Governor Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Department of Education have announced a statewide investment of over $3.5 million to provide every first-grade student with decodable book packs to take home and keep, reinforcing classroom instruction. “Iowa is making early literacy a top priority, recently enacting landmark literacy legislation, improving state standards and ensuring teachers have…

Picture a school where nearly half the students speak a language other than English at home. Now imagine there’s only one psychologist available—and they only speak English. This is the reality for many US schools today. The national ratio stands at one school psychologist per 1,119 students, more than double the National Association of School…

Walk into any classroom in the US, you’ll likely encounter students who speak a language other than English at home, who might have learned to read in another language before coming to school, or who are learning to read in more than one language in their classroom. Regardless of the language of the teacher, multilingual…

A new study, “How User Language Affects Conflict Fatality Estimates in ChatGPT,” published in Journal of Peace, suggests that the language used to ask questions of large language models (LLMs) can significantly affect the information provided by them, potentially deepening biases. Conducted by researchers from the University of Zurich and the University of Konstanz, the…

Early this month, the Colorado Department of Education is presenting a “state of the state on multilingual learners” (MLLs)—a sign of more focus on their needs by the state.In the 2023–24 school year, Colorado identified 114,482 MLLs, up from 109,780 in 2022–23 but lower than the 122,976 in 2019–20—that equates to about 13% of all…

Career exploration and exposure to real-world experiences are essential in today’s education for students in K–12 as they consider postsecondary and career opportunities after high school graduation. UnidosUS and the National Urban League co-authored a white paper in 2024, “A Community-Based Approach to Career Pathways Navigation,” to elevate the promise of career pathways as a…

A recent study from the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, which appears in Imaging Neuroscience, shows how interests can modulate language processing in children’s brains and paves the way for personalized brain research. “Traditional studies give subjects identical stimuli to avoid confounding the results,” says of MIT professor and McGovern Institute investigator John Gabrieli, who…