Does Reading Historical Drama Increase Historical Knowledge and Empathy? The Case of Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born to be King

Literary theorists have argued that literary reading fosters empathy, a claim that has substantial empirical support. In this study, I consider the more specific case of reading historical drama and its potential to foster historical empathy among secondary school students. Although several educational interventions for fostering historical empathy have been proposed, none have yet considered the potential of reading historical drama. I evaluate an intervention where students engaged with selected plays from Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born to be King that depict the Nativity and Easter narratives. After the intervention, I find that these students, compared to students who did not engage with the plays, exhibited higher levels of various dimensions of historical empathy including cognitive empathy towards historical figures in those narratives, feeling more immersed in the historical narrative, and confidence in properly contextualizing the historical events in the narrative. The students who engaged with the play also gained more knowledge about the historical accounts depicted in the plays but did not exhibit more affective empathy with historical figures. Implications for history education are considered

Electrical power dissipation in carbon nanotubes on single crystal quartz and amorphous SiO2

Heat dissipation in electrically biased semiconducting carbon nanotubes (CNTs) on single crystal quartz and amorphous SiO2 is examined with temperature profiles obtained by spatially resolved Raman spectroscopy. Despite the differences in phonon velocities, thermal conductivity and van der Waals interactions with CNTs, on average, heat dissipation into single crystal quartz and amorphous SiO2 is found to be similar. Large temperature gradients and local hot spots often observed underscore the complexity of CNT temperature profiles and may be accountable for the similarities observed

Does Reading Historical Drama Increase Historical Knowledge and Empathy? The Case of Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born to be King

Literary theorists have argued that literary reading fosters empathy, a claim that has substantial empirical support. In this study, I consider the more specific case of reading historical drama and its potential to foster historical empathy among secondary school students. Although several educational interventions for fostering historical empathy have been proposed, none have yet considered the potential of reading historical drama. I evaluate an intervention where students engaged with selected plays from Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born to be King that depict the Nativity and Easter narratives. After the intervention, I find that these students, compared to students who did not engage with the plays, exhibited higher levels of various dimensions of historical empathy including cognitive empathy towards historical figures in those narratives, feeling more immersed in the historical narrative, and confidence in properly contextualizing the historical events in the narrative. The students who engaged with the play also gained more knowledge about the historical accounts depicted in the plays but did not exhibit more affective empathy with historical figures. Implications for history education are considered

The Value of Study Abroad Experience in the Labor Market: Findings from a Resume Audit Experiment

Conventional wisdom and some empirical research suggests that study abroad programs enhance skills and personal growth in ways that translate into success in the labor market. However, this research is limited by its inability to address sources of selection bias that may confound the positive relationship between study abroad experience and labor-market success. We conduct a field experiment to overcome these limitations. Using a resume audit, we estimate the causal relationship between participation in study abroad experience and the likelihood of receiving a callback from a potential employer. We also tested for potential heterogeneities by the location (i.e., Asia versus Europe) and length (i.e., two weeks versus one year) of the study abroad experience. Compared to resumes that list no study abroad experience, resumes that list study abroad experience in Asia regardless of length are about 20 percent more likely to receive a callback for an interview if the resume studied. The differences in rates increases to 25 percent when comparing resumes without study abroad experience to those that list two-week programs in Asia. Resumes that list study abroad experience in Europe for one year are 20 percent less likely to receive any callback and 35 percent less likely to receiving a call back for an interview, relative to resumes that do not list study abroad experience. Implications about the value of study abroad are discussed

Buckets of Water into the Ocean: Non-public Revenue in Public Charter and Traditional Public Schools

The funding of K-12 education remains a contentious public policy issue. Questions of funding adequacy and equity across school sectors, school districts and individual schools are prominent in discussions of how to improve educational outcomes, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Downes & Stiefel 2008; Ladd 2008). Although scholars are divided regarding the extent to which money affects student outcomes in K-12 education (Jackson, Johnson, & Persico 2015; Hanushek, 1997; Burtless 1996), there is basic agreement that more education revenue is better so long as the increased resources are directed towards productive educational activities and programs (Murnane & Levy 1996). If you ask education practitioners, the majority will say that more resources will make their schools better

Contemporary homeschooling arrangements: An analysis of three waves of nationally representative data

Homeschooling has increased dramatically in recent decades. During this period of expansion, scholars have reported on growing diversity in the ways that homeschool families educate their children. However, research tends to treat homeschooled children as a uniform group without accounting for differing homeschool arrangements. In this study, we examine the prevalence of four types of homeschool arrangements reported in prior literature as follows: (1) home education supplemented by the use of a private tutor or a homeschool cooperative, (2) home education supplemented by the use of online learning, (3) home education supplemented by part-time enrollment in a brick-and-mortar school, and (4) fully parent-delivered home education. For the analyses, three cross-sectional waves of nationally representative data on homeschool families (n = 1,468) from the National Household Education Survey (NHES: 2012, 2016, 2019) are examined. Results indicate that the four types of homeschool arrangements tested in this study are widespread and that the majority of homeschool families supplement home education with cooperatives and tutors, brick-and-mortar schools, and online education. Homeschool families who continue to perform conventional homeschooling without additional supplements are more likely to be white and less educated with elementary-aged children in the South region of the United States. Homeschool families whose children attend brick-and-mortar schools part-time are less likely to be white and more likely to have secondary school-aged children in urban areas. Use of online education is also higher at the secondary school level

Homeschooling, social isolation, and life trajectories: An analysis of formerly homeschooled adults

A longstanding critique of homeschooling is that it isolates children from mainstream society, depriving them of social experiences needed to thrive as adults. Although a small number of empirical studies challenge this criticism, this research tends to be derived from self-reports of homeschooling parents about their children. In this study, analyses of qualitative interviews (n = 31) and survey data (n = 140) of adults who were homeschooled as children are performed. Most interview participants described conventional and unconventional social experiences that they felt had satisfied their social needs while being homeschooled. Participants who were homeschooled for all or most of their K-12 education had less exposure to mainstream school-based social opportunities but reflected that homeschooling had not hindered their ability to navigate society effectively. Analyses of survey data seemed to echo this finding. No statistical differences on four social and life outcomes (i.e. college attendance, household income, marital status, and subjective wellbeing) were observed between short-term homeschoolers (1-2 years) who spent nearly all of their K-12 education in brick-and-mortar schools and long-term (10-12 years) and substantial (3-9 years) homeschoolers who had less exposure to mainstream social opportunities available in brick-and mortar schools. This study advances the literature by using qualitative and quantitative data to generate key insights on the social and life trajectories of formerly homeschooled adults

The Role of Poetry in Cultivating Attentiveness, Curiosity, and Affinity in the Science Classroom

Poetry is endemic to classical education and often studied for its own sake. However, poetry is also posited to possess a pedagogical power not shared by prose or formal scientific language. Poetry’s distinctive effects on learning outcomes have been well articulated by philosophers since Plato and Aristotle, but their claims have not been subjected to an empirical test. We fill that gap in this study. We collaborated with a local classical grammar school and divided kindergarten, first grade, and second grade classrooms into two groups for a two-week science unit. One group of classrooms integrated poems about the topic of study into the science unit, while the other group of classrooms did not. Measuring students’ levels of affinity, attentiveness, curiosity, and enjoyment of poetry both at baseline and after the poetry intervention, we found that poetry increased students’ attentiveness and their enjoyment of poetry. There was less evidence of poetry’s impacts on affinity and curiosity. Implications about the role of poetry for teaching and learning and the place of empirical research for classical education are discussed

Measuring Teacher Conscientiousness and its Impact on Students: Insight from the Measures of Effective Teaching Longitudinal Database

Although research has been unable to find strong links between observable teacher characteristics and a teacher’s ability to improve student achievement, it has generally not considered the role that teacher non-cognitive skills play in affecting student outcomes. In this article, we validate several novel performance-task measures of teacher conscientiousness based upon the effort that teachers exert completing a survey and use these measures to examine the role that teacher conscientiousness plays in affecting both student test scores and student non-cognitive skills. We conduct our analysis using the Measure of Effective Teaching Longitudinal Database where teachers were randomly assigned to their classrooms in the second year of the study. We exploit this random assignment to estimate causal impacts of teachers on their students’ outcomes during the second year of the MET project. We find that our survey-effort measures of teacher conscientiousness capture important dimensions of teacher quality. More conscientious teachers are more effective at improving their student conscientiousness but not their student test scores. Additional analysis suggests that traditional measures of teacher quality largely fail to capture a teacher’s ability to improve student conscientiousness, though measures of teacher quality based upon student ratings and one particular classroom observation protocol are exceptions