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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.

 

Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , ,

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.

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

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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Confusion is educational, if temporary

April 22, 2011 By

Clarity may not be educational, writes Nate Kornell on Miller-McCune. People learn more when they have to work at it, research shows.

Researchers Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Erikka B. Vaughan convinced a group of high school teachers to change their PowerPoint fonts to hard-to-read fonts such as Monotype Corsiva and Hattenschweiler for one section, while using normal fonts for the other. Students taught with the less-clear fonts did better on exams than the control group.


Ugly fonts are an example of “desirable difficulties,” learning techniques that make us struggle but help us learn, Kornell writes.

Spacing study sessions also can be valuable. It gives students time to forget, struggle to remember and learn.

Taking tests is another desirable difficulty. People learn more when they’re asked to come up with information themselves rather than when they’re told the information. This may seem somewhat intuitive. But students even benefit from being asked test questions that they can’t answer (if they’re subsequently told the answer)! Again, it’s about the struggle.

While it’s OK for a teacher to confuse students, “leaving them confused is an absolutely terrible idea,” Kornell writes.

Confusion can lead to deeper understanding but only if it is followed by clarification. Reach a solution, or better yet, guide your students so they can reach it themselves.

Of course, not all difficulties inspire students to struggle and learn. Too much confusion is overwhelming. I think Kornell is talking about achievable challenges.

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Colleges must show students are learning

March 15, 2011 By

College leaders fear intrusive regulation unless they find ways to show students are learning.

Also on Community College Spotlight:  At a House subcommittee hearing, higher education leaders speak out against proposed Education Department regulations that define a credit hour by “seat time.”

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Defining degrees

January 28, 2011 By

What does a college degree mean in terms of student learning? So many hours of  seat time? The Lumina Foundation has developed a framework to determine the knowledge and skills students should demonstrate to earn an associate, bachelor’s or master’s degree. But will colleges use the Degree Qualifications Profile?

Also on Community College Spotlight:  Is a college degree worth the debt? It’s a humorous (and bilingual!) animated video.

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Does college make you smarter?

January 27, 2011 By

Does college make you smarter? Not so much, say respondents on the New York Times’ Room for Debate.

First there was the news that students in American universities study a lot less than they used to. Now we hear, in a recent book titled Academically Adrift, that 45 percent of the nation’s undergraduates learn very little in their first two years of college.

After four years of college, 36 percent of students showed no improvement in reasoning or writing skills, according to sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. Students majoring in humanities, social sciences, math and natural sciences learned more than students in pre-professional fields such as education, business and social work. In addition, students who took courses that required significant reading and writing were more likely to show learning gains.

Most college students want “a credential attesting to their employability, accompanied by as much fun as possible,” writes George Leef of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.  They didn’t work hard in high school and expect college to be just as easy.

Intellectually vapid courses and programs that will attract customers have proliferated. Professors who would rather devote their time to their own career-advancing research projects often strike an implicit deal with their students: don’t expect much of my time and I’ll keep the course easy and the grades high.

By making it easier for students to borrow money, the federal government is luring “more marginal students into college, further increasing the pressure to lower standards,” Leef adds.

It has been accurately said that college is the new high school; the way we are going, soon it will be the new middle school.

Students aren’t interested in learning, writes Gaye Tuchman, a sociology professor at the University of Connecticut. Nearly all want to know, “Will I be able to get a job?”

Today’s college students average 14 hours a week of study time compared to 24 hours a week for students in the 1960s, writes Philip Babcock, an economics professor at University of California at Santa Barbara.  Thinking requires more effort than most colleges require.

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To learn more, take a test

January 21, 2011 By

To learn more, don’t study. Take a test, advises the New York Times.  College students who read a passage and took a test on the content, remembered 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who studied the material or drew “concept maps,” according to research published online in Science,

“I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”

Students read about a scientific subject, such as how the digestive system works. One group read the text for five minutes, a second group studied the passage in four  five-minute sessions, a third group “arranged information from the passage into a kind of diagram, writing details and ideas in hand-drawn bubbles and linking the bubbles in an organized way.” The final group read the material and wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes; then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test.

A week later, the test takers aced a short-answer test on their ability to recall facts and draw logical conclusions. The other groups were more confident but less competent.

The second experiment focused only on concept mapping and retrieval practice testing, with each student doing an exercise using each method. In this initial phase, researchers reported, students who made diagrams while consulting the passage included more detail than students asked to recall what they had just read in an essay.

But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers. They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from memory.

Struggling to remember information helps people learn, psychologists say.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , ,
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