Check Out What Is Happening with Learning Landscapes

At the intersection of the global cities movement and the movement to optimize early education in and out of school, lies Playful Learning Landscapes. Twenty-first Century Learning models will need to embrace a breadth of skills that allow children to succeed in a world of increasing uncertainty and change. Projections suggest that by 2050 over 70% of the worlds’ children will be living in urban areas and that most of these children – over 825 million – will reach adulthood without even the basic secondary skills required to meet the workplace of today and tomorrow.

Announcing the QUILS™

QUICK INTERACTIVE LANGUAGE SCREENER

Funded by the Institute for Education Sciences with a grant to Roberta M. Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Jill deVilliers, Aquiles Iglesias, and Mary Wilson, Brooks Publishing has brought out our new language screener, developed to find children (ages 3 through 5) with potential language problems. As language is fundamental to children’s success in school and in life, we hope it will be adopted by schools to find children with potential language issues who might linger unnoticed in classrooms. It can be administered on any touchscreen tablet or computer and identifies children for referral. QUILS™ has a monolingual English version and a forthcoming version for children learning both English and Spanish (the QUILS: ES).

Bringing Out Developmental Science:

THE LEARNING SCIENCES EXCHANGE

Breakthroughs and insights now emerge regularly from the learning sciences. Yet they are slow to make their way into schools, family support systems, and the social consciousness. Too often, new findings are either left to wilt in inaccessible academic journals, contorted by splashy headlines, or too complicated to lead to real policy changes. One major contributor to this problem is that journalists, entertainers, policy influencers, and learning scientists have no incentive to take the time to listen to each other, grapple with problems together, and gain a deeper understanding of each other’s mission and work.

This is why the Jacobs Foundation, together with the think tank New America, and the International Congress on Infant Studies (ICIS) created a new fellowship: The Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX). The LSX aims to create a conversation between scientists, journalists, entertainers, and policy makers.