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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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Reading, math crowd out untested subjects

December 9, 2011 By

Language arts and math are crowding out untested subjects, such as art, music, foreign language and sometimes science, say 3rd-to-12th grade public school teachers surveyed by Common Core. The problem is greatest in elementary school.

  • Among those who say crowding out is taking place in their schools, virtually all (93%) believe that this is largely driven by state tests
  • 60% say in recent years there’s been more class time devoted to test-taking skills
  • Almost two out of three teachers (65%) say they’ve “had to skip important topics in [my] subject in order to cover the required curriculum”
  • 80% report that “more and more” of the time they should be spending on teaching students is spent on “paperwork and reporting requirements to meet state standards”

Most teachers say their school is offering more help to students struggling in math and language arts.  However, the strong focus on reading and math affects all students, not just those who need extra help, according to 77% of teachers.

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In defense of testing

November 26, 2011 By

Test-based accountability has done little to improve student performance and graduation exams have done harm by lowering graduation rates, concludes a National Research Council study. But the study distorted the evidence to confirm the panel’s anti-testing bias, writes Eric Hanushek in Grinding the Anti-Testing Ax on Education Next.

Test-based accountability hasn’t raised U.S. achievement to the same level as the highest-achieving countries worldwide, the report complains. That’s an “extraordinary” and unrealistic goal, writes Hanushek. The real question is whether it’s raised achievement significantly. He argues that it has, even by the report’s lowball estimate.

The report also claims graduation exams “decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement,” and urges states to repeal their requirements.

The best evidence suggests 2 percent of students drop out because they can’t pass a graduation exam, Hanushek writes.  People who can’t pass a 10th-grade exam by the end of 12th grade aren’t likely to be high earners if they’re handed a diploma. “The economic impact on these students will be much lower than the average difference between graduate and dropout.”

Perhaps the best argument against exit exams is simple: If a student shows up for school for 12-plus years and cannot pass a 10th-grade exam, it must be the school’s fault, and it would be unfair to hold the student responsible. This argument, interestingly enough, is the precise opposite of one of the primary arguments against the testing and accountability provisions of NCLB: We should not hold schools responsible for low achievement, because achievement is affected by student motivation and family background characteristics beyond the school’s control. Taken together, the arguments embedded in the committee’s two conclusions imply that nobody—not schools, not teachers, not even students themselves—bears responsibility for low student achievement.

If we really want to maximize high school graduation, we can eliminate teacher-given exams, lower course requirements and hand out diplomas after 10 or 11 years of schooling, Hanushek writes. Certainly, the NRC should tell states not to require more math or adopt college- and career-ready standards, since raising standards will lower graduation rates.

We didn’t advocate an end to testing, Boston University’s Kevin Lang, a member of the NRC panel, told the Huffington Post.

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Science teachers sour on hands-on labs

October 17, 2011 By

Hands-on science labs waste time, teachers at a Florida middle school tell the Palm Beach Post.

Greg Loumanis and colleagues at Osceola Creek Middle School replaced most labs with videos, Powerpoint lectures and demonstrations by the teacher. Test scores rose.

“If we take a day to do a lab, (the students) don’t see it as a learning day. They see it as a free day to mess around,” said Jay Mermelstein, another Osceola Creek science teacher who has minimized the number of labs in his classes. He said students quickly get off-topic with labs, so it often takes more time to teach a concept using a lab rather than other methods. He said that it’s already difficult fitting all the necessary curriculum into a semester or a school year.

The National Science Teachers Association recommends that labs make up 80 percent of middle-school science instruction.

“There’s little evidence to support hands-on learning,” said David Klahr, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He suggests a mix of hands-on activities, direct instruction and other techniques.

“Teachers like to use discovery methods, but if that’s all they do, the semester is over before you’ve gotten to all the topics,” Klahr said. “If you want to go back to discovery learning things in the classroom, you have to back off high-stakes tests and not have every topic covered.”

Linda Cronin Jones, an associate professor of science education at the University of Florida, blames testing for squeezing out labs. If teachers think their pay will be linked to their students’ test scores, they’ll spend their time on “low-level factual knowledge,” she said.

Loumanis said he recently showed students how liquids with different densities settle in layers in a glass. “Kids can see the lowest density rises. If the kids did the lab, it would take longer and it would be a mess.”

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Technology can personalize learning

October 6, 2011 By

Brookings is hosting a conference — available live online — on education technology.

Using Technology to Personalize Learning and Assess Students in Real-Time, a new Brookings study by Darrell West, looks at new ways to teach made possible by technology.

Imagine schools where students master vital skills and critical thinking in a personalized and collaborative manner, teachers assess pupils in real-time, and social media and digital libraries connect learners to a wide range of informational resources.  Teachers take on the role of coaches, students learn at their own pace, technology tracks student progress, and schools are judged based on the outcomes they produce.  Rather than be limited to six hours a day for half the year, this kind of education moves toward 24/7 engagement and learning full-time.

Technology alone won’t remake education, West writes.  Schools will need to change their organizational structure and rethink teaching and assessment.

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State policy OKs special ed ‘cheating’

September 16, 2011 By

Some testing modifications for special ed students and English Learners amount to cheating, writes Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, author of Fixing Special Education, on Thoughts on Public Education. “Providing a calculator for a student on a math computation test, having an instructor read a reading test to a student or giving extended time on a test that measures results under time pressure” will not produce valid scores.

Isn’t this, too, a form of  “cheating”? Certainly it cheats students out of knowing what they can and cannot do. Also it cheats schools, taxpayers, and parents from getting a valid measure of student achievement.

California reported higher scores on the state Academic Performance Index this year. But the API now includes scores from a much easier test given to increasing numbers of students with learning disabilities, Freedman writes.

 


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Poster boy

August 4, 2011 By

Via Intercepts, this photo from the Save Our Schools march was posted originally by Mark Simon of the Mooney Institute for Teacher and Union Leadership.

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Secret school success

July 23, 2011 By

We’re not all going to hell in a hand basket, argues Mike Petrilli on Flypaper. ”The last 15 years have seen tremendous progress for poor, minority, and low-achieving students — the very children that have been the focus of two decades of reform.”

 . . . For instance, between 1990 and 2009, black fourth graders made 35 points of progress on the mathematics NAEP exam; black eighth-graders gained 24 points. The corresponding numbers for Latino children were 28 and 21 points respectively. In reading, black fourth-graders gained 13 points between 1992 and 2009; black eighth graders gained 9 points. In the just-released geography exam, black fourth-grade students gained 28 points between 1994 and 2010; Latino fourth-graders gained 21 points. Similar progress was seen in history and civics.

This means low-income and minority students are “achieving one, two, and sometimes three grade levels higher than their counterparts in the early 1990s were,” Petrilli writes.

What happened? States that adopted accountability systems made big gains in the ’90s and “the stragglers made big progress once No Child Left Behind forced them to follow suit,” he argues.

NCLB doesn’t hold schools accountable for history, civics, and geography; neither do most states. But “poor and minority kids are stronger readers now, so they can better read the social studies exams and answer more questions correctly,” Petrilli theorizes.

The debate should be about trade-offs, he writes. Poor and minority kids are learning more, but their schools may be turning to scripted lessons and squeezing out art and music. Poor and minority kids are learning more, but principals and teachers have more incentive to cheat on tests. “Poor and minority kids are learning more, but their more affluent, higher-achieving peers are making fewer gains. Is it worth it?”

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NRC: Test science like reading, math

June 25, 2011 By

Science learning should be tested just like reading and math, urges a report by the National Research Council .

The report also urges policymakers to craft new assessments for all the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering, and math — that test students to probe for a deeper understanding of the material, and for states to hold their districts accountable to high standards for those subjects.

What’s tested gets taught.

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Compared to what?

June 14, 2011 By

The National Research Council report dissing test-based accountability is misleading, writes Eric Hanushek in Education Next. The report proclaims:

Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries.

The report actually finds evidence that suggests positive impacts for accountability, he writes. OK, it hasn’t turned us into Finland or South Korea. But it’s helped.

Why would we discard an effective program just because it falls short of our hopes of producing the world’s best education?

. . . Nowhere does the report indicate an alternative educational program that leads to as large an improvement in overall U.S. achievement as accountability. Nowhere does the report suggest any single program or package of reforms that would close the achievement gap with the highest performing countries. Nowhere does the report really make the case that alternative reform packages should not include an accountability component.

The report dismisses estimated achievement gains of 0.08 standard deviations as insignificant. Even very small gains have very big pay-offs, Hanushek writes. “If the future follows the patterns we have seen historically, the present value of achievement gains of this magnitude would be over $13 trillion.”

“Existing but imperfect accountability schemes could be modified in order to improve on the first generation of plans,” Hanushek adds, but the NRC panel ignored this possibility.

Test scores should be audited independently to prevent cheating, writes Herbert Walberg in the Washington Times.

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