Teaching, Learning and Behavior

The tool can help identify strengths in very young students and allow parents, teachers and others to start building on them from an early point in their lives and education. Previous strengths research had focused on older students and adults.

A PLOS One study from a psycholinguist at the University of Kansas explores how ChatGPT responded to nonwords

A KU study working with an English language arts class found that in addition to helping students learn how to think through complex topics, teachers and students can work together to form their own social construction of thinking and how they think about topics in their classes.

KU researchers Lisa Dieker and Maggie Mosher have launched "AI Advocates," a short-form podcast that helps teachers navigate classroom artificial intelligence tools in five minutes or less. Each episode breaks down one tool’s uses, benefits and considerations, focusing on free and accessible options.

KU has received funding from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to team with Workforce Partnership and the Kansas City Public Library to expand a program that works with women leaving incarceration and those who have left to provide technology and career training and learn about online security. The program has also shown it reduces recidivism rates.

A new book edited by University of Kansas scholars aims to help educators move beyond overemphasis on STEM subjects to "STREAM," which merges science, technology, reading, engineering, arts, mathematics and social sciences to create a greater, more equitable educational approach.

Four pre-service teachers designed and delivered a lesson on "Night," Elie Wiesel's seminal Holocaust survival memoir, in a University of Kansas study. The lesson, performed in a mixed-reality simulator, found the teachers did not have instruction on teaching difficult topics, but their confidence in teaching difficult material improved.

The Center for Undergraduate Research at the University of Kansas is hosting online and in-person research presentations through April 25 to celebrate Undergraduate Research Week, featuring the work of more than 150 Jayhawks.

A study led by the University of Kansas addressed whether using interventions designed to improve working memory can help students solve math word problems. The study found that in working with more than 200 students with and without math difficulties, working memory plays a key role in word problemsolving and that interventions designed to improve it helped both students with and without math difficulties.

“The Psychology of Liberty: Reclaiming Everyday Freedom” by Barbara Kerr of the University of Kansas combines the study of anthropology, economics, history, creativity, family studies, evolutionary studies and education to suggest a new concept of freedom: Allowing people to be free to create, play and spend time with their families, as humans did for nearly 200,000 years.