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It’s not just the teachers, stupid

April 16, 2012 by

Good instructional materials are as important for student learning as good teachers, yet there’s a “scandalous lack of information” about what schools are using and what’s most effective, concludes a new report from Brookings’ Brown Center,  Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness and the Common Core.

Students learn principally through interactions with people (teachers and peers) and instructional materials (textbooks, workbooks, instructional software, web-based content, homework, projects, quizzes, and tests). But education policymakers focus primarily on factors removed from those interactions, such as academic standards, teacher evaluation systems, and school accountability policies. It’s as if the medical profession worried about the administration of hospitals and patient insurance but paid no attention to the treatments that doctors give their patients.

Choosing better instructional materials “should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick,” compared to improving teacher quality, write Russ Whitehurst and Matthew Chingos. They urge states, the federal government, nonprofit groups and philanthropists to fund research on effectiveness. That would start by collecting data on what instructional materials schools are using.

 

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Smart phones, smarter students

April 13, 2012 by

As smart phones become common, smart instructors are helping students use their phones as study aids while they’re on the go.

Standardizing textbooks won’t save money and will undercut instructors’ autonomy, complain community college instructors in Texas.

 

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E-textbooks: What’s the rush?

April 4, 2012 by

Don’t rush to adopt e-textbooks, advises Daniel Willingham. It’s not clear they’re better, at least as currently produced, and students prefer traditional textbooks. “Some data indicate that reading electronic textbooks, although it leads to comparable comprehension, takes longer.”

Further, many publishers are not showing a lot of foresight in how they integrate video and other features in the electronic textbooks. . . . multimedia learning is more complex than one would think. Videos, illustrative simulations, hyperlinked definitions–all these can aid comprehension OR hurt comprehension, depending on sometimes subtle differences in how they are placed in the text, the specifics of the visuals, the individual abilities of readers, and so on.

What works for e-books — putting the same words in a new format — may not work for e-texts, Willingham writes. “Textbooks have different content, different structure, and they are read for different purposes.”

 

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Report: Textbooks boost Islam

March 23, 2012 by

Islam is presented positively — and inaccurately — in U.S. textbooks, charges a report by ACT! for America Education. It’s more “indoctrination than education,” says Brigitte Gabriel, the group’s president.

The report provides happy-think quotes from textbooks:

“The Quran granted women spiritual and social equality with men.”

ACT! responds:  The Quran does not grant “social equality” to women. “Muslim women cannot divorce except in limited circumstance—men can divorce at any time for any reason—and the testimony of one man equals that of two women in legal proceedings.”

“In Medina, Muhammad…fashioned an agreement that joined his own people with the Arabs and Jews…These groups accepted Muhammad as a political leader.”

Response:  The Jews did not accept Muhammad as a leader. He “expelled two of the Jewish tribes and destroyed the third, beheading the men and selling the women and children into slavery.”

“Shari’a law requires Muslim leaders to extend religious tolerance to Christians and Jews.”

Response: “Shari’a law imposes a litany of burdens and restrictions on Christians and Jews, both in their daily lives and in the practice of their religions.”

“In the early eighth century, Islam became popular in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent.”

Response: Islam spread through conquest.

In addition, textbooks spend many pages on European slave traders, ignoring the role of Islamic slave traders, the report charges.

Textbook writers hate controversy. I’m sure they accentuate the positive when writing about any religion — but not to this extent.

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An iPad for every student?

March 6, 2012 by

Don’t expect to see the all-iPad classroom any time soon — at least not in cash-strapped California, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

Apple has partnered with three big K-12 textbook publishers to provide digital textbooks that require the iPad.

 What puts educators off is not just the $499 sticker price — $475 if purchased in batches of 10 — for the basic iPad (add $35 for a case) It’s also the requirement that schools buy the textbook software as vouchers for individual students, who will download the electronic textbooks onto their own iTunes accounts.

Every year, the school district will have to buy more $14.99 textbooks that it will never own.

“Everybody’s going to go to open-source textbooks” — which are free predicts Ann Dunkin, technology director for the Palo Alto Unified School District. “We’ve already bought textbooks. We’ll use them until they fall apart.”

Of course, the iBook can do things a standard textbook can’t do, such as show things in three dimensions and link to videos — or to social media sites.  Most teachers at Palo Alto’s Gunn High don’t let students use their iPads, issued as a pilot project, reports the Mercury News. Too many students were checking out their Facebook page in class.

Despite the cachet of Apple, “districts shouldn’t get crazed by technology. They should figure out what they want, then work backward,” said Michael Horn of the Innosight Institute, a Mountain View think tank promoting “disruptive innovation” in education. “The iPad is getting a huge amount of attention, a lot of districts are spending money on it, but they haven’t thought out why.”

Archbishop Mitty High School, a Catholic school in San Jose, is renting iPads for all students and teachers next year after a two-year experiment.

Tim Wesmiller created an online textbook “as a dynamic mashup of content from the Library of Commerce, YouTube and Google maps” for his religious studies class.

Valerie Wuerz, 17, peers into her iPad, where an app called 7 Billion breaks down the global impact of overpopulation in text, slides, video and forums where students can share ideas and develop projects. She calls the iPad “a great resource, because textbooks are expensive and heavy to lug around.”

Down the hall, science teacher Kate Slevin’s class focuses on the subject of momentum.

“OK, guys,” she says. “Open your iPads.” They use a note-taking, audio-recording app called Notability that lets users write notes with their fingers over text on the screen. They can import a syllabus or a book chapter, create bullet outlines, and record the lecture in case they miss something.

Mitty is adding the cost of iPad rental to tuition bills, figuring that parents will save money in the long run by having to buy fewer expensive textbooks.

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New standards, tests may kill teacher ratings

March 3, 2012 by

New common standards, which will require new tests, may put the kibosh on value-added ratings of teachers, speculates WashPost columnist Jay Mathews.

California will switch to Common Core Standards in 2014, get new tests in 2015, but no new textbooks aligned with the new standards and tests until 2017, teacher Jerry Heverly learned at a conference organized by his union. The state can’t afford new books.

(Heverly) has no strong feelings about the current tests, but the big change in 2015 is akin to watching a rising tide approach sand castles carefully constructed on the beach.

Integrated Math I, II and III will replace the traditional algebra, geometry, advanced algebra sequence, Heverly was told.  (This is a blast from the past: California adopted integrated math — algebra, geometry and statistics are taught at each level — in 1992. After protests, districts won the right to choose a traditional or integrated approach. New math standards were adopted  five years later, which required a new exam. Integrated math went out of fashion.)

The new standards will require changes in other subjects, as well. And developers say the new tests will be quite different, stressing students’ ability to explain their thinking, not just right answers.  Mathews writes:

These new tests in nearly every state will delay, if not stop altogether, the national move toward rating teachers by student score improvements. School districts can’t do that when the tests change so radically. They might have to wait years to work out the kinks in the tests before using them to assess teachers.

Once the new tests are accepted as valid, it will take years of data on students’ progress to create valid value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.

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Be afraid of your child’s math textbook

February 26, 2012 by

Be afraid — be very afraid — of your child’s math book warns Annie Keeghan, who worked in educational publishing for 20 years, in Open Salon.

There may be a reason you can’t figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter’s math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you’re trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution. It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept your child hasn’t yet been introduced to, or that the math problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons.

After a series of mergers and buyouts, few educational publishers are left, she writes. Many are skimping on quality control to rush new books (especially math books) to market to beat the competition.

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Tuning up higher ed

February 10, 2012 by

What does a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering mean? What about an associate degree in nursing? Colleges and universities in seven states are “tuning” courses and degree programs, setting clear standards for what graduates in a specific discipline should know and be able to do.

E-textbooks aren’t much cheaper than traditional books. Apple’s iBook app will require students to use an iPad. To really slash rising textbook costs, college students need access to o-books — free or very cheap open-source learning materials — advocates argue.

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Apple offers iPad texbooks

January 19, 2012 by

Apple will sell e-textbooks designed to run on iPads.

Apple unveiled a new version of its iBooks digital book software that supports textbooks featuring quizzes, note-taking, study cards and other features like the ability to interact with a diagram of an ant.

The service will launch with a small number of high-school titles from McGraw-Hill Cos., Pearson PLC and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Textbooks for courses such as algebra 1, environmental science and biology will be available first, priced at $14.99 or less. Eventually, Apple said, it expects textbooks for almost every subject and grade level. The company also announced iBooks Author, to help developers create interactive titles.

In a media event held at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Apple executives said textbooks should be portable, searchable, easy to update and provide immediate feedback.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

It’s the curriculum, stupid

January 16, 2012 by

Education reform has ignored curriculum, writes Beverlee Jobrack, a retired editorial director for McGraw-Hill, in Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reforms.

Mediocrity is the norm, according to Jobrack, writes Erik Robelen in Ed Week‘s Curriculum Matters.

• School and district committees for curriculum selection filled with teachers and others who lack the appropriate expertise, motivation, and time to make the best choices;

• State textbook adoptions focused on whether curricular materials meet state standards, line by line, with little or no attention to whether they actually are of high quality and represent a coherent and well-designed instructional approach; and

• A radically consolidated publishing industry, driven by sales and marketing tems, that has “resulted in a dearth of customer choice, a reluctance to innovate, and huge [curricular] programs that are barely distinguishable from one another.”

Graphics win favor. Innovation does not. ”A group of very experienced teachers selects the textbook that is most like what they are already doing so they don’t have to change their lesson plans or procedures,” she writes.

Common standards won’t change teaching and learning “without real and meaningful changes in the curriculum,” Jobrack believes. The industry will resist change, she says in an interview.

“They’re not changing anything in the curriculum. They are simply relabeling. … If there’s anything missing in a textbook series, the publishers will simply add a paragraph or add a lesson to address that particular standard.”

When publishers produce an incoherent, standard-stuffed curriculum, it’s not surprising that teachers cherry-pick what they want to teach and ignore the rest.

 

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