Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Shelley Mitchell, Senior Extension Specialist in Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Oklahoma State University

I used to teach high school science in Oklahoma, and one day I brought in a stalk from a cotton plant with bolls of cotton still attached. Students asked me why I glued cotton balls to a stick.

My students and I lived in a rural town surrounded by pastures of cattle and goats and fields of wheat, soybeans and cotton. I was amazed to learn how little my students understood agriculture. After a few related incidents, I started incorporating agriculture into my science classes.

When the United States was formed, about 80% of the population lived and worked on farms. Within a century the number had fallen to 40%. Today, less than 2% of the population lives on farms.

When most Americans lived on farms, agriculture was part of daily life. Most kids did farm chores, and planting and harvest seasons dictated the schedule of the school year. Today, most Americans are several generations removed from agriculture, and agriculture is seen as a career instead of a part of daily life.

As an agricultural extension specialist focused on horticulture, I’ve found that gardens can be an excellent teaching tool. By integrating gardens into schools, students can grow up learning about agriculture and the food systems that shape their daily lives.

Many researchers have cataloged the benefits of school gardens, and they go far beyond seeing how food grows.

Gardening for education

As people increasingly left the farms in the early 1900s and became disengaged from agriculture, a gap began to emerge between the public’s perception of farming and the nuts and bolts of the practice. In 1981, the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a task force to address agriculture illiteracy. This task force resulted in the formation of the National Agriculture in the Classroom program, which provides educators with lessons and tools to improve students’ understanding of raising farm animals and crops, including gardening.

Gardening also has benefits beyond agricultural literacy. For very young children, gardening increases hand-eye coordination, which is linked to success in handwriting, math and reading. Gardening, instead of sitting in a classroom, increases students’ physical activity during the school day.

During a typical indoor class, children sit about 84% of the time. While in the garden, children sit only about 15% of the time.

Getting outside and doing hands-on learning is more engaging than sitting in a classroom passively learning by lecture, because active learning engages more regions of the brain, resulting in better understanding and retention of concepts. Active learning also allows students to follow their own curiosity, which motivates them to learn and remember concepts.

A study showed that allowing more individual freedom in gardens led to an increase in positive attitudes toward school. Children involved in school gardening are also more active outside of school hours.

While working in a garden, students are involved with science and nature, and that involvement leads to more science literacy and positive attitudes toward science and the environment.

Gardening is, in essence, a science experiment with variables, such as water, temperature and sun exposure. Each variable has an effect on the success of the garden. Manipulating the variables and seeing the resulting consequences boosts students’ science process skills.

Gardening fosters life skills, such as teamwork, patience, self-confidence and responsibility.

School gardening also promotes an increase in vegetable consumption. If students grow something, they’re more likely to eat it.

Challenges with school gardens

However, establishing and maintaining a school garden program isn’t easy.

Many teachers feel they don’t have the time or funding to use gardening in their teaching, especially when their districts set goals based on test performance.

Many teachers also report they don’t feel confident enough in their understanding of gardening to teach it effectively.

Gardens don’t have to be flashy or expensive to help students learn, but they still cost some money that schools may not have. Space can also prove an issue, because some school administrators see even tiny gardens in 5-gallon buckets as encroaching on their schools’ playgrounds.

Aesthetics can create another hurdle. Many administrators whom I’ve spoken to think school gardens are messy, and rightfully so. Often they have weeds, they don’t look well manicured like a botanical garden, and a lot are neglected during the summer.

But that messiness is how students learn. Students grow their skills when they have the freedom to experiment with different gardening techniques, see how much room different plants need to grow, and determine what variables they will have to rethink for the next growing season.

If volunteers or teachers visit after the students and clean up or fix their mistakes, the students don’t see the outcomes of their decisions, and they don’t see any reason to change the inputs or growing methods.

Through gardening, students can gain an appreciation for farmers and their food supply. When coupled with lessons about agricultural systems, students learn to make informed food purchases and better understand the economic and political challenges that farmers face.

And nothing beats a garden-grown tomato.

Shelley Mitchell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. School gardens help students learn science and connect with agriculture – but making them happen isn’t easy – https://theconversation.com/school-gardens-help-students-learn-science-and-connect-with-agriculture-but-making-them-happen-isnt-easy-279919

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo, Clinical Professor of Literacy Studies, Drexel University

If you have a child in school right now, you may have heard them talk about needing a “brain break” while doing homework or studying for a test. Maybe they shake their bodies out, do some deep breathing exercises, or watch their favorite YouTube video of hamsters in a maze or a hydraulic press crushing various items.

To assist with these brain breaks, the School District of Philadelphia recently announced that an app called Rallee will be available to teachers and students in the district. The district’s version of Rallee will include a section of the app with branded activities related to the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team.

I’m a clinical professor of literacy studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and I previously worked as an elementary school teacher for 18 years. I know some families will wonder: Will this digital tool actually improve my child’s learning? And do students really need a brain break that involves more screen time?

What is Rallee?

Rallee encourages users to “turn your body into the controller for timed obstacle courses” and “stretch and breathe alongside the avatar.” While using Rallee, students might jump in place to help their avatar clear an obstacle or imitate their avatar by stretching their arms wide while taking a deep breath. These movement breaks are designed to take 1 to 5 minutes. The website says the activities help students improve learning comprehension, reduce stress and manage overwhelming emotions.

What are brain breaks?

Brain breaks are brief interruptions in instructional time during which students do cognitive or physical activities that are different from what they are doing in class. These breaks are grounded in some general principles of learning science and human physiology.

Researchers and educators know that learning requires students to absorb new information or skills and actively connect this new information to things they already know. One way the brain does this is through a process called consolidation. When a learner focuses on something other than the new information or skill, it gives the brain a chance to improve the neural connections it is making between the new information and prior knowledge. This improves long-term retention.

Scientists also know that movement increases blood flow to the brain, which enhances executive function. Executive function refers to the ability to focus on new information and then organize that information in the brain. Executive function skills also help a learner filter distraction, which is something many teachers and families see as a challenge for today’s learners.

Finally, long-standing research shows that recess, which is an extended break from learning, has a positive effect on student learning.

These established ideas support the idea of shorter “brain breaks” during lessons starting in preschool and all the way through college.

Do ‘brain breaks’ actually work?

The research that supports the idea of brain breaks is strong, but what does the research say about how effective brain break programs and practices are when applied in schools?

Many small studies show positive outcomes for specific learning measures with specific populations.

For example, a study of 35 Canadian students in grades 1 to 3 showed that classroom activity breaks improved kids’ engagement in learning tasks.

Another study involving second and third graders in the U.S. demonstrated that brain breaks using the popular website GoNoodle were associated with improved reading fluency

And a study involving 7- to 9-year-olds in Europe showed that classroom-based physical activity breaks were correlated to better math scores and an improvement in some executive function skills, such as cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to switch attention from one thing to another.

Still other studies have shown that activity breaks help adolescents and college students with general cognitive skills, such as attention and concentration.

However, when researchers combine the results of these smaller studies and do a larger statistical analysis, they find that the impact of brain breaks on learning and achievement is weaker than expected. This may be because these larger studies include other published studies that did not find that school-based brain breaks improve learning and achievement.

These meta-analyses find that there are no negative outcomes for students when they participate in these brain breaks, but the evidence does not strongly support positive outcomes either.

How will Rallee work in classrooms?

Rallee states that using their brain break app takes 1 to 5 minutes, but simply asking students to open a digital device and access an app can take twice that time, depending on the age and accessibility challenges of the students. These tools also need to be put away afterward, which takes more time. I’d estimate that a Rallee break would likely take 10 minutes in an average classroom.

Moving your body to navigate an avatar through a maze, as depicted on the Rallee website, also means a teacher may need to manage different students moving in different ways within their classroom space.

Rallee also requires students’ eyes to be focused on a screen, which research shows can have a negative impact on the very skills that brain breaks are trying to improve. Screen time is associated with concentration difficulties and a slower pace of new learning. More time on a screen and the required time to access and implement the brain breaks may prove more problematic than beneficial.

On their website, Rallee does not share any research on the use of their product in either a lab or a classroom. Rallee did not respond to my inquiry about research on its product.

Who is paying for the app?

Rallee’s rollout in Philadelphia schools is being funded by the Philadelphia Flyers for one year. The version of the app they are supporting has a special “Flyers World” set of activities built in. This partnership seems to be supported by the NHL’s Industry Growth Fund, which pays for projects aimed at increasing the team’s fan base and getting more people, particularly kids, to play hockey.

The Philadelphia School District did not respond to questions about how it chose the app or the specific source of the Flyers’ funding.

Some parents might see the Rallee subscription as a win-win, where the Flyers grow potential hockey fans and the Philadelphia School District gets a new tool it might not otherwise be able to purchase for its schools. Others might be more suspicious of the district partnering with a sports franchise to promote its team while offering unclear benefits to its learners.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo has received funding from the National Science Foundation and Drexel University.

– ref. The new brain break app for Philadelphia students raises questions about more screen time – https://theconversation.com/the-new-brain-break-app-for-philadelphia-students-raises-questions-about-more-screen-time-280246

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Peter McGraw, Professor of Marketing and Psychology, University of Colorado Boulder

When a couple marry in a church, synagogue or mosque, the ceremony does more than sanctify a union. Often, it binds two families to an institution.

For centuries, marriage and child-rearing have been among the main ways adults are integrated into congregational life. Couples who share the same faith tend to be more observant, and they often raise children within that tradition – bringing the next generation into congregational life. More marriages mean more families in pews and more children raised in the faith.

That helps explain why the rise of single adults is so unsettling for many faith communities today. In the United States, 42% of adults were not married or living with a partner in 2023, up from 38% in 2000. This shift is unlikely to change soon: A quarter of 40-year-olds have never been married, and a third of Gen Z are projected to never marry.

At the same time, the share of unmarried Americans who belong to a religious congregation has fallen well below that of married Americans. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, 68% of married adults identify as Christian, compared with about 51% of never-married adults. Twenty-four percent of married Americans are religiously unaffiliated, compared with 39% of Americans who never married.

As a behavioral economist and a business school professor, I study what I call the “solo economy”: how the rise of single adults is reshaping workplaces, taxes and consumer markets. Religious institutions are the latest domain to face the same shift. They are not simply confronting lower marriage rates. Many of them, I contend, are reckoning with the consequences of treating unmarried adults as incomplete members of the community.

Alarm across faiths

According to the Survey Center on American Life, the gap in religious membership between married and unmarried Americans has widened substantially since the 1990s.

At the time, 71% of married Americans said they belonged to a religious congregation, compared with 64% of unmarried Americans. In 2019, those numbers were 59% and 45%, respectively. Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling firm, found that just 1 in 4 single mothers attend church weekly – the lowest rate of any parent group.

Communities that have historically built their infrastructure around married families are feeling the shift most acutely: couples retreats, small groups organized by life stage, children’s programs, and leadership roles that quietly assume a spouse. The cumulative effect is less about overt exclusion than about whom the institution imagines when it pictures itself.

In an April 2021 address during a churchwide conference, M. Russell Ballard, then one of the top leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, acknowledged that more than half of adult church members were widowed, divorced or not yet married – and that some “wonder about their opportunities and place in God’s plan and in the Church.” In July 2024, the church expanded its “young single adult” category from ages 18–30 to 18–35.

In evangelical Christianity, sociologist Katie Gaddini’s research for her book “The Struggle to Stay” found that women – especially those over age 35 – often felt overlooked, excluded from leadership and valued less because they had not married.

At a women’s conference in London, one attendee captured the tension: “I’m so tired of fighting Christian church leaders to be treated equally, but I don’t want to leave the church. So, what do I do?”

In Modern Orthodox Judaism, similar patterns of exclusion have emerged. A 2022 Nishma Research survey found that singles reported the lowest sense of community connection of any group studied: 69 on a 100-point scale, compared with 81 for married members. Another 2022 report, by Brandeis University sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman, described unmarried members feeling “ignored and invisible” in synagogue life, sometimes treated as if they were broken people waiting to be fixed.

On my podcast, sociologist Ari Engelberg, author of “Singlehood and Religion,” described how unmarried adults in Israel’s Religious Zionist community internalize their single status as a religious failing. The community treats marriage as so central to observant life that remaining single can feel like falling short.

Doubling down

Religious institutions’ responses to the rise of singles have split in two directions.

Some have reasserted marriage as the expected path to adulthood, belonging and spiritual maturity. Pope Francis, for example, repeatedly warned about declining birth rates, calling the trend a “tragedy” in a 2021 address. In a 2023 worldwide broadcast, Dallin H. Oaks, who is now the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, urged single adults to date more, marry earlier and not delay having children. And in June 2025, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution lamenting “willful childlessness” and calling for laws that “incentivize family formation.”

In qualitative research with single churchgoers, a consistent theme emerges: Marriage comes up regularly in sermons – in illustrations, examples and applications – while singleness almost never does.

That instinct is understandable. But a strategy built for a society where most adults married young is a poor fit for one where many never will.

But doubling down carries a real cost. When single adults hear, again and again, that the fullest version of faithful life is married life, many do not feel called upward. They feel pushed outward.

Adapting

Other religious communities are adapting.

In the U.K., the Single Friendly Church Network developed a guided audit to help congregations across denominations assess how welcoming they are to people who come alone. In the U.S., ministries such as Table for One have tried to move singles programming away from matchmaking and toward spiritual community. And Fishman’s 2022 report on Modern Orthodox Judaism urged synagogues to give singles leadership roles, committee seats and ritual honors, regardless of marital status — though whether those recommendations have taken hold remains an open question.

But adaptation raises its own question. Are these efforts designed to support single adults as full members of the community or to manage them toward marriage? There is a difference between welcoming singles and treating singlehood as a problem to solve.

I see several practical steps for religious institutions that want to keep unmarried adults engaged in their communities:

1. Count who is actually in the pews. Leaders may not realize how many of their members are single, divorced or widowed. The Single Friendly Church Network found that when congregations conducted demographic audits, many were surprised by the results.

2. Give singles real authority. Inclusion does not mean creating a special ministry and leaving decision-making to married people. It means leadership, voice and visibility.

3. Rethink the language of belonging. Sermons and announcements that reflexively address “families” and “couples” can make unmarried adults feel peripheral. Small linguistic changes can signal that they are not.

4. Build community rather than dating pools. The goal should not be to funnel unmarried adults toward coupledom. It should be to treat them as complete people whose spiritual lives matter now.

Religious institutions have joined employers, policymakers and consumer brands in facing the same choice: Adapt to a society with more single adults, or keep building for a world that no longer exists.

Peter McGraw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Many churches, synagogues and mosques are built around families – and they’re struggling to respond to rising singles – https://theconversation.com/many-churches-synagogues-and-mosques-are-built-around-families-and-theyre-struggling-to-respond-to-rising-singles-278723

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mark Bartholomew, Professor of Law, University at Buffalo

Americans spend a remarkable amount of time shopping – more than on education, volunteering or even talking on the phone. But the way they shop is shifting dramatically, as major platforms and retailers are racing to automate commercial decision-making.

Artificial intelligence agents can already search for products, recommend options and even complete purchases on a consumer’s behalf. Yet many shoppers remain uneasy about handing over control. Although many consumers report using some AI assistance, most currently say they wouldn’t want an AI agent to autonomously complete a shopping transaction, according to a recent survey from the consultancy firm Bain & Company.

As scholars studying the intersection of law and technology, we have watched AI-assisted commerce expand rapidly. Our research finds that without updated legal measures, this shift toward automated commerce could quietly erode the economic, psychological and social benefits that people receive from shopping on their own terms.

Caveat emptor

Part of shoppers’ hesitation is about privacy. Many are unwilling to share sensitive personal or financial information with AI platforms. But more profoundly, people want to feel in control of their shopping choices. When users can’t understand the reasoning behind AI-driven product recommendations, their trust and satisfaction decline.

Shoppers are also reluctant to give away their autonomy. In one study involving people booking travel plans, participants deliberately chose trip options that were misaligned with their stated preferences once they were told their choices could be predicted – a way of reasserting independence.

Other experiments confirm that the more customers perceive their shopping choices being taken away from them, the more reluctant they are to accept AI purchasing assistance.

Although the technology is expected to get better, there have been some well-publicized missteps reported in financial and tech media. The Wall Street Journal wrote about an AI-powered vending machine that lost money and stocked itself with a live fish. The tech publication Wired cataloged design flaws, like an AI agent taking a full 45 seconds to add eggs to a customer’s shopping cart.

The business case for AI shopping

Consumers have good reason to be cautious. AI agents aren’t just designed to assist; they’re designed to influence. Research shows that these systems can shape preferences, steer choices, increase spending and even reduce the likelihood that consumers return products.

And companies are hyping these capabilities. The business platform Salesforce promotes AI agents that can “effortlessly upsell,”
while payments giant Mastercard reports that its AI assistant, Shopping Muse, generates 15% to 20% higher conversion rates than traditional search – that is, pushing shoppers from browsing to completing a purchase.

For companies, the appeal is obvious. From Amazon’s Rufus app and Walmart’s customer support to AI-enabled grocery carts, companies are rapidly integrating these tools into the shopping experience.

Assistants with names like Sparky and Ralph are being promoted as the future of retail, while technologists are calling on companies to prepare their brands for the era of agentic AI shopping.

The real concern is not that these systems might fail, but that they may succeed all too well.

The human side to shopping

AI shopping agents do offer considerable benefits.

For example, they can scan numerous products in seconds, compare prices across sellers, track discounts over time, sift through thousands of product reviews, and tailor recommendations to the user’s preferences and needs. They can even read through terms of service and privacy policies, helping consumers detect unfavorable fine print.

But there’s more at stake than these considerations.

While consumers have reason to focus on privacy and control, AI shopping agents carry some overlooked emotional risks, such as squashing the joy of anticipation. Psychologists have shown that the period between choosing a purchase and receiving it generates substantial happiness – sometimes more than the product or experience itself. We daydream about the vacation we booked, the outfit we ordered, the meal we planned. Automated buying threatens to drain this anticipatory pleasure.

This anticipation connects to another value: a sense of personal and ethical authorship. Even mundane shopping decisions allow people to exercise choice and express judgment. Many consumers deliberately buy fair-trade coffee, cruelty-free cosmetics or environmentally responsible products. The brands and products we choose, from Patagonia and Harley-Davidson to a Taylor Swift tour shirt, help shape who we are.

Shopping, moreover, has a communal dimension. We browse stores with friends, chat with salespeople and shop for the people we love. These everyday interactions contribute considerably to our well-being.

The same is true of gift-giving. Choosing a gift involves anticipating another person’s preferences, investing effort in the search and recognizing that the gesture matters as much as the object itself. When this process is outsourced to an autonomous system, the gift risks becoming a delivery rather than a meaningful gesture of attention and care.

Keeping human agency alive

AI shopping agents are likely to become part of everyday life, and the regulatory conversation is beginning to catch up, albeit unevenly.

Transparency has emerged as a central concern. Past experience with recommendation engines shows that undisclosed conflicts of interest are a real risk. The European Union has proposed a disclosure framework around automated decision-making, although its implementation was recently delayed. In Congress, U.S. lawmakers are considering bills to require companies to reveal how their AI models were trained.

So far, consumers seem to want to choose their own level of engagement – a signal that shopping, for many people, is more than just the efficient satisfaction of preferences. Perhaps the least-settled, yet most crucial question is whether AI shopping tools will be designed and regulated to serve users’ interests and human flourishing – or optimized, as so many digital tools before them, primarily for corporate profit.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What we lose when artificial intelligence does our shopping – https://theconversation.com/what-we-lose-when-artificial-intelligence-does-our-shopping-280251