Why Teach?

Cathy Davidson / Digital Media and Learning Blog / 31 January 2011

There are as many reasons to teach as there are reasons to learn. One reason item-response testing (the twentieth-century’s dominant method of testing) is so deficient is that it tends to reduce what we teach to content (especially in the human, social, and natural sciences) or calculation (in the computational sciences). Think of the myriad ways of knowing, making, playing, imagining, and thinking that are not encompassed by content or calculation. This semester, I’ve moved over to highly experimental, collaborative, peer-led methods in my two undergraduate classes, “This Is Your Brain on the Internet,” comprised largely of students in the natural and social sciences, and “Twenty-First Century Literacies,” made up mostly of students in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

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Grading the Education President

Opinion Page / New York Times / 26 January 2011

On one issue, at least, there seemed to be rare agreement in Washington. President Obama and Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was flawed and needed revision. The legislation, a priority of President George W. Bush and enacted with bipartisan support, gave Washington more power to set national education standards.

On Tuesday night, in his State of the Union message, the president touted his Race to the Top standards instead, saying that they were developed by governors, not by Washington. “Race to the Top should be the approach we follow this year as we replace No Child Left Behind with a law that is more flexible and focused on what’s best for our kids,” he said in his address.

Do the education goals outlined by the president pass muster? What were the strong and weak parts of the president’s statements on education in his address?

To read the six opinion essays…

Prototyping Our Way to Reforming Education

by Heather Chaplin / Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning / 4 January 2011

As anyone in the field of education knows, change comes slowly. It isn’t easy to move the needle in an institution like compulsory education that has existed since the turn of the last century. Yet, some educators are beginning to test that assumption.

Kurt Squire, associate education professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to approach change differently—as a videogame designer would—by employing rapid prototyping of an idea and tons of user testing.

“I’m adverse to the model in education where there’s a group of people who develop this thing that is going to solve all your problems, that’s going to be your silver bullet,” Squire said. “I want to make education more participatory.”

In 2008, Squire, who is also a leader in the Games, Learning and Society initiative, a group of more than 50 faculty and students investigating game-based learning, at UW-Madison, started designing a curriculum that took advantage of mobile technology.

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Adding Up The Spending: Fiscal Disparities and Philanthropy Among New York City Charter Schools

by Bruce D. Baker and Richard Ferris / National Education Policy Center / 26 January 2011

In prominent Hollywood movies and even in some research studies, New York City (NYC) charter schools have been held up as unusually successful. This research brief presents a new study that analyzes the resources available to those charter schools, and it also looks at their performance on state standardized tests. The study reaches some surprising conclusions, some of which include the following:

• Spending by NYC charter schools varies widely, and these differences in spending per pupil appear to be driven primarily by differences in access to private donors. [...]

• Outcomes also vary widely. However, there is little or no relationship between spending and test score outcomes after including appropriate controls. [...]

• NYC charter schools serve, on average, far fewer students who are classified as English Learners or who are very poor. Both groups of students require more resources to teach than do other students, meaning that charters with lower enrollments of these more resource-intensive students can devote their funding to other purposes.

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Nature after Nurture?

by Meghan Rosen / 3 Quarks Daily / 24 January 2011

Last year, while doing our taxes, my husband and I were surprised to discover that we weren’t as poor as we thought we were. As lowly graduate students making a combined income of about $50,000 per year, I had assumed we were on the penny-pinching side of the national pay scale. But when I compared our income to the median income in the country, I found that we were sitting comfortably in the center. We had made it; we were officially smack-dab in the middle class. I thought it would feel different. [...]

This year, 16 million children will be born into poverty (1 out of every 5 children born in the US). [...] The cycle is vicious, and unrelenting. But is it possible to escape? How early is the influence of our environment engraved into the patterns of our development?

In 2003, a study from the University of Virginia showed that 7 year-old fraternal twins raised in families with low socioeconomic status had almost no variability in IQ. Why is this surprising? Fraternal twins are as genetically dissimilar as any other pair of non-twin siblings—their IQs should have been different.

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To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test

by Pam Belluck / New York Times / 20 January 2011

Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.

The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.

One of those methods — repeatedly studying the material — is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other — having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning — is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts.

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Our superficial scholars

by Heather Wilson / Washington Post / 23 January 2011

For most of the past 20 years I have served on selection committees for the Rhodes Scholarship. In general, the experience is an annual reminder of the tremendous promise of America’s next generation. We interview the best graduates of U.S. universities for one of the most prestigious honors that can be bestowed on young scholars.

I have, however, become increasingly concerned in recent years – not about the talent of the applicants but about the education American universities are providing. Even from America’s great liberal arts colleges, transcripts reflect an undergraduate specialization that would have been unthinkably narrow just a generation ago.

As a result, high-achieving students seem less able to grapple with issues that require them to think across disciplines or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why.

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Oakland school one of two in California honored for closing achievement gap

by Katy Murphy / Oakland Tribune / 18 January 2011

In public education, closing the “achievement gap” between students who are poor and middle class, black and white, English learners and native speakers has become a common goal — and a ubiquitous buzzword.

But Oakland’s Manzanita SEED Elementary School is doing it. And it’s doing it more swiftly than almost every other school in the state, by the federal government’s calculations.

Manzanita SEED, a small, Spanish-English immersion elementary school in the Fruitvale neighborhood, was one of two schools in California to win the 2010 National Title I Distinguished School Award for that reason.

About 85 percent of the school’s students come from low-income families and half enter kindergarten.

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U.S.Study Hopes to Increase School Efficiency

by Wendell Marsh (Reuters Life!) / Yahoo News / 19 January 2011

At a time when U.S. school districts face tighter budgets, schools may be able to get better results if they increase productivity, according to a new study.

But achieving an increase in education efficiency may require spending less on administration and more on teaching.

The Return on Educational Investment study, conducted by the Center for American Progress, assesses around 9,000 school districts across the nation in terms of student achievement as seen on reading and math proficiency tests versus spending.

It also evaluates to what degree improving efficiency would increase student achievement.

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Students not learning a lot in college, tracking study finds

by Eric Gorski (AP) / Denver Post / 18 January 2011

A new study answers questions about how much students actually learn in college — for many, not much — and has inflamed a debate about the value of an American higher education.

The research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.

One problem is that students just aren’t asked to do much, according to findings in a new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

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Bending and Stretching Classroom Lessons to Make Math Inspire

by Kenneth Chang / New York Times / 17 January 2011

[...] Ms. Hart — her given name is Victoria, but she has long since dropped the last six letters — has an audacious career ambition: She wants to make math cool.

She effused, “You’re thinking about it, because it’s awesome.”

She calls herself a full-time recreational mathemusician, an off-the-beaten-path choice with seemingly limited prospects. And for most of the two years since she graduated from Stony Brook University, life as a recreational mathemusician has indeed been a meager niche pursuit.

Then, in November, she posted on YouTube a video about doodling in math class, which married a distaste for the way math is taught in school with an exuberant exploration of math as art.

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As Wikipedia Turns 10, It Focuses on Ways to Improve Student Learning

by Tushar Rae / Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus / 14 January 2011

As Wikipedia hits its 10th year of operation, it is making efforts to involve academics more closely in its process. The latest is a new plan to build an “open educational resource platform” that will gather tools about teaching with Wikipedia in the classroom.

Rodney Dunican, education programs manager for Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent company, is part of the team working to build the platform, which he said will highlight the ways in which Wikipedia can be used to improve student learning.

“We don’t want them to cite Wikipedia,” he said of students. “What we really want them to do is understand how to use and critically evaluate the articles on Wikipedia and then learn how to contribute to make those articles better.”

To read more…

Data Mining Gets Traction in Education: Researchers Sift ‘Data Exhaust’ For Clues to Improve Learning

by Sarah D. Sparks / Education Week / 11 January 2011

The new and rapidly growing field of educational data mining is using the chaff from data collected through normal school activities to explore learning in more detail than ever, and researchers say the day when educators can make use of Amazon.com-like feedback on student learning behaviors may be closer than most people think.

Educational data mining uses some of the typical data included in state longitudinal databases, such as test scores and attendance, but researchers often spend more time analyzing ancillary data, such as student interactions in a chat log or the length of responses to homework assignments—information that researchers call “data exhaust.”

Analysis of massive databases isn’t new to fields like finance and physics, but it has started to gain traction in education only recently, with the first international conference on the subject held in 2008 and the first academic journal launched in 2009. Experts say such data mining allows faster and more fine-grained answers to education questions that ultimately might change the way students are tested and taught.

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School Tech: 6 Important Lessons From Maine’s Student Laptop Program

by Sarah Kessler / Mashup – Yahoo! News / 4 January 2011

When students at Skowhegan Area Middle School decided to undertake a study of the town’s history, they departed from traditional readings and paper writing. They instead made podcasts about historical landmarks that cumulatively produced a walking tour, recorded interviews with town elders and created websites for local farmers. Like the 225 other middle schools in Maine, every seventh and eighth grade student has been provided with a laptop computer, making projects like these accessible.

“It’s just a part of how we do business now, and in some ways we’re starting to take it for granted,” explains Michael Muir, who helped design the leadership development program for the initiative that brought one-to-one computing to Maine. “It’s very exciting because it’s now a part of the culture of teaching middle school in Maine … that all the kids have laptops and you teach with technology, and it’s exciting because it’s no longer the new thing.”

In 2002, the state of Maine signed a $37 million contract with Apple that provided laptops to 33,000 middle school students and 3,000 teachers. The contract was extended in 2006 and expanded in 2009 to include some high schools. All seventh graders, all eighth graders, and students at 55% of Maine’s high schools are currently issued laptops. At the launch of the initiative, the state made no apologies about how it had chosen to spend its one-time state surplus.

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Rethinking Advanced Placement

by Christopher Drew / New York Times / 7 January 2011

WHEN Joan Carlson started teaching high school biology more than 30 years ago, the Advanced Placement textbook was daunting enough, at 36 chapters and 870 pages. But as an explosion of research into cells and genes reshapes our sense of how life evolves, the flood of new material has been staggering. Mrs. Carlson’s A.P. class in Worcester, Mass., now confronts a book with 56 chapters and 1,400 pages, along with a profusion of animated videos and Web-based aids that supplement the text. [...]

As A.P. has proliferated, spreading to more than 30 subjects with 1.8 million students taking 3.2 million tests, the program has won praise for giving students an early chance at more challenging work. But many of the courses, particularly in the sciences and history, have also been criticized for overwhelming students with facts to memorize and then rushing through important topics. Students and educators alike say that biology, with 172,000 test-takers this year, is one of the worst offenders. [...]

The changes, which are to take effect in the 2012-13 school year, are part of a sweeping redesign of the entire A.P. program. Instead of just providing teachers with a list of points that need to be covered for the exams, the College Board will create these detailed standards for each subject and create new exams to match.

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