News Bureau

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - While social media such as Facebook and Twitter have transformed the way people communicate, educational practices haven't kept pace, relying on outdated, limited tools such as standardized tests that don't reflect the profound changes precipitated by the Web. An interdisciplinary team of experts at the University of Illinois is developing software that they believe will transform the practice of writing assessment - and potentially eliminate cumbersome proficiency testing such as that mandated by state and federal agencies as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Mary Kalantzis, a professor of education and former dean at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, has been named the new dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pending approval by the U. of I. Board of Trustees at its May 11 meeting in Chicago.

Walter W. McMahon, a professor emeritus of economics and of educational organization and leadership at the University of Illinois, is the author of "Higher Learning, Greater Good: The Private & Social Benefits of Higher Education." An expert on the economics of education, McMahon spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about higher education funding in Illinois.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Bullying perpetration decreased by 20 percent over a three-year period among youths with disabilities who participated in a social and emotional learning program, a new study found.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - About 250 Champaign and Urbana students will get a taste of college and help preparing for it in an all-day event Friday (Nov. 18) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Families whose children with autism spectrum disorders spend less than 20 percent of their time in mainstream classrooms are nearly twice as likely to resort to litigation, such as filing for due process hearings or mediation, when they disagree with school officials about their children's education, according to a recent survey of parents.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Service-learning projects have become popular in U.S. public schools for teaching citizenship values.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - For individual parents, finding the right child care or preschool program is tough enough.

An annual statewide conference that focuses on helping new teachers prepare students to compete in science, technology, engineering and math fields in the global economy is expanding this year to include the arts.The STEM Beginning Teacher Conference, July 28-29 in Champaign, will be the third such event organized by the Illinois New Teacher Collaborative – but the first time that the agenda will include sessions focusing on instructional strategies for the arts.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Asian cooking, Vietnam movies, Russian museums É and seafood, architecture, opera, writing, Lincoln and the Amish.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - High schools need to work with community colleges to align their curricula better and to reduce the number of students who need to enroll in remedial courses, according to a University of Illinois expert who studies community college education policy.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Several staff changes will be taking place later this spring in the Office of the Chancellor on the University of Illinois campus.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Illinois officials need to re-examine enrollment and funding policies for the state's public early childhood education programs to eliminate barriers that may keep the neediest of children from attending.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Whether in the classroom or the boardroom, chalkboards have been replaced nearly universally by computer-aided audiovisual presentations that commonly involve a laptop computer and Microsoft PowerPoint software. And while that change has proved beneficial for most presenters and their audiences, a notable exception is for people with disabilities.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - An approach to teaching young children the principles of writing and literacy that prohibits them from borrowing from our common cultural landscape is a problematic one, according to a University of Illinois professor who studies childhood learning and literacy development.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Preschoolers who engage in challenging behaviors - patterns of behavior that interfere with learning and social interaction - are at increased risk of academic failure and peer rejection, among other poor outcomes.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Many things have been said about reality TV, but "educational" has rarely been among them.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Boys exposed to familial violence, including conflict between siblings, become increasingly aggressive toward their peers at school, and this aggression is associated with greater levels of alcohol and drug use over time, a new study by a University of Illinois researcher suggests.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Margaret Brooks LaRaviere of Chicago, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, will be working on Capitol Hill this academic year instead of on campus.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Sexuality is not an easy topic for discussion as it relates to schools, but what is left unsaid can cause a lot of harm, says Cris Mayo, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of a new book.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Women who were victims of childhood sexual abuse have long been assumed to be at a higher risk for eating disorders. The results of research, however, have been mixed, with some studies showing a link and others none.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Author and syndicated columnist Naomi Klein will speak Oct. 29 on the University of Illinois campus, on the topic "Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism in Latin America."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Keeping quality teachers in Illinois classrooms will be the agenda for a statewide conference Feb. 27-28 in Springfield, Ill., expected to draw more than 350 educators and policymakers.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth and those questioning their sexuality are at significantly greater risk of truancy and of considering and attempting suicide than their heterosexual classmates - even when bullying isn't involved, according to a new study of more than 11,000 middle and high school students.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A researcher at the University of Illinois is counting on a unique computer program to make it easier and more enjoyable for elementary school students who are at risk of academic failure to learn basic addition and subtraction facts.

Education reform policies that penalize struggling schools for poor standardized test scores may hinder – not improve – students’ college readiness, if a school’s instructional focus becomes improving its test scores, suggests a new study that explored efforts to promote a college-going culture at one Texas high school.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - There is no certainty in science, no such thing as "the truth." Nor is science completely rational, objective or free of cultural influence. There is no step-by-step procedure for doing science, no "scientific method," says University of Illinois education professor Fouad Abd-El-Khalick.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A new study of more than 346 middle-school children indicates that boys are less likely than girls to intervene to protect a bullying victim, especially if the boy is a member of a peer group in which bullying is the norm. The study also suggests that anti-bullying programs that focus on bystander intervention and empathy training aren't likely to have much impact unless attention is given to reducing bullying perpetration within children's peer groups.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Bill Gaines, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner during 27 years as an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, has been named to the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Illinois.

A Minute With™... educational psychology professor Dorothy Espelage

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The impact of text messaging on the decline of formal writing among teens has been debated in pedagogical circles ever since cell-phone ownership became an adolescent rite of passage in the mid-2000s. But according to a University of Illinois expert in media literacy, not only are critics who argue that texting is synonymous with literary degradation wrong, they also often overlook the bigger role that texting and its distant cousin, "tweeting," could play in education and research.

CHAMPAIGN,Ill. - Officials from Jiangxi Normal University in Nanching, China, and the University of Illinois will sign an agreement establishing a Confucius Institute at the Urbana campus during an event Nov. 21 (Thursday).

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The quality of the social relationships that newly hired people develop with other employees in their work groups is critical to newcomers' job satisfaction, learning their responsibilities and their ability to fit in to the workplace culture, a new study suggests.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In the battle against drugs in the 1980s and '90s, schools overwhelmingly embraced the DARE program before research came to seriously question its effectiveness.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - James D. Anderson, the Gutsgell Professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois, has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Education, considered the highest honor in the field of educational scholarship.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The University of Illinois Motorcycle Rider Program, now in its 24th year, will recognize its 10,000th enrollee Saturday.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A new study by researchers at the University of Illinois indicates that children who spend in excess of 30 hours per week in non-relative care through the age of 4 1/2 may be exposed to a social environment that popularizes aggression, leading some children to become more physically aggressive than peers who spend less time in nonmaternal care.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - For the U.S. to achieve President Barack Obama's goal of having the largest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020, educators, policymakers and families will need to address the barriers that discourage minorities from pursuing higher education. A new study by Lorenzo DuBois Baber, a professor of higher education at the University of Illinois, sheds light on the unique challenges facing African American and Latino males.

Numerous states have enacted laws that redefine tenure and academic freedom protections at their universities. Carol Symes, a professor of history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, discusses how these laws may fundamentally change teaching and research.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Colleges and universities are under siege from an array of economic, political and cultural forces that are dramatically changing higher education as we know it - but not for the better, according to Cary Nelson, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Photos of happy, smiling faces on patient education websites may engage readers, but they also may have a negative impact on older adults' comprehension of vital health information, especially those elderly patients who are the least knowledgeable about their medical condition to begin with, suggests a new study.

Culture’s pivotal role in effective educational and social assessments – and how related research findings can spark social change – will be the focus of an international conference in Chicago this fall.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Self-administered surveys are a vital tool for researchers who gather sensitive information about adolescents. But young people who provide untruthful answers on questionnaires as pranks have the potential to throw researchers' findings way off track, particularly studies that involve minority groups.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Contrary to common wisdom, public schools score higher in math than private ones, when differences in student backgrounds are taken into account.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Companies that want to motivate workers to use electronic-based or digital training programs need to make training modules fun and stimulating whenever they can, and offer extrinsic incentives, such as wage increases and user support, when employees need extra enticement, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Illinois.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Brainiacs of all ages are invited to explore the mysteries of the brain and nervous system March 11 during an afternoon of games and activities at the Orpheum Children's Science Museum in Champaign. The event, F.I.N.D. Orphy, will kick off a new science education outreach program jointly sponsored by the Orpheum and the University of Illinois that highlights the research of the university's neuroscientists.

Illinois’ guaranteed-tuition law is causing tuition rates at the state’s public colleges and universities to escalate faster than they would if schools were allowed to adjust tuition rates annually, say two experts in higher education finance from the University of Illinois.

A Minute With™ Angela Lyons, director of the Center for Economic and Financial Education

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In the years immediately following the Civil War, the question of education for newly emancipated slaves in Mississippi centered on whether schools should seek to educate blacks as citizens or train them as subsistence laborers. While many whites favored the laborer option, those who had been freed wanted schools established by and for themselves as a means of achieving independence, equality and political empowerment - in essence, full citizenship, says Christopher M. Span, a professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Many characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorders can be identified by the age of 2 and are predictive of which children will be diagnosed with these disorders when they're older, a new study suggests.