autonomy, mastery, purpose

Dan Dempsey just left a link to this fantastic YouTube on the Irvington Parents Forum ---

effect size

Dan Dempsey says:

By Golly .. the insanity just will not stop .. another educational pack of lemmings is ready to follow the "Whole Language" rodents into the sea of ignorance.

Hattie Visible Learning effect sizes:

Phonics = 0.60
Whole Language = 0.06
(1/10 as effective and good for a decade of educational malpractice)

So now we are off to the decade of the twins I trust: "Problem & Project Based Learning"

Nope we don't want any of that effective stuff like Worked Examples, Direct Instruction, or Mastery learning.

Not when Problem Based Learning = 0.15

You know what?

I'm going to start talking about effect size at school board meetings.

Something new and different.

Dan Dempsey

in a comment on Allison's post on problem solving, Dan writes:

From Bertrand Russell or was it Alfred North Whitehead...."the goal is to have no problems only exercises".

By expanding long term memory one can turn potential problems into exercises.

It seems that the goal of many pushing the discovery/inquiry approach is to have no exercises but only problems. ^*

I am still in shock from Dr. Ruth Parker's powerpoint given at NCTM national that the Standard Algorithm always harms conceptual understanding, which seems to be a recipe for lots of problems.

The person most everyone would like to hire is the one that has so much extensive background knowledge that most everything is an exercise.

Brilliant!

Here's Ken on the subject of struggle:

• compare & contrast

• to struggle or not to struggle

^* students must struggle