Featured Education Reports

The reports featured on this page are representative of the wide variety of reports on education that the National Academies produces. Please see the following links for DBASSE’s most recent reports or a listing of all reports.

	How should children learn mathematics? Adding it Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics explains what mathematics students in pre-K through 8th grade need to learn and recommends how teaching, curricula, and teacher education should change to improve mathematics learning during these critical years. The report discusses what is known from research about the mathematical knowledge students bring to school, how teachers can build on that knowledge to develop mathematical and how teachers themselves can develop proficiency in teaching mathematics. Based on Adding It Up, Helping Children Learn Mathematics examines school mathematics during a critical period in a child’s education—from pre-kindergarten (pre-K) through eighth grade and focuses on the domain of number, which is at the heart of preschool, elementary school, and middle school mathematics. This report is addressed to parents and caregivers, teachers, administrators, and policy makers, all of whom must work together to improve mathematics learning.
	How do we know if students are learning? Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment explains how advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure learning can improve our approach to educational assessment–an integral part of our quest for improved education. It offers the hope of developing new types of assessments that can help students succeed in school through making clear the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning.
	How do you get a fourth-grader excited about history? How do you persuade high school students that mathematical functions are relevant to their everyday lives? In How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom, practical questions that confront every classroom teacher are addressed using the latest exciting research on cognition, teaching, and learning. Building on the discoveries detailed in the National Academies report, How People Learn, this report explores how the principles of learning can be applied in teaching history, science, and math topics at three levels: elementary, middle, and high school.
	How can education research become a more evidence-based field? Transforming education into an evidence-based field depends in no small part on a strong base of scientific knowledge to inform educational policy and practice. Advancing Scientific Research in Education makes select recommendations for strengthening scientific education research and targets federal agencies, professional associations, and universities—particularly schools of education—to take the lead in advancing the field.