I updated "Failure of future learning"

Update here.

Retrieval practice, the bad news

I was thinking the incredible results people find with retrieval practice sounded too good to be true, and now I'm worried they are:

Failure of further learning: the limits of repeated study and retrieval practice

Wish to heck I could pull the study. All I've got for the moment is the abstract:

Abstract

Previous research has shown that little benefit is achieved through spaced study and recall of text passages after the first recall attempt, an effect that we term the failure‐of‐further‐learning. We hypothesized that the effect occurs because a situation model of the text's gist is formed when the text is first comprehended and is consolidated when recalled; it dominates later recall after verbatim memories of more recent study episodes have been lost. Experiments 1 and 2 attempted to circumvent the effect by varying the activities of participants and requiring interactive exploration. In both experiments, recall after four, weekly sessions showed little benefit beyond performance on the first recall. Experiment 3 interfered with the formation of an immediate situation model by introducing passages that were hard to comprehend without a title. Performance improved substantially across four sessions when titles were not supplied, but the standard effect was replicated when titles were given. Experiment 4 made verbatim memories available by incorporating all re‐presentations and tests into one session; as predicted, recall improved over successive tests.

Failure of further learning: Activities, structure, and meaning
Catherine O. Fritz,
Peter E. Morris,
Barbara Reid,
Roya Aghdassi,
Claire E. Naven

Unfortunately, I don't understand the final sentence in the abstract.

I see that "interactive exploration" didn't help students remember anything beyond what they recalled during their first retrieval practice. (Another nail in the coffin of hands-on, guide-on-the-side activities as the cure for limited remembering and understanding.)

I see that difficult reading passages without titles (!) helped. That finding is especially striking in light of the SQ3R approach to reading comprehension, which involves paying attention to titles. (SQ3R isn't necessarily incompatible with this finding, but still...)

It sounds like the last sentence refers to a complete, or near-complete, re-creation of the original learning-and-quizzing episode.

Did students re-read and quiz themselves, both in the same "session"?

I should go read the summary at Jung's Biology Blog.

I'm probably going to enjoy it:

In other experiments, Fritz et al. show that FOFL occurs even when ideas are presented as itemized lists on Powerpoint slides (why am I not surprised).

Update: OK, I should have read first, posted later.

The last sentence has to do with word-for-word memorization, which does improve with repeated retrieval practice.

As for the rest of it, in fact, recall does improve over time, but not by nearly as much as one would hope.

"Elaborative" study techniques -- underlining, annotating, diagramming (Make It Stick highly recommends elaboration) -- had no effect at all.

Difficult texts without titles offer no advantage I can see from the summary: students recalled less during their first retrieval practice and then, over time, continued to recall more until they reached the level of students who had read a clearly-written text with a title. Lots more pain, no gain.

At this point, I don't think this study tells me too much. The authors' theory - which I do find quite interesting - is that a student's mental model blocks further learning. Specifically, the student's mental model blocks learning of content that didn't make it into the model.

That strikes me as highly likely; I've experience a "gist" effect myself, and I think "gist effects" are a major problem in any kind of reform effort.

However, fields of study are different from a book you are trying to remember, which is what the students in this study were trying to do.

When you study a field, one of the things you are learning is the field's organization and categories.

New content gets slotted into pre-existing categories. That's why the more you know about a subject, the easier it is to learn new aspects of that subject. You have a mental 'gist' of the subject that is 'hungry' for new content, or at least wide-open to it.

Make It Stick - is 3 the magic number?

I'm reading Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel's Make It Stick in a mixed state of trepidation and fascination.

Trepidation because the wording is so incautious and, often, so imprecise that I think it's entirely possible we'll see Make It Stick touted as justification for bad teaching of every stripe.

e.g.: the preface spends a great deal of time denigrating "drill and kill," which the writers take to mean massed practice. Also, "easy" lessons are slammed on grounds that learning should be hard. (So drill and kill is too easy?) And at one point the text baldy avers, sans footnote, that "people do have multiple intelligences" while in the same breath asserting that there's no evidence learning styles have anything to do with anything. So instead of worrying about our learning styles we should all use all of our multiple intelligences all the time because you learn better when you "go wide," drawing on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or experience to the style you find most amenable.

What can any of this possibly mean?

Hard is good but hard drill-and-kill is bad .... learning styles are meaningless but we should deploy all of our "intelligences" all of the time (dancing in math? math-ing in dance?) ...

And does the exhortation to "go wide" mean multisensory programs are always to be preferred? I'm completely open to that possibility myself, but there's no listing for "multisensory" in the index, so who knows?

But that's the preface.

The first chapter, on retrieval practice, is riveting.

Retrieval practice, or the testing effect, refers to the finding that taking a test -- any kind of test, in-class or a quiz you give yourself -- increases your memory of the material you are trying to learn. In other words, taking a test or a quiz is a form of practice in which you practice remembering.

What's more, simple retrieval practice is probably superior to the kind of "active," "higher-order" learning students are purported to do via concept mapping. It also appears likely that retrieval practice produces knowledge that is readily transferred to new contexts and to problem solving.

In short, memorization makes you smart. (That's not how Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel put it.)

What is shocking to me is the tiny amount of retrieval practice the middle-school students in Roediger's studies needed in order to recall the material they had covered in class: just 3 "low-stakes" (ungraded) clicker quizzes in all. One quiz at the beginning of the class (on material they were supposed to have read the night before), one quiz at the end of the class (after the teacher's lecture on the same material) and one before the unit test a few weeks later. Students scored a full letter-grade higher on quizzed than on un-quizzed material.

When Roediger expanded the study to 8th-grade science, students scored an average of 92% on quizzed material, 79% on un-quizzed material. They still remembered the quizzed material eight  months later, for the final.

After 3 ungraded quizzes no one had to study for.

Is 3 the magic number?

Here are Rawson & Dunlosky on "How Much Is Enough?"

The literature on testing effects is vast but supports surprisingly few prescriptive conclusions for how to schedule practice to achieve both durable and efficient learning. Key limitations are that few studies have examined the effects of initial learning criterion or the effects of relearning, and no prior research has examined the combined effects of these 2 factors. Across 3 experiments, 533 students learned conceptual material via retrieval practice with restudy. Items were practiced until they were correctly recalled from 1 to 4 times during an initial learning session and were then practiced again to 1 correct recall in 1–5 subsequent relearning sessions (across experiments, more than 100,000 short-answer recall responses were collected and hand-scored). Durability was measured by cued recall and rate of relearning 1–4 months after practice, and efficiency was measured by total practice trials across sessions. A consistent qualitative pattern emerged: The effects of initial learning criterion and relearning were subadditive, such that the effects of initial learning criterion were strong prior to relearning but then diminished as relearning increased. Relearning had pronounced effects on long-term retention with a relatively minimal cost in terms of additional practice trials. On the basis of the overall patterns of durability and efficiency, our prescriptive conclusion for students is to practice recalling concepts to an initial criterion of 3 correct recalls and then to relearn them 3 times at widely spaced intervals.

The chapter also says that short answer and essay tests are probably superior to flash cards and multiple choice, but flash cards and multiple choice produce superior retention, too.

Clicker quizzes work.

I need a clicker.

"How to learn things automatically"

More on the Matrix-type memory downloads

Video here

As I understand it, in Shibata & c.'s experiment subjects learned 'X' not by seeing 'X' or being told about 'X' but instead by generating the brain activation pattern of a person who knows 'X' and who learned 'X' in the customary way.

To generate the brain activation pattern of a person who knows 'X', subjects reacted to 'neurofeedback': a green circle indicating how close the subject's activation pattern was to the pattern produced by people who know 'X.' Subjects were able to change their brain firing by changing the green circle, and once their brains were firing the way brains fire when brains know 'X,' the subjects knew 'X,' too.

Without ever having seen or been told about 'X.'

Wow.

For the record, I have experienced neurofeedback myself, and I can tell you that it works. Back in college, as the T.A. for a Learning and Memory course, I was once hooked up to electrodes and directed to produce alpha waves with my eyes open instead of closed (which is when we normally produce alpha waves). I was the demonstration project.

Obviously I had no idea how to produce an alpha wave on purpose, but after just a few minutes of neural feedback in the form of a tone that sounded every time my brain randomly produced an alpha wave, I was able to produce alpha waves intentionally.

I was able to turn the tone on and keep it on.

(Producing alpha waves with my eyes open, by the way, was not a particularly pleasant sensation. Producing alpha waves with my eyes closed was relaxing; producing alpha waves with my eyes open made me feel sleepy and semi-blind. Very strange.)

Ever since that day I've wondered why biofeedback, which is what it was called back then, never took off.

Articles & excerpts:

How to learn things automatically

From the study:

With an online-feedback method that uses decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals, we induced activity patterns only in early visual cortex corresponding to an orientation without stimulus presentation or participants’ awareness of what was to be learned.

[snip]

[W]e developed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) onlinefeedback method, by which activation patterns corresponding to the pattern evoked by the presentation of a real and specific target orientation stimulus were repeatedly induced without the participants’ knowledge of what is being learned and without external stimulus presentation [see supporting online materials (SOM) and methods]. The mere induction of the activation patterns resulted in significant behavioral performance improvement on the target stimulus orientation, but not on other orientations.

[snip]

Although previous fMRI online feedback training is a promising technique for influencing human behaviors (10–13), as in lesion or TMS studies, it could at best reveal influences of the entire extent of an area/region on learning/memory, which is a certain limitation for neuroscientific research (20). In contrast, the present decoded fMRI neurofeedback method induces highly selective activity patterns within a brain region, thus allowing the investigator to influence specific functions. It can “incept” a person to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized.
Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation by Kazuhisa Shibata,* Takeo Watanabe,*† Yuka Sasaki,‡ Mitsuo Kawato

Related:

In this study, we have shown that it is possible to directly condition neural activity using reward feedback derived from fMRI. Subjects were able to discriminate between two cues and respond to each by activating the appropriate region of their left sensorimotor cortex, while suppressing activity in a second region.
Direct Instrumental Conditioning of Neural Activity Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Derived Reward Feedback
Signe Bray,1 Shinsuke Shimojo,1,2 and John P. O’Doherty1,3

10 faulty notions

William L. Heward's list:

1. Structured curricula impede true learning.
2. Teaching discrete skills trivializes education and ignores the whole child.
3. Drill and practice limits students' deep understanding and dulls their creativity.
4. Teachers do not need to (and/or cannot,should not) measure student performance.
5. Students must be internally motivated to really learn.
6. Building students' self-esteem is a teacher's primary goal.
7. Teaching students with disabilities requires unending patience.
8. Every child learns differently.
9. Eclecticism is good.
10. A good teacher is a creative teacher.

Ten Faulty Notions About Teaching and Learning That Hinder the Effectiveness of Special Education
THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 36/NO. 4/2003/PP. 186-205

For what it's worth, and without having actually read the article (!), I agree strongly with Heward that numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, and 9 are myths.

I may agree strongly with numbers 5, 6, 7, and 10, too, once I know how Seward defines terms like "motivation" and "creative."

btw, one of my favorite books about education is Vicky Snyder's Myths and Misconceptions about Teaching: What Really Happens in the Classroom.

Explicit and implicit learning

Explicit (Declarative)	Implicit (Procedural)
facts and experiences	skills and habits, priming, classical conditioning
knowledge can be verbalized (conscious)	knowledge is inaccessible (unconscious)
tested by recall, recognition, cued recall (as in school)	evidenced via altered dispositions, preferences, judgements, behavior
one trial learning	often acquired gradually over multiple trials
requires effort and intention.....	acquired incidentally (without intention, attention, or awareness)
flexible knowledge, available to multiple response systems	inflexible knowledge, limited to response systems participating in original learning
not durable	durable
can form conjunctions between arbitrary stimuli (e.g., paired associate learning)	cannot learn conjunctions
“specialized to detect variance, i.e., what is different or unique about the events of a particular time and place” [Eichenbaum].....	“specialized for detecting invariance, i.e., for extracting what is common in stimulus environment” (i.e., regularities)
medial temporal lobe (hippocampus)	striatum (basal ganglia)
source: Learning and Memory

Various:

• I always remember the meaning of "declarative knowledge" by the sentence: "I declare that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States." Or: "I declare that I was born in Springfield, IL." Declarative knowledge is facts and factoids you can (consciously) declare.
• I think these two systems correspond to Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. (Take that with a grain of salt.)
• It's misleading to characterize implicit learning as strictly procedural. Category learning and probabilistic learning are both handled by the basal ganglia. It's the basal ganglia that allow you to learn that where there is smoke, there is fire.
• It's the hippocampus that allows you to learn the aphorism "Where there's smoke, there's fire."
• The basal ganglia-frontal circuit understands language. Procedural memory processes grammar; declarative memory learns vocabulary. 
• "One trial learning" is a bit misleading (in column one). Declarative knowledge can be acquired in one trial in a way that procedural knowledge (e.g.: how to hit a tennis ball) cannot. But retaining declarative knowledge over time requires spaced repetition and practice.
• Not sure about 'cannot learn conjunctions [8th row].' Offhand, it doesn't jibe with scenarios like the weather prediction task. update 8/1/2012: paired-associate learning at Cambridge Brain Sciences - vocabulary learning is a case of paired-associate learning
• Must determine the meaning of "limited to response systems participating in original learning."
• Alzheimer's affects the hippocampus.

And:

Seems to me constructivism mixes these two systems up.

The basal ganglia are built to look for a pattern naturally and unconsciously. You don't have to think about it, and you don't have to go to school to do it. But constructivists want students to expend a great deal of time and conscious effort figuring out the patterns and regularities in school subjects.

Meanwhile declarative knowledge has to be attended to and consciously acquired, but constructivists seem to want students to learn content knowledge more or less by osmosis. Osmosis is the basal ganglia's department. Ditto learning by doing.

Constructivists seem to want to make easy things hard and hard things easy.

Vicky on video

A couple of months ago, I exchanged emails with Vicky on the subject of Khan Academy and the flipped classroom:

We are not wired to sit down and watch [instructional videos] instead of all the other things we do at home. When you encounter a youtube video (on something that you're interested in!) that's over 6-7 minutes long, do you watch it? I usually don't, too long, maybe later, maybe never.

People just aren't wired to do the passive lecture thing at home.

And really, a lecture (in person) is NOT passive, even if the lecturer doesn't ask for feedback once. I've been to a lot of CLEs where you have your choice, live or taped. Live, you have to pay attention--everyone else is. Taped, you get up, go to the bathroom, check your mail, pull out a magazine...

What the "Learning Cultures" people have right, I think, is that learning is (often) a highly social activity.

What they have wrong is that the "social" part of the activity isn't sitting in a small group of novices trying to figure out what it is you're supposed to be learning.

The 'social' part of learning is about imitation: you do what the other people around you are doing, and learn what they are learning.

I think Albert Bandura was the person who pointed out that stimulus-response theory had its limitations.

To wit: If a baby antelope has to learn about lions through direct, stimulus-response contact with a lion, there won't be many baby antelopes.

Baby antelopes learn about lions by watching how their parents act around lions. They imitate.

Same deal with CLEs on tape versus live. If you're sitting in a room with a lot of other people who are paying attention, you pay attention, too.

With whole-class, teacher-led instruction, you have 20 peers or more to imitate and learn from.

With small group self-teaching, you have 4 other people who are just as confused as you are. In fact, confusion is a "Learning Cultures" selling point: "[unison reading] is an exciting opportunity for [students] because they get to bring their confusions to the table." [video]

If the Big Idea behind unison reading is that students 'get to bring their confusions to the table,' what are students in unison reading groups going to be imitating?

They're going to be imitating other students' confusions, not other students' learning.

"Confessions of an Instructional Leader"

excerpt from:
The Learning-Centered Principal by Richard DuFour
Educational Leadership - May 2002

When I entered the principalship a quarter century ago, the research on effective schools warned that without strong administrative leadership, the disparate elements of good schooling could be neither brought together nor kept together (Lezotte, 1997). I heeded the message and embraced my role as a strong leader with gusto. I was determined to rise above the mundane managerial tasks of the job and focus instead on instruction—I hoped to be an instructional leader. I asked teachers to submit their course syllabi and curriculum guides so that I could monitor what they were teaching. I collected weekly lesson plans to ensure that teachers were teaching the prescribed curriculum. I read voraciously about instructional strategies in different content areas and shared pertinent articles with staff members.

But my devotion to the clinical supervision process at the school was the single greatest illustration of my commitment to function as an instructional leader. I developed a three-part process that required me to be a student of good teaching and to help teachers become more reflective and insightful about their instruction.

During the pre-observation conference, I met with teachers individually and asked them to talk me through the lesson I would be observing in their classroom. I asked a series of questions, including What will you teach? How will you teach it? What instructional strategies will you use? What instructional materials will you use? During the classroom observation, I worked furiously to script as accurately as possible what the teacher said and did.

During the postobservation conference, the teacher and I reconstructed the lesson from my notes and his or her recollections. We looked for patterns or trends in what the teacher had said and done, and we discussed the relationship between those patterns and the lesson's objectives. Finally, I asked the teacher what he or she might change in the lesson before teaching it again. I then wrote a summary of the classroom observation and our postobservation discussion, offered recommendations for effective teaching strategies, and suggested ways in which the teacher might become more effective.

The observation process was time-consuming, but I was convinced that my focus on individual teachers and their instructional strategies was an effective use of my time. And the process was not without benefits. As a new pair of eyes in the classroom, I was able to help teachers become aware of unintended instructional or classroom management patterns. I could express my appreciation for the wonderful work that teachers were doing because I had witnessed it firsthand. I observed powerful instructional strategies and was able to share those strategies with other teachers. I learned a lot about what effective teaching looks like.

In Hot Pursuit of the Wrong Questions

Eventually, after years as a principal, I realized that even though my efforts had been well intentioned—and even though I had devoted countless hours each school year to those efforts—I had been focusing on the wrong questions. I had focused on the questions, What are the teachers teaching? and How can I help them to teach it more effectively? Instead, my efforts should have been driven by the questions, To what extent are the students learning the intended outcomes of each course? and What steps can I take to give both students and teachers the additional time and support they need to improve learning?

This shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning is more than semantics. When learning becomes the preoccupation of the school, when all the school's educators examine the efforts and initiatives of the school through the lens of their impact on learning, the structure and culture of the school begin to change in substantive ways. Principals foster this structural and cultural transformation when they shift their emphasis from helping individual teachers improve instruction to helping teams of teachers ensure that students achieve the intended outcomes of their schooling. More succinctly, teachers and students benefit when principals function as learning leaders rather than instructional leaders.

[snip]

By concentrating on teaching, the instructional leader of the past emphasized the inputs of the learning process. By concentrating on learning, today's school leaders shift both their own focus and that of the school community from inputs to outcomes and from intentions to results. Schools need principal leadership as much as ever. But only those who understand that the essence of their job is promoting student and teacher learning will be able to provide that leadership.

Professional learning communities: ALL POSTS

AND SEE:
ruining Lemov

the learning curve

re: C's and my apparent learning "spike," here are Frank E. Ritter and Lael J. Schooler on the learning curve:

Most tasks get faster with practice. This is not surprising because we have all seen this and perhaps know it in some intuitive sense. What is surprising is that the rate and shape of improvement is fairly common across tasks. Figure 1 shows this for a simple task plotted both on linear and log-log coordinates. The pattern is a rapid improvement followed by ever lesser improvements with further practice. Such negatively accelerated learning curves are typically described well by power functions, thus, learning is often said to follow the "power law of practice". Not shown on the graph, but occurring concurrently, is a decrease in variance in performance as the behavior reaches an apparent plateau on a linear plot. This plateau masks continuous small improvements with extensive practice that may only be visible on a log-log plot where months or years of practice can be seen. The longest measurements suggests that for some tasks improvement continues for over 100,000 trials.

[snip]

The power law of practice is ubiquitous. From short perceptual tasks to team-based longer term tasks of building ships, the breadth and length of human behavior, the rate that people improve with practice appears to follow a similar pattern. It has been seen in pressing buttons, reading inverted text, rolling cigars, generating geometry proofs and manufacturing machine tools (cited in Newell and Rosenbloom, 1981), performing mental arithmetic on both large and small tasks (Delaney, Reder, Staszewski, & Ritter, 1998), performing a scheduling task (Nerb, Ritter, & Krems, 1999), and writing books (Ohlsson, 1992).

[snip]

Averaging can mask important aspects of learning. If the tasks vary in difficulty, the resulting line will not appear as a smooth curve, but bounce around. Careful analysis can show that different amounts of transfer and learning are occurring on each task. For example, solving the problem 22x43 will be helped more by previously solving 22x44 than by solving 17x38 because there are more multiplications shared between them. Where sub-tasks are related but different, such as sending and receiving Morse code, the curves can be related but visibly different (Bryan & Harter, 1897).

[snip]

The learning curve has implications for learning in education and everyday life. It suggests that practice always helps improve performance, but that the most dramatic improvements happen first. Another implication is that with sufficient practice people can achieve comparable levels of performance. For example, extensive practice on mental arithmetic (Staszewski reported in Delaney et al., 1998) and on digit
memorization have turned average individuals into world class performers.

Draft version of:
Ritter, F. E., & Schooler, L. J. (2002). The learning curve. In International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences. 8602-8605. Amsterdam: Pergamon.

Don't know how this relates to the experience of having a sudden jump in learning....

the learning spike?

As I mentioned the other day, C. and I have suddenly jumped a good 50 points in our math scores on Blue Book tests.

On April 6, C. missed 7 and skipped 1 on a 20-item math section.

Four days later, on April 10, he finished all 8 questions in an 8-question multiple choice section and missed just 1. He got 7 of the 10 grid-ins right, missed 2, and skipped 1.

And: all three of the questions he missed were dumb mistakes. He knew how to do the problems, and did them quickly enough to finish the test.

I've had the same experience. Last summer I couldn't hope to finish a math section; yesterday I finished early enough to go back and check my bubbles.

At first I thought the higher scores were a fluke. But C. has now turned in the same performance on 5 math sections in a row, and for me that number is probably 6 or even 7.


the power spike of learning?

I'm surprised. I don't remember ever experiencing a sudden jump in learning like this, and my understanding of the "learning curve" is that it's a power curve (if that's the right term), not a right angle. You make more gains early on than you do later.

C. and I made practically no gains early on. While C and I weren't doing a lot of SAT practice fall semester, we have been working with some regularity since January, and in that time we've gotten nowhere. He's been stuck in the high 500s, and I've been stuck in the low 600s. (Very low.)

In fact, I've been stuck in the low 600s for a good two years now. Not that I was practicing SAT math per se -- I wasn't -- but I have been studying high school math off and on during that period, and I've seen no transfer to SAT math at all.

Yesterday, my score on all 3 sections of Test 2 in the College Board online course was 690. C.'s score was 640.

C. said, "It's like I jumped over a wall."

If you graphed our scores on an xy plane, it would be more like we leaped a tall building in a single bound. 

Now we have to leap another one.


arguing in French

The other night at dinner we were talking with our friends about whether they'd had this experience. One friend, an attorney, said tax law was her version of SAT math. She didn't get tax law at all until one day she did. 

Then Ed remembered learning French in France. He was doing what C. and I have been doing: grinding away, putting in the time, having nothing much to show for it. 

Then one day he was sitting around with some friends, and one of them made a provocative statement about something or other. Ed disagreed, an argument ensued, and at some point Ed realized he was arguing in French.

Arguing in a foreign language is the equivalent of an 800, I think.


10 tests

What does this mean, if anything?

Well, first of all, I have to see whether C. and I really are stable at this new level. I suspect we are, but we'll see.

Second: start early. I have no idea why it's taken us so long to experience this leap, but no one becomes an expert - or even a proficient novice (which is probably what we are now) - in a day.

Third: The Blue Book has 10 real SAT tests. C. and I have taken all of the math sections in all 10 tests, and I have taken all 3 math sections in Debbie Stier's January 2011 test.^* Our scores jumped somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 math sections taken over several months' time.

My current thinking on SAT prep is that students should do all 10 sample tests in the Blue Book at a minimum and should spread that work out over at least 4 months.

I'm also thinking it would be a good idea to do the 9 tests College Board offers online for $70.


reading and writing

I'm going to start paying attention to the reading and writing sections. We've done far fewer of those because C. is a very good reader and has been since he was little. He was one of those kids who taught himself to read. That's a funny story, which I know I've told before. C's Kindergarten teacher called us in for a parent-teacher meeting and told us C's handwriting indicated that he was at risk for a reading disability, which was true. Very bad handwriting is a flag.

Naturally, I figured: we've got two autistic kids so now we're going to have a dyslexic kid, too. Just our luck. 

Two weeks later, C. could read. All of a sudden. He went from not reading to reading.

(Another case of a power right angle?)

Back on topic: because C's SAT reading scores are routinely in the low 700s, there's not a lot to learn about SAT prep from observing him, I don't think. He misses or skips questions when he absolutely does not know a vocabulary word and can't figure it out from context. I told him yesterday he has to get back to memorizing his SAT vocabulary words, so the challenge will be remembering to nag him to do it.

("Have you studied your SAT words?" "No." "Do you know where your SAT flash cards are?" "I have an iPod app I use." "Fine, but do you know where the cards are?" "They're in the family room." etc.)

The writing multiple choice questions are more interesting; he misses more of them and presumably will benefit from more practice. (We've done very few writing sections.)

I'm going to start paying attention and will report back.


^* We had also re-taken all 3 sections of the first test in the Blue Book as well as 1 section of the first test in John Chung's book.