Susan Murabana’s travelling telescope began with a simple revelation（被暴露的真相）：We all have access to the sky. We all see the same moon. At the same time, she knew that access wasn't created equal. Telescopes have been around for 400 years, but most children in Kenya had never looked through one. She thought she could change that.

In 2014, she and her partner Mr. Owen bought a telescope and started showing kids around Kenya what the stars looked like up close. Today, their Travelling Telescope program has reached 200,000 kids. It teaches kids about space and rockets online, offering workshops on 3D modeling and astronomy to local schoolchildren. “It's never been about these kids becoming astronomers,” Mrs. Murabana says. “I believe astronomy is an opportunity for kids to spread interest in other fields of science such as engineering and math, and that it is only through science that we can understand the world we live in.”

Growing up in Nairobi, Mrs.Murabana never saw astronomy as a possible career path-or even a potential hobby. “I always loved math and science, but I wasn't exposed to astronomy,” she says. She studied economics in college, and then worked in marketing. But when she volunteered in science outreach programs where she met Owen, she saw the way astronomy seemed to make kids from all walks of life light up. Soon, she began teaching kids about space through programs like Hands-On Universe, and completing a master' s degree in astronomy herself.

At Hillcrest International Schools in Nairobi, preparatory head teacher Surbhi Vashisht says the telescope has hit it big among her students, 170 of whom have participated in Travelling Telescope workshops: looking at the stars, building rockets, and virtually exploring the landscape of Mars. “The children enjoy a lot in the sessions,” she writes in an email.

Around the world, girls do better than boys at school. These are the findings of a recent study that looked at the test results of 1.5 million 15-year-olds in 74 regions across the globe.

The level of gender equality in those regions made no difference to the results. 【小题1】 In only three regions — Colombia, Costa Rica and the Indian state Himachal Pradesh — was the trend reversed with boys doing better.

【小题2】 In the UK, girls outperform boys in exams that are taken at the age of 15 or 16, called GCSEs. According to education expert Ian Toone, this is down to the way girls and boys are brought up. “Boys are encouraged to be more active from an early age, whereas the restless movements of baby girls are pacified… Hence, girls develop the skill of sitting still for longer periods of time.【小题3】”

He goes on to say that boys often cluster together in larger groups than girls. 【小题4】 He says that GCSEs require a lot of solo work and are not viewed as 'cool' in a laddish culture.

This is backed up by research in the UK that says girls are out-performing boys at the age of five. 【小题5】 Should girls and boys be educated separately? Or do exams and school curricula need to be changed to better reflect boys' skills? These are the questions facing educators in many countries.

Recently, we’ve been talking about how we need better teachers. There’s no doubt that great teacher can help in a student’s learning but here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents.

Every three years, the organization called O.E.C.D. organizes exams as part of the Program for International Student Assessment(评估), or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds on their abilities to deal with real problems. America’s 15-year-olds have not done as well as students in Singapore, Finland and Shanghai in the PISA exams.

To better understand the reasons, the PISA team, starting with four countries in 2006, and then adding 14 more in 2009, went to the parents of 5,000 students. They interviewed them about how they raised their kids and then compared it with the test results for each of those years. Two weeks ago, the PISA team published the main finding of its study.

Fifteen-year-olds whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school get much higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents don’t often read with them or not at all. Parents’ concern for their children is strongly connected with better results in PISA.

According to Schleicher, the leader of the team, just asking your children how their school       day was and showing great interest in their learning can help a lot. It is something every   parent can do, no matter what their education level is.

The study found that getting parents concerned about their children’s learning at home is more powerful than parents attending parent-teacher meetings, volunteering in classrooms,     taking part in money-raising, and showing up at back-to-back nights.

To be sure, nothing can replace a good teacher. But let’s stop putting the whole duty on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make teaching more beneficial.