Tag: social

  • CASEL Becomes New Home for Engaging Schools Resources

    CASEL Becomes New Home for Engaging Schools Resources

    The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) recently announced that it has become the new steward of Engaging Schools’ extensive body of educational resources. With Engaging Schools set to close in early 2025 after more than four decades of impact, CASEL will ensure the organization’s valuable tools, books, and frameworks remain available to educators worldwide.

    As part of this transition, CASEL is making these resources freely accessible to the public. Over time, CASEL will integrate elements of Engaging Schools’ work into several areas including the free Guide for Schoolwide SEL to further advance high-quality, evidence-based SEL implementation in schools and districts.

    “For more than 40 years, Engaging Schools has helped educators create safe and supportive learning environments where students thrive,” said Aaliyah A. Samuel, president and CEO of CASEL. “We are honored to carry forward their legacy by making these resources widely available and embedding them into our work to create school communities that prioritize academic, social, and emotional development.”

    Engaging Schools has long been recognized for its contributions to fostering inclusive school climates, strengthening restorative and equitable  discipline, and advancing engaging  teaching practices. 

    “We take immense pride in the lasting impact of Engaging Schools’ work,” said Larry Dieringer, Executive Director of Engaging Schools. “Though our organization’s chapter is closing, we are deeply grateful to CASEL for ensuring our resources continue to benefit educators and students for years to come.”

    For more than 30 years, CASEL has been a trusted leader in advancing SEL through research, practice, and policy. By integrating Engaging Schools’ resources into its offerings, CASEL reaffirms its commitment to supporting educators with the tools they need to create engaging, inclusive, and academically rich learning environments.

    To access Engaging Schools’ resources now available through CASEL, visit casel.org/engagingschools.

    Kevin Hogan
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  • Why social media hasn’t ruined our democracy (yet)

    Why social media hasn’t ruined our democracy (yet)

    “The algorithm won’t push posts that aren’t dramatic enough,” Keller said. “If I want something to go viral, I need to communicate differently.”

    Popularity and popular elections

    Effects of algorithms can be seen all around the world. In Romania, the 2024 presidential election was annulled due to alleged disinformation on social media platforms. During the 2022 national election campaign in the Philippines, social media played a significant role in the rapid spread of disinformation narratives.

    In Germany, social media significantly influenced the 10% increase in votes in the recent election for the far right party Alternative for Germany(AfD) compared to 2021. A notable factor was Elon Musk’s promotion of the AfD on Twitter.

    In Switzerland, direct democracy allows citizens to vote directly on laws and policies. This system is a core part of its governance, with frequent referendums and initiatives shaping political decisions.

    On average, there are 3-4 national votes per year, which could make the direct democracy even more susceptible to social media than other types of democracies, as people get to vote on smaller issues than presidential elections, which only happen once every four years. This makes the political processes more inclusive.

    As online campaigns grow more popular, social media can play a larger role in votes. However, Switzerland still relies heavily on traditional media sources for political news consumption. A recent report by research and consulting firm Publicom AG found that 58% of voters form their opinions through radio, TV or print media. Most of these are neutral and based on the information given by the national news agency SRG. That means there is less polarization.

    A generational change

    By contrast, only 16% actively turn to social media to establish a viewpoint. However, these numbers may be misleading. The popularity of social media has been on the rise; for instance, in 2017, just 12% of the population sourced their news from these platforms. It is also important to note that the study groups all voters into one category.

    When focusing specifically on the younger demographic, aged 15–29, the shift is more pronounced. In this age group, social media usage for news has increased by 11 percentage points since 2020, now reaching 40%.

    Despite the significant engagement of young people with news through social media, Switzerland’s democratic system remains largely unaffected. Keller said that the average voter in the country is approximately 55.

    While the influence of social media in Switzerland right now may only be marginal, this could change in the future, once these younger generations, which heavily rely on social media for news, enter the political landscape.

    Many of the students we go to school with acknowledged that social media shapes their beliefs. “It depends on how reliable the source is,” said one 16-year old who we spoke to. “But if a lot of people say the same thing and if I also hear it on multiple platforms, then I’ll probably start believing it too.”

    Positive aspects of social media

    A repeated theme seemed to be, appropriately, repetition. Our schoolmates seem to equate repetition with credibility.  “I think it could [influence my beliefs], if I see the same information multiple times across multiple platforms,” said one student, aged 15.

    Another said that he would question the information he sees but ultimately he would end up believing it. “If I see 10 posts about the CDU [German political party], for example, and they are all positive, I think about what their arguments are, and if they make sense, then yeah, I think I’d believe it,” he said.

    So even though it might not be necessary to implement additional regulations regarding the usage of social media in political campaigns right now, it might become necessary in the future as social media continues to grow in importance.

    Social media in the political process isn’t all about misinformation. It can also provide a platform for people to discuss political issues, regardless of their party. Keller sees social media as an opportunity.

    “I’m more of an optimist than a pessimist,” Keller said.

    For example, Keller said, if he wanted to start a referendum campaign, he could post about that and find other people to help organize it. That also allows people the opportunity to communicate directly with politicians.

    “Nowadays a lot of them are on social media platforms,” he said. “You can tell them your opinion directly … and sometimes they even reply.”

     

    For more about the power of repetition in news coverage check out this News Decoder Top Tip.

     

    Three questions to consider: 

    1. How can a single social media post affect an election?
    2. What do the authors mean by politicians becoming “personalities”?
    3. In what ways are you influenced by what you read or see on social media?

     

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  • Starting Salaries for Comm, Social Science College Grads Drop

    Starting Salaries for Comm, Social Science College Grads Drop

    Graduating college is a stressful process for many, with a May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab finding seven in 10 current students feel at least somewhat stressed thinking and preparing for life postgraduation. The Class of 2025, on average, is pessimistic about starting their careers, due in part to competition for jobs and student loans, according to research from Handshake.

    Recent survey data from the National Association of College and Employers points to uneven starting salary projections for the Class of 2025, with year-over-year movement on the decline for some bachelor’s degree majors, but all starting salaries have increased somewhat since 2022.

    “These salary projections come on the heels of employers indicating plans to hire 7.3 percent more graduates from the college Class of 2025 than they did from the Class of 2024, which hints at the overall health of the current job market for college graduates,” Shawn VanDerziel, NACE’s president and chief executive officer, said in a press release.

    The report draws on survey data from 158 employers and finds STEM students continue to have the highest starting salaries, compared to their communications, business and agriculture, and natural resources peers.

    The results: NACE’s survey focuses on base salaries, not including bonuses, commissions or other benefits. Projected movement in salaries over all ranges, with agriculture and natural resources climbing 2.8 percent but social sciences declining 3.6 percent, compared to the year prior.

    An Inside Higher Ed analysis of NACE’s winter surveys since 2022 finds that, while all degree programs have seen starting salary projections grow over the years, the growth has not been uniform. Communications and social sciences, in particular, saw growth in 2024 projections, which then fell in 2025.

    The highest-paid individual majors were in the engineering field: computer ($82,565) and software engineering ($82,536). Math and sciences graduates remain the third-highest-paid majors but saw a 2 percent decrease in salary projections.

    Employer respondents indicated the most in-demand majors are finance and computer science, with two-thirds of respondents indicating they will hire students in these majors. Similarly, accounting (65 percent), business administration (55 percent) and information sciences and systems (53 percent) are majors employers indicated that they will hire.

    Students’ predictions: A November 2024 student survey by ScholarshipOwl found, on average, respondents expect to earn $60,000 to $80,000 per year for their first full-time job after they graduate. Around one-quarter of respondents indicated that they expect to earn $90,000 or more for their first job out of college, which is not reflected in employer responses.

    In addition to having a competitive salary, students are most interested in jobs that provide tuition reimbursement or support for student loan repayment (61 percent), retirement savings benefits (59 percent), medical and dental benefits (58 percent), and paid vacation and holidays (49 percent). The results reflect the economic pressures college students face paying for college and high costs of living that disproportionately affect students.

    Do you have a career-focused intervention that might help others promote student success? Tell us about it.

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  • Real World Support

    Real World Support

    As students navigate an increasingly complex world defined by artificial intelligence, social media, and rapid technological change, the need for essential life skills has never been greater. A new curriculum called The Edge immerses students in real-life, complex scenarios that challenge them to think critically, collaborate effectively, and apply social-emotional learning (SEL) to everyday situations. Hear how educators are using these next-generation strategies in classrooms today.

    The computer-generated transcript is below:

    Kevin Hogan,
    Content Director, eSchool News
    This episode is brought to you by ascend now. Ascend now is an online education platform focused on providing personalized, academic and beyond academic coaching and mentoring to students aged 7 to 17. With a particular emphasis on fostering entrepreneurial skills and mindset by integrating entrepreneurship education into their curriculum. Aiming to normalize kid entrepreneurs through tailored programs and personalized learning paths. OK. Hello and welcome to this special edition of Innovations in Education, the podcast that explores how tech can enable districts to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms. I’m Kevin Hogan, content director for eSchool News. And I’m glad you found us. Believe it or not, it’s been five years this month that the world and schools shut down due to the COVID pandemic. Since then, so much has changed from student behavior to the way that schools respond to that behavior. Many through the use of social emotional learning, or SEL techniques. I had the pleasure to speak with Jesse Bushman. Jesse is the senior director of SEL at. Fayette Valley Community School District in Iowa about their efforts by using a new program called the. We also spoke with the creator of that curriculum, Devi Sahny. She’s the CEO and founder of Ascend now, now designed in collaboration with educators and aligned with the Castle Framework. The. The first curriculum to meet educators demands for high quality instructional materials for SEL and life skills readiness. The curriculum helps students cultivate communication, problem solving and self-awareness, as well as essential life skills like entrepreneurs. Negotiation, financial literacy and networking to boost their academic abilities. I think you’ll find their insights valuable. Have a listen. OK. Devi, Jesse, thanks so much for joining me today. Really appreciate it.

    Devi Sahny
    CEO and Founder, Ascend Now & The Edge
    I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having us.

    Kevin Hogan
    And as I was mentioning right before we started the recording here, I guess it’s hard to believe, but it’s five years ago to this month, it was actually Friday the 13th. Believe it or not that Jesse, I mean I know a lot of school districts, that’s when we. Into this great. Beta test in education with remote learning and COVID. Years. So tired of talking about it. However, it is still really kind of with us in the way that it has changed education and especially with the work that Jesse you do and Devi that you do that really took one of those acronyms I’ve always heard in education SEL, which was kind of like a nice to have probably for districts who might be kind of more well off than others. That would introduce that to where social emotional learning became front and Center for everybody in this. Group trauma together districts have spread apart. If they had the luxuries or the privileges to be able to set up remote right away. Most of the, if I recall correctly, in my conversations, most of those conversations involved around social emotional learning. You OK at home? How are you doing at home? People those first few months. No more worried about standardized testing, right? Everybody was worried. Just kind of keeping it all together. Jesse, we can get. Let me talk about that time for you in. In your district, in what you were doing in what SEL mean back then. And what does it mean? And Devi, I promise we’ll get into the news of the edge and how this all comes part and parcel.

    Jessie Bushman
    Senior Director SEL,
    North Fayette Valley Community School District,
    Yeah. You’re totally correct. At that time it was like scary. We’re all learning to adjust. The kids were learning to adjust to and as educators. That was our most important thing was to tune in with the kids. Sure, they were safe. Check in on how they were doing and as staff we did that together as well, so we would check in on each other. A lot of our first meetings were just talking about how everybody was doing. So coming back, it did change a lot of things kids were. And teachers were. So as a school, we had to change things.

    Kevin Hogan
    Yeah. And Devi, let’s get into the news a little. I mean, just here in January, now you’ve announced this new curriculum called The Edge. How have the past few years informed the work and the ultimate release of this new service? You’re providing.

    Devi Sahny
    Yeah. And and just to answer that first part of the question about COVID, I think COVID certainly transformed education for K12. In a lot of ways, I think in one way teachers overnight had to have this accelerated adoption of technology, some that was super helpful and integrated really easily and others that may have perhaps even. Slow down learning. I think teachers out of all stakeholders during Covic with the heroes, because overnight they had to change their delivery and immediately adapt. And I think that’s in a very entrepreneurial thing. One of the other big changes we saw through Covic was this increased emphasis on social emotional learning. Think there was a report. Brookings stating that nearly 40% of teachers report students struggling more with depression and anxiety than before. COVID and over 80% of those teachers still have students that are struggling with depression and anxiety. So I think the overemphasis of technology combined with an entirely new world landscape reframed this focus of, hey, we should maybe turn back the pendulum and focus on the important skills. And with AI and technology, everything is advancing. But certain skills like networking and grit and resilience and communication, they still remain incredibly important. And one of the reasons we decided to create the edge is we felt that students in their middle and high school years did not really feel those skills were learnable. They thought I’m either born with strong public speaking skills or I’m not. I’m either born. With a learning mentality and a strong mentality or I’m not and we wanted to break that belief and provide them with student friendly resources, but I think yeah, COVID certainly changed a lot and I think now more than ever SEL is critical the amount of times we hear. Teacher saying we don’t have time for essay and I always. Well, that’s actually going to reframe and support your your students to be ready for. But even the teachers need SEL. I mean, Jesse and I were just talking about one of her students who I think Jesse was saying, like, found purpose through essay.

    Jessie Bushman
    Yeah, we had a great conversation when we were working on a lesson. It would just like the light bulb went off, he and he said. Now have a purpose like. There’s a reason, like I understand why I need to learn this, because this is my future. And so it wasn’t just another thing to teach. At that moment, for him, this was like I need to learn this. Is life.

    Kevin Hogan
    Yeah, it seems to me with both you’re talking about two is the change in student behavior right? Of the experiences of the of the past couple years. One of the net positives, if you can call it that or a silver lining, whatever cliche you you wanna use. You’re describing a self-awareness that I still don’t think I have for myself. That said, students of that age and having gone through this experience, are aware of their learning journeys. Aware of where they might need to improve and also don’t kind of shrug it off as. This sort of like, well, that’s just for people with depression. Or that’s just for certain part of the kids in class, maybe who aren’t succeeding like, this really is beneficial for everybody, right?

    Devi Sahny
    Absolutely. And I think that when we talk about soft skills and we talk about Sela, lot of the resources that currently exist remain a bit outdated and they’re not student friendly and a lot of the teachers we’ve spoken to have said we’re using the same curriculum, that’s 50. Older. 30 years old to teach, you know, stress and anxiety, and it’s not as simple as just a deep breath. There’s more to it, and there’s more conversation involved. So one of the things we did when we created this program, the edge is we try to identify what the future skills are. How do we actually figure out what are those skills? And how are they learnt? Are they acquired? So we went on this crazy research experiment where we interviewed different stakeholders. We interviewed 500 educators from different demographics and socio economic backgrounds to ask them what are the scales you wish you could teach in your classroom but don’t have the resources for. Then we interviewed 500 students different ages in middle and high school to understand what skills they wish they could learn, and some really interesting responses. Like networking, which is one of our more. Skill. And then we interviewed about 200 chief learning officers from different Fortune 500 companies to ask them when you teach your employees in these higher Ed programs whether the skills you focus on. Then we cross reference that with HR and recruitment industry to understand what they hire for across sectors, whether that be education, technology, human resources, fin. We came up with a list of about 6000 schools. We then took that. We spoke with OECD World Economic. We’re actually one of the partners and I was at Davos recently in January speaking about this and we looked at the future of jobs report and we took all that data and all that research. To create our own framework which is called the Life readiness playbook by. Edge and this playbook is not necessarily, as you pointed out, Kevin, for students to get ready for an outcome like good grades or a university outcome or a good job, it’s actually just to have them ready for life. And these are skills that are lifelong. You know, I’m constantly working on my listing skills, my stress management skills. And the way that students can consume this content is pretty exciting. Like if a student wants to. Consume the content, grit the skill, grit they can learn from Michael Jordan. Not making his high school basketball team and the cool thing is the video format. It’s funny. Quirky. It’s engaging. But it still has all those learning outcomes tied to it, which is something, frankly, I wish I had when I was in middle high school.

    Kevin Hogan
    Yeah. Jesse, talk a little bit about what that means on a day-to-day basis for our listeners, our readers who are either running districts themselves or their principal of a school or even at the classroom level, I mean. These are great theoretical topics, but what? About science class between 10:30 and 12:30 on a Tuesday. How do these curricula? Do these topics kind of show themselves in the day-to-day of educating students?

    Jessie Bushman
    Well, I’m gonna step. Just one step and kind of explain how we. There. I think that’ll make a little bit more sense looking for something. We just know that we needed something to add for our students and looking for a curriculum we couldn’t find what we needed. They were not rigorous enough. Wasn’t the correct content. Not engaging for our students or didn’t have enough depth as as far as lessons to make it through a school year or to do a 612 model so. Once I saw the edge, the skies parted and I was like, this is exactly what we need. And so once we started teaching those things, we noticed that the students confidence changed. They became more confident in themselves in what they can do, looking forward to their futures. And so we had a lot less behaviors. So those started decreasing because. There was. We’ve also seen absentee change. Kids want to be at school, they want to be engaged. It’s great with our staff as well. Like you said, adults need this too. This is stuff for all of us. It’s been great teaching it because it’s a reminder myself as well on a lot of these skills that you don’t think. Every day.

    Kevin Hogan
    Yeah, especially when you look at again. I hate to go back to COVID, but there really was a significant chasm there in, I would say the soft skills versus the hard skills. But we we kind of focus on the on the reading and and the math scores that go down. I see it from my own kind of COVID kids here to see. Of having a person to person in person conversation with someone if they weren’t in school for 18 months between the time they were an eighth grader up to sophomore, they’re still struggling to recover on how to. Behave in person for for a lot of stuff, right? But maybe Devi, you could talk a little bit. I know that you you had this integrated school framework, you had this educator friendly design that you put these things together. What is your hope terms of turning those soft skilled potentials into real world accomplishments?

    Devi Sahny
    Yeah, I think that in the digital age and like you said, the students that were were most impacted during COVID. Many of them have lost what’s called human skills. Actually hate the term soft skills because I think soft and hard skills, but all human skills, right? Portions of soft skills have pieces of hard scales, etc. We actually focus on both soft and hard. But I would. That turning the pendulum back and saying how can we help these students develop self-confidence, self-awareness, resilience, grit through stories of themselves through activities, through gamified examples that will really take them forward into the real life. It’s funny that you say this because I gave a talk at one of the leading international schools and recently and I asked the students, I think it was about 200. I asked them who here is confident with the skill networking and is confident speaking to people they have never met before in person. And I have 200 students, maybe 3 raise their hands. Then I reframe that question. Said. Who here in this classroom is confident speaking to someone they haven’t met before online? Maybe 30 raised their hand. So there’s this confidence and this comfort with online communication that is so easy for students to accept. It’s interesting. I I I will say that sometimes I’m like that too, right? When I’m in person, meeting changes into zoom, I’m like, yeah. Like I don’t have to like wear anything. Know too too fancy. I can do it in my hoodie. There is a bit of that right and I think there there’s an honesty to that and I think that’s important. But I think the. The fear with this new generation is that the human skills are not getting practised at all. Again, very weird example which I’ll put in quotations. You may want to cut out, but some of our students, one of our students I’m speaking to recently, she’s 19 years old, she said to me, I have a boyfriend. I said, oh, great. Where did you meet him? She said no. We’ve been dating for a year, but I never met him in person.

    Kevin Hogan
    It’s amazing, yeah.

    Devi Sahny
    So it’s like is the world changing that way or is it, you know, the skills or what’s happening, right? But I think you know, Jesse’s been Jesse’s such an inspiring educator for this reason. Jesse’s smart enough to know that teachers themselves also need to work on their SEL. All do. Adults, professors, everyone and so in parallel. If teachers working on their SEL, they’re teaching students SEL. The students are teaching the teachers. And that’s such a beautiful process because. Learning can happen in any sort of. But that’s really our. My hope is to help students to fundamentally figure out who they are, their purpose, like Jesse’s student who figured out what made himself tick. The Edge is designed for students to figure out who they are, what their strengths are, what skills they’d like to work on and for. Kevin, I’ll be honest that the edge is designed as a one stop shop, easy to use resource that helps them use these skills in their classroom with no prep that gives them maybe 10 minutes extra with their, with their kids or their partner. That they don’t have to write a whole Lesson plan or learning sequence, right? And that’s important to us too, because they’re the heroes.

    Jessie Bushman
    That was a huge. Point that I fell in love with when I saw it is these are lessons that I can just pick up. I can pick it up, I can read it, and I can teach it, and it’s not something that’s going to be another thing on. Plate right now I have a lot of things on my plate, so when I’m able to pick it up, the slides are ready for a whole group. Very little needed. It also has the online component. It has all the pieces to it prepped and ready, so it’s not one more thing for me to have to do.

    Kevin Hogan
    Yeah, another aspect I know which is important for districts. Again, when it came to social emotional learning techniques in the past, you might have had that guy, usually a guy on the school board saying. Show me the results. Show me the data. Show me how this is actually been effective and don’t give me the squishy anecdotes. Me the the hard numbers. And I know that with the eggs, there are some real time analytic techniques that are connected with it.

    Devi Sahny
    Absolutely. So you as a teacher or a district can see how your students are performing across every. Personal development, communication, employability, skills, active citizenship and learning, and you can actually get a score to see how your students are progressing on a grade level. Age level. Student level. You can compare that data geographically so you can see what kids. In China or in Asia or Europe are doing compared to your students, at least those of our school partners that are working with us, we work with quite a few international schools too, like International School partnerships, Dulwich College, Xcl Cognita School, some of the American schools and so. Interesting to compare that data with some of the data in the US and to see how students. But overall, we’re seeing that a lot of students are like, wow, I didn’t know I could learn financial literacy. Didn’t know I could learn about. I didn’t know I could learn about entrepreneurship in such a friendly way, so that’s really important to us, but also to feed the schools with unique data to see where the holes and the gaps are, because as schools. Ton of things you have to, you know, kind of take care of chronic absenteeism, teacher retention, you know, school leadership. So many things involved. I mean this is really just designed to see how can we. And we also have a mental health teacher track coming up too, which I’m really excited about because that’s something that can really support the teachers.

    Kevin Hogan
    Yeah. And Jesse, to kind of to go back a little bit, give us a little bit of a day in the. I mean, are these seen as extracurricular activities that happen after the Bell ring in the afternoon or they are they tied into actual classes? Kind of give us the specifics there.

    Jessie Bushman
    Well, the one thing that I love about this curriculum is it’s super. So according to your school, you can adapt it and switch it to. However, it’s going to work best for you. We as a district started off with it in the special Ed program. Actually, and we needed a curriculum there 1st and looking at that then we saw the need like the rest of the kids need this information as well. Looking into putting it into advisory, that portion of time. A lot of times teachers are trying to fill that time with lessons themselves or create these types of lessons. So using it as universal gives the kids the the vocabulary, the information, and then we can use it all the way into special Ed. So it’s an intensive program as well. It’s very. That was huge for me that my students are going to have the same vocabulary from 6:00 to 12:00. In. Ed and special Ed.

    Kevin Hogan
    And it says to me that it’s pretty much teacher driven or educated driven. That fair to say.

    Jessie Bushman
    Yeah, it’s very engaging. All the material is very. And it’s very relevant to the kids. The kids can relate to it. Stuff that’s happening in their lives. The discussions. It’s not just role. It’s great discussions on actual problems in the world and tools that they can actually use right there in the classroom as well, so. They’re discussing things that are happening right around us.

    Kevin Hogan
    Excellent. Now I think we’ve gotten a really good sense of the state of play of where we are with social emotional learning. Now, if you are up in progressive schools or districts like Jesse’s, let’s talk about. Next steps, Devi, where do you see? This is just the edges that’s been launched here in January. What are your hopes to see your services as they continue to evolve over the next several months and and years?

    Devi Sahny
    Yeah. What we’re doing in parallel supporting districts now, 200 schools and total. So we just enter the US, but we already work with seven districts here as well as Georgetown University Summer School and two other summer schools in the process. But my hope really is that as we have all these amazing districts using us to take as much feedback and see how we can make this product as easy to use and helpful for teachers. One of the feedbacks we’ve gotten is we love this so much. You include a teacher mental health track. And mental health videos for teachers to help us do what we’re doing every single day. We have tracks that include entrepreneurship and internships. A lot of employability skills in college and career readiness, but we have two more tracks. Is called AI interpretation and another is graphic design in the making. So what happens in these tracks is the students can reapply the skills they were learning. But through an experience through something a different context where they can basically trans context, apply that skill again. So that’s really cool because at the end of the entrepreneurship track, there’s a Shark Tank for kids where they can compete, and the best business gets funding. Actually, that funding is funded by Ascend. Now, over the past seven years, actually we’ve. We funded student businesses as prize money essentially, and the internship track they can, you know, apply to different companies to apply for internships. So there’s a bit of that, but overall my hope is. Is that we have this next generation of future ready, SCL, smart skill, savvy students across the world that know themselves that find their own edge through essay. Because essay everywhere and to have 30 minutes a week in SEL. I don’t think that’s enough. You know, I really Don. So it’s a. It’s a good start, but we need to do better, so I think valuing the Selma as a society would be something that I would be very interested to see what happens in the next few years.

    Kevin Hogan
    Yeah. And Jesse will leave the last word with you about where your hopes to see this sort of work and how we can kind of continue to evolve and benefit your students.

    Jessie Bushman
    I’m just excited to see what they can do with their futures as we’re learning these skills and you see the light in their eyes and they’re able to you do the challenges and apply the skills that they’re learning in real life. Talking about networking, the challenges to go. And network and come back with three business cards. So we’re putting it right in their. And so when they’re learning, it guided with us, I mean, just excited to see what they’re going to be able to do in the future.

    Kevin Hogan
    Yeah. Well, once again, it’s a difficult topic and you add in COVID. It’s just always a tough conversation, but at the end of it I come out feeling better. Congratulations on your launch. Congratulations on on the work that you’re doing. Jesse at your district glass always seems half full. When I when I sit. With a few educators for 15 or 20 minutes this way, and here the the real work and the real successes you’re having. Thanks again for your time and for your insights.

    Devi Sahny
    Thanks so much Kevin for having us. We really appreciate it and love talking to you.

    Jessie Bushman
    Thank you.

    Kevin Hogan
    And that wraps up the special edition of Innovations in Education, which was brought to you by ascend. Now a US based education startup committed to increasing both college and career readiness for all students. For more information, you can find them on the web at buildmyedge.com.

    Kevin Hogan
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  • Statement on President Trump’s Truth Social post threatening funding cuts for ‘illegal protests’

    Statement on President Trump’s Truth Social post threatening funding cuts for ‘illegal protests’

    President Trump posted a message on Truth Social this morning that put social media and college campuses on high alert. He wrote:

    Colleges can and should respond to unlawful conduct, but the president does not have unilateral authority to revoke federal funds, even for colleges that allow “illegal” protests. 

    If a college runs afoul of anti-discrimination laws like Title VI or Title IX, the government may ultimately deny the institution federal funding by taking it to federal court, or via notice to Congress and an administrative hearing. It is not simply a discretionary decision that the president can make.  

    President Trump also lacks the authority to expel individual students, who are entitled to due process on public college campuses and, almost universally, on private campuses as well.

    Today’s message will cast an impermissible chill on student protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Paired with President Trump’s 2019 executive order adopting an unconstitutional definition of anti-Semitism, and his January order threatening to deport international students for engaging in protected expression, students will rationally fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.

    As FIRE knows too well from our work defending student and faculty rights under the Obama and Biden administrations, threatening schools with the loss of federal funding will result in a crackdown on lawful speech. Schools will censor first and ask questions later. 

    Even the most controversial political speech is protected by the First Amendment. As the  Supreme Court reminds us, in America, we don’t use the law to punish those with whom we disagree. Instead, “[a]s a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.” 

    Misconduct or criminality — like true threats, vandalism, or discriminatory harassment, properly defined — is not protected by the First Amendment. In fact, discouraging and punishing such behavior is often vital to ensuring that others are able to peacefully make their voices heard. 

    However, students who engage in misconduct must still receive due process — whether through a campus or criminal tribunal. This requires fair, consistent application of existing law or policy, in a manner that respects students’ rights.

    President Trump needs to stand by his past promise to be a champion for free expression. That means doing so for all views — including those his administration dislikes.

     

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  • BIG CHANGES to SNAP, Medicaid, Social Security & Student Loan Forgiveness – What You NEED to Know! (Low-Income Relief)

    BIG CHANGES to SNAP, Medicaid, Social Security & Student Loan Forgiveness – What You NEED to Know! (Low-Income Relief)

    If you’re worried about losing your benefits, you’re not alone. With new budget resolutions and lawsuits targeting SNAP, Medicaid, and student loan forgiveness, millions of Americans could be impacted.
     

     

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  • The Role of Social Science in Shaping Inclusive Leadership

    The Role of Social Science in Shaping Inclusive Leadership

    Senior Vice President of Human Services Julie Kochanek discusses how social science informs her leadership at American Institutes for Research (AIR), emphasizing trust, collaboration, and community-building in research.

    Julie Kochanek

    Senior Vice President, Human Services Division, American Institutes for Research (AIR)

    How does your experience in behavioral and social science research inform your approach to leadership?

    As a leader, I always return to themes I observed while training to be a researcher: trust, culture, and community. In graduate school, I studied how East African nations used education as a mechanism to build community. I dug deeper into this community theme as part of my Ph.D. studies, focusing on how U.S. schools operate organizationally and how teachers, school leaders, and parents must all interact to better support student learning. 

    How do you build strong teams to accomplish AIR’s mission?

    At AIR, collaboration is key to our success. Project teams at AIR often include staff with different backgrounds, various methodological expertise, unique content knowledge, and/or experience working directly with community leaders. Our work is strengthened by bringing people together. This allows us to fully consider the challenge we’re studying and understand the needs of the communities we serve.

    As a leader, I am responsible for creating the conditions to help staff develop meaningful partnerships, recognize everyone’s contributions, and reward meaningful collaboration. We collect and share information on staff interests, skills, and experiences so teams can easily identify those they might recruit to fill a gap. My weekly internal messages to staff often highlight examples of great team building and how our work is strengthened by diverse teams. 

    What are some of the most important results you have uncovered across your 20+ years in the research sector?

    Discussions about education policy often inadvertently leave people and human connection out of the equation. Throughout our work, I am constantly reminded that working collaboratively and building relationships among educators and students is an essential part of setting the right conditions for learning. 

    I’m impressed, for example, by how educators, researchers, and school leaders have partnered to build stronger support systems for students who are at risk of not graduating from high school. Researchers help school districts collect and interpret data on early warning signs and develop an evidence-based approach to address the challenge and boost graduation rates. As more districts across the country adopt these early warning systems, we’re seeing real results: More young people are able to continue on the path to success. 

    Another example is how we use research and technical assistance to help teachers strengthen their reading and literacy instruction. There are proven strategies (e.g., the science of reading) to help kids learn to read. Working alongside teachers and giving them the tools they need to adopt evidence-based approaches has been successful. However, this requires hands-on training, coaching, and human connection — a significant investment. We know that making this kind of investment in our nation’s teachers is well worth the reward.  

    What advice would you give women just beginning their careers in research?

    Women are better represented in behavioral and social science research than in other scientific fields, but we still face barriers, including balancing work and family, dealing with bias, and having fewer opportunities for funding and leadership. Addressing these barriers is important because evidence shows that diverse research teams bring more innovative and effective solutions. 

    Whatever your field, I think it is important to live with integrity. Remember that there is not one right path to follow. Upon completing my post-doctoral position and considering my next move, I worried about making a career-defining wrong turn. This is normal. I definitely made choices that concerned my graduate school advisors, but I don’t regret any of them. I’ve gotten to where I am today by learning from the different contexts in which I’ve worked, taking some risks, and staying true to my values. 

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  • Social media can benefit college students with disabilities

    Social media can benefit college students with disabilities

    College students often have a complicated relationship with social media, with a large number of learners active on multiple social media platforms but also aware of the negative mental health consequences social media can have.

    Teens receive hundreds of notifications on their phones every day, with over half of one study’s participants receiving more than 237 notifications per day. Nearly one in five teens say they’re on YouTube or TikTok almost constantly, according to a 2023 survey from Pew Research.

    A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed found one-third of respondents indicated social media was one of the biggest drivers of what many call the college mental health crisis.

    A recent study authored by a group of researchers from Michigan State University and published in the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education evaluates how students with disabilities interact on social media and build social capital.

    Researchers found disabled students—including those with autism, anxiety, attention-deficit and/or hyperactivity disorder—were more likely to seek out new relationships and engage in active social media posting, which can advance connectedness and relationships among learners.

    The background: While social media can offer users social supports, such as promoting a sense of belonging during times of transition or crisis, it also poses risks for young people, including cyberbullying and online harassment, according to the study.

    Previous studies show youth with disabilities experience higher rates of cyberbullying compared to their peers, but students with disabilities are also more likely to report they receive social support through social media, which could be tied to the social isolation they can experience in person.

    Existing literature often focuses on the negative effects of social media for young adults with disabilities, but it is not known if there are differences between the experiences of those with and without disabilities and their social media habits.

    “Understanding different learners’ experiences with social media could help college faculty, special education professionals, and counselors not only consider using social media to create more welcoming and supportive learning environments but also how they might play a role in building individual learner’s capacity for positive digital participation,” researchers wrote.

    Methodology: Researchers conducted a survey of college undergraduates in the U.S. with and without disabilities in fall 2021, collecting data on social media use, social capital and psychological well-being. In total, 147 students responded to the survey.

    From this sample, researchers selected five individuals with and five individuals without disabilities to participate in semistructured interviews. Participants were matched based on social media habits and demographic factors, such as gender.

    Results: Through postsurvey interviews with 10 students, researchers learned that while both groups of students engage on social media for personal entertainment and to stay connected with people in their social circles, students with disabilities were more likely to say they used social media to initiate and grow relationships.

    All five participants without disabilities used Snapchat to interact with friends or keep in touch with loved ones in an informal manner, and all participants used Instagram to stay up-to-date with their peers.

    Among the five participants with disabilities, students reported using more social media platforms individually, and these learners were more likely to use TikTok (which in fall 2021 first hit one billion monthly active users compared to Instagram’s then-two billion users) compared to their peers. Students reported using TikTok for watching videos, sharing humor with their friends or participating in larger community building, including professional learning networks or cosplaying.

    Students without disabilities were more likely to say social media made no difference on their relationships or that it positively impacted their relationships by allowing them to stay in touch over geographical distances or other barriers.

    Similarly, all students with disabilities said social media assisted with their relationships, allowing them to connect with new people, expand their community and help manage their disabilities by connecting with others.

    Some respondents with disabilities said they felt more confident to engage with strangers in a safe way online and that social media was an avenue to find like-minded people they wouldn’t ordinarily interact with, allowing them to build new relationships. This was a unique trend to students with disabilities; those without were more likely to say they use social media to engage with people they already had relationships with.

    Students with disabilities may have greater challenges with in-person socialization, which researchers theorize makes social media particularly important for these learners, who also said they’re more likely to post on social media versus passively scroll.

    Interacting with others in the disability community and breaking stigma around disability was another theme in conversations with disabled students. These interactions could be with peers who share their disability or from medical professionals or support groups who provide new information.

    One limitation to the research was social desirability bias, or respondents’ tendency to answer questions in a way that would please researchers, meaning students underreport undesirable behaviors. The sample included only female and nonbinary students, which creates further limitations to the data.

    Put in practice: Researchers offered some suggestions for how educators can utilize this data to create a more inclusive learning environment, including:

    • Integrating social media into the classroom. While some digital learning platforms have forums for community building, such as a discussion board, these platforms can be less accessible than traditional social media platforms.
    • Facilitating personalized learning environments. Higher education leaders can consider ways to use social media to create formal and informal learning experiences in and around courses. These learning environments can also include methods for peer communication and connection, helping make learning more collaborative.
    • Engaging on social media themselves. Self-disclosure by professors can help build relationships in the classroom and enhance learning, but instructors must weigh safety, privacy and other legal boundaries in their social media usage. This could be one way to model positive social media usage for students, including how to have productive interactions with others.

    In the future, researchers see opportunities for analysis of design, implementation and evaluation of social media interventions for connection among students with disabilities, such as peer mentoring programs, online support groups or digital storytelling. There should also be consideration of the long-term effects of social media use on students’ mental health and well-being.

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  • Social mobility is about to die – and university won’t help

    Social mobility is about to die – and university won’t help

    In 1994, the year that HESA was born and we started to count those with degrees from former polytechnics in the stats, about 225,000 full-time home-domiciled students graduated with a first degree in the UK.

    Today the Russell Group enrols about 350k. Funny that those who say too many people go to university tend to stay tight lipped about that part of the sector’s “dilution”.

    Ten years later, then funding council boss Howard Newby said:

    [T]he English—and I do mean the English—do have a genius for turning diversity into hierarchy and I am not sure what we can do about that, to be quite honest. It is very regrettable that we cannot celebrate diversity rather than constantly turning it into hierarchy.

    The switch of circa 125,000 students from poly to university in the early 90s was one of the signature moments of the status/sorting panic that has accompanied the expansion of higher education over time.

    The story runs something like this. Access to university has never been evenly distributed across the social-economics. And having a degree seems to bestow upon graduates socio-economic advantages.

    So over the long-run, rather than doing the hard yards of making entry distribution fairer – which, whatever method is used, necessarily involves saying “no” to some who think they have a right to go – the easier thing has always been to say “yes” and expand instead.

    Hence when in 2018 OfS had a choice between Option 1:

    …it obviously couldn’t persuade ministers to front out Option 1. So everyone let Option 2 happen instead – only without the money to support it. And now look at the mess we’re in.

    Option 2 – whether applied to the whole sector or just the elite part – creates a problem for those who enjoy the relative rarity of the signalling. The signal is less powerful, partly because there are few who look back on their time at university and think “maybe if it was truly meritocratic I wouldn’t have made it in”.

    It also ought to be expensive to expand – so over time both universities and their students are instead expected to become more and more efficient, or fund participation through future salary contributions to pay for the expansion.

    And if overall participation levels off, Option 2 applied just to the elite part of the sector yanks students away from everywhere else – with huge geographical and social consequences along the way.

    There is a human capital upside of mass participation. The better educated the population, the more inventive and healthy and happy and productive it will be in general. But without other actions, that doesn’t address the relative inequalities of getting in or getting on.

    Onwards and upwards

    The phrase “social mobility” doesn’t actually appear in the 2024 Labour Manifesto – but it’s lurking around in the opportunity mission as follows:

    We are a country where who your parents are – and how much money they have – too often counts for more than your effort and enterprise… so breaking the pernicious link between background and success will be a defining mission for Labour.

    Good luck with that. Part of the question for me that surrounds that is the scale of that challenge insofar as it concerns higher education – and what is coming soon in the stats that will make that easier or harder.

    For the past few decades, different iterations of the “efficiencies” needed to massify – which focussed largely on the transfer of the costs of participation from state to graduate – have had three core features designed to reconcile the expansion and efficiency thing with the goals of social mobility before, during and after HE:

    • Initiatives (a mix of sticks and carrots, inputs and outcomes and getting in v getting on) aimed at broadening the characteristics of those getting in into higher education
    • No upfront participation costs via loans to students for maintenance and tuition – so being in it felt “equal”
    • Loan interest and income-contingent repayment arrangements designed to redistribute some of the relative economic success to the less successful

    Taken together, the idea has been that accessing the signalling benefits will be easier via expansion and fairness fixes; that the experience itself resembles the “school uniform” principle of everyone having a fairly similar experience; and then that those who reap the economic rewards shoulder the biggest burden (and in that a burden a bit bigger than it actually cost) in paying for it all.

    You tackle inequality partly through opportunity, and partly through outcomes – the rich pay more both than others and more than the actual cost. So central was redistribution to the design of the fee and loan system in the last decade that the government announced and formally consulted on a plan for early repayment mechanisms to stop people on high incomes being able to “unfairly buy themselves out of this progressive system”.

    But a decade on, the government is in a real bind. The initiatives aimed at broadening the characteristics of those enrolling into higher education look much less impactful than just expanding – especially in “high tariff” providers.

    The cost of living – especially for housing – is wrecking the “school uniform” principle unless we were to loan students even more money – which has its… costs.

    And having reduced interest on student loans to inflation – paid for by a longer loan term – it’s hard to think of a more politically toxic move than slapping it back on, however redistributive it will look on an excel sheet.

    A bigger mountain to climb

    That all exacerbates the social mobility challenge. Students cluster into the Russell Group because that group of providers now has the same “meaning” for the press and parents that “university” had prior to 1992.

    Whether in the Russell Group or not, the differential student experiences of haves and have-nots (both inside and outside of the curriculum) will show up both in their actual skills and what they can “sell” to employers. And the most successful graduates from the most attractive-sounding universities will pay less for university across their lifetime, while everyone else will pay more.

    In a way though, even thinking about social mobility or the redistributive graduate contribution scheme in terms of relative lifetime salary is the biggest problem of all. Because given what’s coming, it really should be the least of our worries.

    Since Tony Blair increased tuition fees to £3,000, above-inflation house price growth has delivered an unearned, unequal and untaxed £3 trillion capital gains windfall in Britain. 86 per cent above inflation house price growth over the past 20 years has delivered capital gains on home owners’ main residences worth £3 trillion – now a fifth of all wealth in Britain.

    The value of household wealth stood at around three times the value of national income throughout the 1960s and 1970s – but since the 1980s, the rate at which households have accumulated wealth has accelerated, outpacing the growth in national income, so that the stock of household wealth was estimated to be 7.6 times GDP at the end of 2020.

    Wealth matters. For those who have accumulated it, it provides a better ability to absorb shocks to income, easier access to lower-cost credit, and facilitates investment in significant assets such as housing. But it’s not equally held.

    Wealth is about twice as unequal as the income distribution, and because growth in wealth is outpacing growth in household income it is harder for those currently without it to accumulate it, and enjoy the same benefits outlined above – because as the value of assets rise relative to income, it becomes harder for someone to “save” their way up the wealth distribution.

    The least wealthy third of households have gained less than £1,000 per adult on average, compared to an average gain of £174,000 for the wealthiest ten per cent. Gains have been largest in London, where on average people have gained £76,000 since 2000, and smallest in the North East of England, with an average gain of just £21,000.

    As Robert Colville points out in The Times:

    We have come to realise that what is really dividing our society, as that £5.5 trillion starts to cascade down the generations, is not the boomers’ greed but their love.

    There’s an age aspect to the inequality – those aged 60+ have seen the biggest windfalls at around £80,000 on average – compared to an average of less than £20,000 for those under 40 years of age. But that age aspect also points to something hugely important that’s coming next – because eventually, those older people will die – and who they transfer their wealth to, and what it’s invested in, will matter. Because not only does wealth inequality dwarf wage inequality, it also predicts and drives it.

    Student transfers

    Here thanks to the Resolution Foundation we can see how intergenerational transfers (both gifts and inheritances) will become increasingly important during the century, as older households disperse their wealth at death via inheritances. It estimates that those transfers are set to double over the next 20 years as the large baby-boomer cohort move into late retirement – and it is likely that more wealth will be dispersed by these households while they are alive through gifts.

    And it’s when that ramps up that the interaction with any tuition fee system that will really start to matter.

    Since 2015/16, DfE figures for England tell us that between 10.1 and 13.6 per cent of entrants at Level 6 have self-funded. Some of that will be PT/CPD type activity, some of it students running out of SLC entitlement, and some not drawing down debt for religious reasons – but most will be people who can just afford it.

    Of course what a fixed-ish percentage hides a bit is the number growth – if HE participation has been growing “at the bottom” of the social-economics, a fixed-ish percentage means that more on equivalent incomes are paying upfront. In 2022/23, a record 54,700 entrants were marked up as “no award or financial backing”.

    In the original £9,000 fees system, it made little sense to opt-out of student loans – because the vast majority never paid it back in full by design. But now with a cheaper (in real terms) tuition fee, a frozen repayment threshold and an extended term of 40 years, the calculation has changed – suddenly it makes much more sense to avoid the debt if you can.

    And so given that paying for your younger relatives’ tuition fees represents a way of investing some of that inheritance in way that avoids inheritance tax, we’d have to assume that unchecked, not only will richer graduates in the loan scheme get a much better lifetime deal than they did a few years ago, more and more won’t be in the scheme at all.

    (The green line is the system we had for most of the last decade – the grey line the system the Conservatives slipped past everyone on their way out).

    Even if every penny of an inheritance was drained away on paying for HE upfront, if we compare two graduates – one with 40 years of graduate repayments ahead of them, and one without, it doesn’t take long to clock how impossible social mobility becomes for otherwise notionally equal graduates.

    Then assume that those getting their fees and costs paid for them while they’re a student are clustered into the Russell Group and its signals already – and lay on top of that the fact that those without a windfall coming are more likely to be those with a pretty thin “student experience” and so without the skills or cultural capital to cheat the socio-economic odds, and you pretty quickly need to give up and go home.

    The problem that that all leaves is pretty significant – partly because wealth inequality is already more stratified than income, partly because it drives the type and value of HE experience a student might have, and partly because HE participation has a much better track record at delivering salary gains and salary redistribution than it does at delivering wealth gains or wealth redistribution.

    Put another way, it might be a rite of passage, and it might be good to have a better educated population, but without the prospect of it delivering social mobility, it will lose both real and symbolic value.

    Hierarchy or diversity?

    So in reverse order, what can be done? On the way out, if there must be a graduate contribution system, not only does it have to return to attempting to redistribute from the richest to the poorest, it has to do so by expecting a fair chunk of that boomer windfall to fund some redistribution.

    An above inflation interest rate has to return – and upfront fee payers shouldn’t be able to just buy a better education for themselves, as they can in the US – they should be expected to contribute more into the pot for everyone’s benefit. Higher fees, but only for for upfront payers – DfE needs to dust off that consultation from the last decade, and fast.

    During, we’ll need to redouble efforts to re-establish at least a notional run at the school uniform principle – carefully calibrating student income and experience to return to a baseline where everyone experiences something similar.

    Some of that is about reducing the costs of participation rather than loaning more money to meet them, some is about defining a contemporary student experience so that those who need to work can do so with dignity while extracting educational value, and those that don’t are expected to. It’s also about a credit system that recognises the educational value of extracurricular activity – so that everyone has time to take part in it.

    Then on the way in, we need more mixing – we do need Scenario 1 to return as a much tougher target.

    As well as that, the clustering up the league tables as a way of avoiding harder questions about access in our elite institutions almost certainly needs to stop. Taken to its logical conclusion, in a couple of decades there will only be 24 universities left (and in the minds of the press and parents, we’re arguably already there) – but if Labour facilitates only 19 cities having students and graduates in them, both it and everywhere else is doomed.

    Labour, in other words, has to start saying no:

    • It could say “no” to current university growth altogether, letting further education grow to soak up demand as polytechnics did when universities were capped in the 80s;
    • It could say “no” to any more university growth in current locations, allowing expansion into other places with all the economic and social benefits that would bring;
    • It could say “no” to any more “residential” places at universities, causing colleges and universities to become more comprehensive as they rush to make commuting more normal;
    • Or it could say “no” to “low value” courses, on the assumption that supply and then demand will flow into “high value” ones – if, of course, it could find a credible way of differentiating between the two.

    Part of the balancing act to choking off clustering is one other thing that should matter to Labour. The scandal isn’t that applicant X can’t quite get into the Russell Group with 3 A*s. It’s that we still have a system that somehow writes off the student and the university they attend if they don’t.

    Making it much more attractive to commute (coupled with a domestic Erasmus), talking up not just alternatives to university but universities that aren’t the Russell Group, abolishing the archaic degree classification system, ripping up all the quality systems that have singularly failed to “assure” the press and the public that quality can be found elsewhere, and forcing through some institutional subject specialisms (and obvious vocational excellence) within the system would all help.

    Do all of that, and maybe one day, a senior figure in HE might be able to claim that mass higher education – and all the rich benefits it brings – both survived and thrived because it finally found a way to celebrate diversity rather than forever turning it into hierarchy.

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  • A virtual reality, AI-boosted system helps students with autism improve social skills

    A virtual reality, AI-boosted system helps students with autism improve social skills

    Key points:

    This article and the accompanying image originally appeared on the KU News site and are reposted here with permission.

    For more than a decade, University of Kansas researchers have been developing a virtual reality system to help students with disabilities, especially those with autism spectrum disorder, to learn, practice and improve social skills they need in a typical school day. Now, the KU research team has secured funding to add artificial intelligence components to the system to give those students an extended reality, or XR, experience to sharpen social interactions in a more natural setting.

    The U.S. Office of Special Education Programs has awarded a five-year, $2.5 million grant to researchers within KU’s School of Education & Human Sciences to develop Increasing Knowledge and Natural Opportunities With Social Emotional Competence, or iKNOW. The system will build on previous work and provide students and teachers with an immersive, authentic experience blending extended reality and real-world elements of artificial intelligence.

    iKNOW will expand the capabilities of VOISS, Virtual reality Opportunity to Integrate Social Skills, a KU-developed VR system that has proven successful and statistically valid in helping students with disabilities improve social skills. That system contains 140 unique learning scenarios meant to teach knowledge and understanding of 183 social skills in virtual school environments such as a classroom, hallway, cafeteria or bus that students and teachers can use via multiple platforms such as iPad, Chromebooks or Oculus VR headsets. The system also helps students use social skills such as receptive or expressive communication across multiple environments, not simply in the isolation of a classroom.

    IKNOW will combine the VR aspects of VOISS with AI features such as large language models to enhance the systems’ capabilities and allow more natural interactions than listening to prerecorded narratives and responding by pushing buttons. The new system will allow user-initiated speaking responses that can accurately transcribe spoken language in real-time. AI technology of iKNOW will also be able to generate appropriate video responses to avatars students interact with, audio analysis of user responses, integration of in-time images and graphics with instruction to boost students’ contextual understanding.

    “Avatars in iKNOW can have certain reactions and behaviors based on what we want them to do. They can model the practices we want students to see,” said Amber Rowland, assistant research professor in the Center for Research on Learning, part of KU’s Life Span Institute and one of the grant’s co principal investigators. “The system will harness AI to make sure students have more natural interactions and put them in the role of the ‘human in the loop’ by allowing them to speak, and it will respond like a normal conversation.”

    The spoken responses will not only be more natural and relatable to everyday situations, but the contextual understanding cues will help students better know why a certain response is preferred. Rowland said when students were presented with multiple choices in previous versions, they often would know which answer was correct but indicated that’s not how they would have responded in real life.

    IKNOW will also provide a real-time student progress monitoring system, telling them, educators and families how long students spoke, how frequently they spoke, number of keywords used, where students may have struggled in the system and other data to help enhance understanding.

    All avatar voices that iKNOW users encounter are provided by real middle school students, educators and administrators. This helps enhance the natural environment of the system without the shortcomings of students practicing social skills with classmates in supervised sessions. For example, users do not have to worry what the people they are practicing with are thinking about them while they are learning. They can practice the social skills that they need until they are comfortable moving from the XR environment to real life.

    “It will leverage our ability to take something off of teachers’ plates and provide tools for students to learn these skills in multiple environments. Right now, the closest we can come to that is training peers. But that puts students with disabilities in a different box by saying, ‘You don’t know how to do this,’” said Maggie Mosher, assistant research professor in KU’s Achievement & Assessment Institute, a co-principal investigator for the grant.

    Mosher, a KU graduate who completed her doctoral dissertation comparing VOISS to other social skills interventions, found the system was statistically significant and valid in improving social skills and knowledge across multiple domains. Her study, which also found the system to be acceptable, appropriate and feasible, was published in high-impact journals Computers & Education and Issues and Trends in Learning Technologies.

    The grant supporting iKNOW is one of four OSEP Innovation and Development grants intended to spur innovation in educational technology. The research team, including principal investigator Sean Smith, professor of special education; Amber Rowland, associate research professor in the Center for Research on Learning and the Achievement & Assessment Institute; Maggie Mosher, assistant research professor in AAI; and Bruce Frey, professor in educational psychology, will present their work on the project at the annual I/ITSEC conference, the world’s largest modeling, simulation and training event. It is sponsored by the National Training & Simulation Association, which promotes international and interdisciplinary cooperation within the fields of modeling and simulation, training, education and analysis and is affiliated with the National Defense Industrial Association.

    The research team has implemented VOISS, available on the Apple Store and Google Play, at schools across the country. Anyone interested in learning more can find information, demonstrations and videos at the iKNOW site and can contact developers to use the system at the site’s “work with us” page.

    IKNOW will add resources for teachers and families who want to implement the system at a website called iKNOW TOOLS (Teaching Occasions and Opportunities for Learning Supports) to support generalization of social skills across real-world settings.

    “By combining our research-based social emotional virtual reality work (VOISS) with the increasing power and flexibility of AI, iKNOW will further personalize the learning experience for individuals with disabilities along with the struggling classmates,” Smith said. “Our hope and expectation is that iKNOW will further engage students to develop the essential social emotional skills to then apply in the real world to improve their overall learning outcomes.”

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