers promote more active forms of learning like retrieval practice, but the research suggests that some of the other hallmarks of active learning, like waiting for students to respond, are not occurring.

Learning Agency founder Ulrich Boser has a new TEDx talk on the science of learning. 

The talk discusses the "New Smart"--and details how everyone can get better at learning.
 

On the crowdsourcing website Mturk, we’ve been building a panel of teachers in order to better understand how educators view teaching and learning. We've also been conducting large-scale surveys and experimental research to better understand how people learn.
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