A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
Blog Posts By Samantha Abrams
Editor's note: Samantha Abrams is a rising senior at Dartmouth College. She interned at the Learning First Alliance during the spring of 2010.
The recent phenomenon of single-sex public schools prompts the question of whether these schools are better than co-ed schools at preparing students academically and socially for the future.
There are a variety of academic arguments that proponents of single-sex schools make in favor of all-boys and all-girls schools. One of these arguments is that students are able to concentrate better in class when they are not being distracted by members of the opposite sex. This argument, of course, assumes that members of the opposite sex are more distracting to students than members of their own sex. As a student who was recently in the K-12 school system, I can say that this statement is not inherently true; while members of the two sexes have different ways of distracting each other, they don’t necessarily distract each other more or less than the other sex.
Proponents of single-sex schools also make social arguments for these schools. They say: there is less peer pressure; students feel more comfortable; students become more confident; students develop stronger same-sex relationships; and classroom behavior is better. I counter these arguments, saying: the social pressures from people of the same sex are not fewer, just ...
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