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Learning ‘myths’ — or not

February 17, 2012 By 59 Comments

Answer Sheet’s Valerie Strauss lists Seven misconceptions about how students learn, which she links to “standardized test-based public school reform.”  The list, which came from the Independent Curriculum Group web site, is based on “21st-century science,” Strauss alleges.

First comes the “myth” that “Basic Facts Come Before Deep Learning.”

This one translates roughly as, “Students must do the boring stuff before they can do the interesting stuff.” Or, “Students must memorize before they can be allowed to think.” In truth, students are most likely to achieve long-term mastery of basic facts in the context of engaging, student-directed learning.

I don’t think anyone argues that students shouldn’t think till they’ve memorized a bunch of facts. People do argue that students think more intelligently — more deeply or critically, if you prefer — if they have a base of knowledge.

Perhaps Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist, will take it up on his new blog.

Some of the other myths are straw men, such as “Rigorous Education Means a Teacher Talking” or  ”Covering It Means Teaching It”  or “A Quiet Classroom Means Good Learning.”

But it’s possible fogies think “Teaching to Student Interests Means Dumbing It Down” or “Acceleration Means Rigor.”  The devil is in the details.

“Traditional Schooling Prepares Students for Life” is her final myth/straw man.

Listening to teachers and studying for tests has little to do with life in the world of work. People in the work world create, manage, evaluate, communicate, and collaborate.

My traditional schooling in the mid-20th century  included a lot more than listening to teachers and studying for tests. I did a lot of reading, writing, discussing and even some collaborating. I learned workforce skills too, such as meeting deadlines, adapting to authority figures, dealing with boredom, typing. At more progressive schools, would I have spent more time “engaged” and less time reading under my desk?

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Is homework worth it? Kids say so

February 3, 2012 By

Jessica Lahey hates homework, but she assigns it — if it passes the Ben test, she writes on a New York Times parenting blog. “If an assignment is not worthy of my own (middle-school) son’s time, I’m dumping it. Based on a quick look at my assignment book from last year, about a quarter of my assignments won’t make the cut.”

Parents are complaining about “horrible homework” burdens, Lahey writes. In Race to Nowhere, which is very popular with affluent parents, filmmaker Vicki Abeles “claims that today’s untenable and increasing homework load drives students to cheating, mental illness and suicide.”

I asked my students whether, if homework were to completely disappear, they would be able achieve the same mastery of the material. The answer was a unanimous — if reluctant — “No.”

Most echoed my son Ben’s sentiments: “If I didn’t have homework, I don’t think I’d do very well. It’s practice for what we learn in school.” But, they all stressed, that’s only true of some homework.

Teachers should be careful not to assign busy work, Lahey writes. “Children need time to be quiet, play, read and imagine.”

 

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‘Adrift’ after college

January 27, 2012 By

People who didn’t learn much in college don’t do well as graduates, concludes a follow-up report by the authors of the controversial Academically Adrift study. Graduates who scored in the bottom quintile on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a test of thinking skills, were more likely to be unemployed and living with their parents, compared to graduates in the top quintile, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education in ‘Adrift’ in Adulthood.

Thirty-six percent of undergraduates showed no gains in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills,” concluded sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in the earlier study, which became a book. Arum and Roksa surveyed more than 900 of the “Adrift” students to see how they fared after college.

The students scoring in the bottom quintile were three times more likely than those in the top quintile to be unemployed (9.6 percent compared with 3.1 percent), twice as likely to be living at home with parents (35 percent compared with 18 percent), and significantly more likely to have amassed credit-card debt (51 percent compared with 37 percent).

Top-quintile students also were more likely to say they follow the news and discuss politics.

That suggests “the general higher-order skills” tested by the CLA are “real and meaningful,” Arum said.

Though business majors didn’t show much growth on the CLA — and didn’t spend much time studying in college — they were the most likely to find full-time jobs. ”Perhaps it’s going to catch up to them down the road,” Arum said.

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Willing to learn?

January 18, 2012 By

How can I make students see this? asks Ricochet.

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What’s really cool about Khan

December 13, 2011 By

Video lessons are the public face of Khan Academy, but the brains of the enterprise is the software that analyzes students’ learning, reports Inside Higher Ed.

Khan Academy’s explicit goal is to teach people fundamental concepts. But in the process, it hopes to break new ground by changing how educators think about teaching, how psychologists think about learning, how employers think about credentialing, and how everybody thinks about the price of a good education.

Registered users watch the videos, which provide short lessons, and solve problems. The exercise platform tracks their efforts.

 “If [a user is] logged in, then we have the entire history of every problem they’ve done, and how long it took them, and how they did,” says Ben Kamens, the lead developer at Khan Academy. “So whenever anybody does a problem, we see whether they got it right or wrong, how many tries it took them, what their guess was, what the problem was, how many hints they used, and how long they took between each hint.”

The Khan engineers are also working to tweak the exercise platform so it does not confuse genuine mastery with “pattern matching” — a method of problem-solving wherein a student mechanically rehashes the steps necessary to solve that type of problem without necessarily grasping, conceptually, what those steps represent.

The goal is to get students to remember how to solve the problem days, weeks and years later. Khan’s team is working on a plan to question students on old problems to analyze how well they “retain their command of different concepts, which in turn would enable them to look back at their original interactions with the concepts and try to spot variables that correlate with long-term retention.”

Sal Khan, who left finance to start his nonprofit, is a critic of buffet-style higher education. A college degree doesn’t guarantee the graduate has mastered his field, Khan said at the Future of State Universities conference in October.

College degrees are “issued by the same institution that is in charge of setting, and enforcing, the standards of that credential,” Khan later complained to Inside Higher Ed, comparing it to investment banks rating their own securities. Credential-granting institutions should be decoupled from teaching institutions, he argued.

In Khan’s ideal world, this would mean an independent third party that tests specific competencies and awards credentials corresponding to knowledge areas in which a student can demonstrate mastery — like the MCAT or standardized tests like a bar exam for calculus, physics, or computer science. “It would be much more useful, speaking as employer, if they show they’re just at the top of the charts on a certain skill set that we really want,” he said.

Reliable, respected certification would be great for independent learners, who may take a few classes on campus, take more classes online, read up on a subject and add on-the-job learning. If they’ve mastered the knowledge and skills, it doesn’t matter how they did it or how long it took.

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Schools need better parents

November 21, 2011 By

Schools need good teachers — and better parents, writes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement,” he writes.

Surprise!

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has data to back up common sense.  Students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school earned much higher test scores at age 15.

(Andres) Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”

Reading, telling stories and talking with children raise scores more than just playing, the study found.

Not all parental involvement affects academic performance to the same degree, agrees a study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education.

“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” (Patte) Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”

OK, we already knew this. What we don’t know — and should be trying to figure out — is how to help poorly educated parents support their children’s learning at home and in school.

 

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Redshirting doesn’t help kids

September 26, 2011 By

Delay Kindergarten at Your Child’s Peril, warn neuroscientists Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, authors of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College, in the New York Times.

Nine percent of children old enough to start kindergarten are “redshirted” each year by parents who want to give them an edge, they write. But the advantages usually fade by the end of elementary school.  “In high school, redshirted children are less motivated and perform less well.”

 In a large-scale study at 26 Canadian elementary schools, first graders who were young for their year made considerably more progress in reading and math than kindergartners who were old for their year (but just two months younger). In another large study, the youngest fifth-graders scored a little lower than their classmates, but five points higher in verbal I.Q., on average, than fourth-graders of the same age. In other words, school makes children smarter.

High achievers benefit from skipping a grade, they add. Acceleration has twice the effect on achievement as programs for the gifted.

Children do best when they’re challenged, but not overwhelmed.

Learning is maximized not by getting all the answers right, but by making errors and correcting them quickly. In this respect, children benefit from being close to the limits of their ability. Too low an error rate becomes boring, while too high an error rate is unrewarding. A delay in school entry may therefore still be justified if children are very far behind their peers, leaving a gap too broad for school to allow effective learning.

Young children’s brains are developing rapidly. For most, the best possible contest is the classroom, Wang and Aamodt believe. That’s especially true for disadvantaged children. The trend to move back the cutoff date for starting kindergarten is hurting children from low-income families, they write.

My husband skipped a grade in elementary school. My sister skipped in middle school.  Neither faced much of an error rate in the higher grade. My daughter’s half-sister skipped high school, starting college at 14. It was not an academic challenge.  Now 18, she’s started graduate school in classics.

 

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Researchers: Single-sex ed is ‘pseudoscience’

September 24, 2011 By

Single-sex education is based on “pseudoscience,” charge a team of neuroscience and child development experts in a Science article. There is “no empirical evidence” that segregating students by sex improves education, they argue. There’s plenty of  evidence it can increase gender stereotyping among students and adults.

The National Association for Single-Sex Public Education estimates more than 500 schools separate boys and girls for at least some classes, reports Inside School Research.

A new curriculum may yield a short-term gain because it’s evaluated by true believers, the scientists said.

“Novelty-based enthusiasm, sample bias, and anecdotes account for much of the glowing characterization of [single-sex] education in the media. Without blind assessment, randomized assignment to treatment or control experiences, and consideration of selection factors, judging the effectiveness of innovations is impossible.”

“There are some definite brain differences in boys and girls as children, but there are a lot of overlaps, and there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that they learn differently,” Claremont McKenna Psychology Professor Diane Halpern told Inside School Research. “The underlying biology of learning is the same.”

Students in single-sex classes don’t perform significantly better than those in mixed-gender classes, once the students’ prior performance and characteristics are taken into account, the critics said.

Update: If there’s no evidence single-sex education is any worse than mixed classes — and there isn’t — then let parents decide, responds Paul Peterson on Ed Next. Many parents like the idea for a variety of reasons, he writes.

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Does SpongeBob make kids stupid?

September 13, 2011 By

Watching nine minutes of SpongeBob Squarepants can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds, concludes a new study published in Pediatrics. Children who drew pictures or watched a slower-paced PBS cartoon, Caillou, outperformed SpongeBob watchers on tests of mental functions.

It’s not just SpongeBob. Watching other fast-paced cartoons makes it harder for young children to pay attention or learn immediately afterward, said Angeline Lillard, a University of Virginia psychology professor Angeline Lillard and lead author of the study.

The anti-Mozart effect?

 

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What does Bloom’s Taxonomy really say?

May 13, 2011 By

How many times have you heard people say that the idea of “higher-order thinking” comes from “Bloom’s Taxonomy”?

Well, in handbook 1 of the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, published in 1956, Benjamin Bloom and colleagues do not once use the phrase “higher-order thinking” or “higher-order learning.” The phrase “higher order” comes up only once, on page 10.

What’s more, the authors make clear that the more complex forms of thinking depend on the simpler kinds (such as factual knowledge). On page 16, they write:

One may take the Gestalt point of view that the complex behavior is more than the sum of the simpler behaviors, or one may view the complex behavior as being completely analyzable into simpler components. But either way, so long as the simpler behaviors may be viewed as components of the more complex behaviors, we can view the educational process as one of building on the simpler behavior.

Building on it? You mean we can’t just skip over it? Bloom and colleagues would say no. They devote considerable space to the discussion of knowledge–its justification and its different forms and levels. The justifications for teaching knowledge, according to the others, include the following (from pp. 32-34):

1. “Perhaps the most common justification,” they write, “is that with increase in knowledge or information there is a development of one’s own acquaintance with reality.” In other words, to know about the world, one has to learn something about it.

2. It is essential for all other purposes in education. “Problem solving or thinking cannot be carried on in a vacuum,” they write, “but must be based upon knowledge of some of the ‘realities.’”

3. Knowledge has status in our culture; it is often associated with maturity and intelligence.

4. Knowledge can often be taught and assessed simply.

They discuss each of these justifications at length. From there, they bring up questions of stable and changing knowledge; interrelated versus isolated facts; students’ immediate and future needs; and more. They describe three levels of knowledge (which they break down into subcategories): knowledge of specifics; knowledge of ways and means of dealing with specifics; and knowledge of the universals and abstractions in a field. Much of this knowledge involves and includes quite a bit of complex thought.

Nowhere do they imply that knowledge gets in the way of complex thinking or that the latter can do without the former. Of course, each new situation demands unforeseen combinations of knowledge and method; it is impossible to prepare a student perfectly for the future. “It is possible, however,” they write, “to help him acquire that knowledge which has been found most useful in the past, and to help him develop those intellectual abilities and skills which will enable him to adapt that knowledge to new situations.”

Bloom and his colleagues are not gods; the fact that the Taxonomy says this does not make it truth. But what’s clear here is that the Taxonomy does NOT encourage teachers to stop emphasizing knowledge. Those who claim that the knowledge emphasis belongs to the “industrial age” are welcome to say what they wish, but the Taxonomy, if given the floor, would likely disagree.

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