selling snake oil

Now this takes audacity.

To the unsuspecting reader this article in the Cincinnati Recorder starts off innocently enough:

Elementary students in the Kings Local School District won't be learning arithmetic next year - they'll be learning mathematics.

According to Angie Thompson, Kings elementary curriculum specialist, there is a difference - and it can make a child more successful in math.

Can you hear the local tutors licking their chops? I swear they are behind all of this. Who else benefits as much?

Pity the elementary students of the Kings Local School District in Cincinnati--they're in store for a bumpy ride the next few years.

It's bad enough that they're going to lose arithmetic. But, they also going to be getting "mathematics" and you know what that's going to be:

The district is getting rid of arithmetic, which consists of memorization of math concepts and procedures for solving problems, in the elementary grades.

The replacement is mathematics, a more unprocedural, inquiry-based approach to math.

First they masterfully redefine "mathematics" but then they follow it up with a brutally honest description of the snake oil--"a more unprocedural, inquiry-based approach." New math now with 60% more poison.

Students will be asked to develop a deep understanding of number concepts and how numbers relate, so they can better understand how to solve problems, why they're solving the problem and be able to find their own method to reach the solution, Thompson said.

More honesty. Students aren't going to "develop a deep understanding of [math]." We know that's impossible. They are only going to be "asked to develop a deep understanding." Many will choose not to answer. We will call these kids unengaged slackers and label them "learning disabled."

The teachers' roles are no longer showing the procedure and having them practice over and over," she said.

"Teachers are being taught to teach in a way that's different from the way they were taught. The way they were taught was very fragmented. Nothing ever connected.

If they think that topics in the traditional curriculum didn't connect and were fragmented wait until they get a load of the amazingly incoherent and illogical structure of the wondrous inquiry-based math curriculum that'll soon be foisted upon them. Measuring shoe sizes one day, fun with tally marks the next, followed by each student deriving the commutative law from a pile of beans and twigs the next.

After building a solid foundation of number concepts, how numbers relate, place value and other number concepts, students will then use that knowledge to solve problems their own way and will be able to communicate their answers, Thompson said.

"As long as they can understand how they're solving it and can communicate how they're solving it, it's fine... This is what research is telling us we need to do."

Is it the research telling you to do it or the voices inside your head?

Who wants to start a Kumon center in Cincinnati?

fun with numbers

Janese Heavin writes in the Columbia Tribune:

Coutts said higher scores on assessment tests indicate the Investigations program works. Within two years of implementing the curriculum, Benton Elementary saw a 23 percent increase in the number of fourth-graders scoring proficient or above on the math portion of the Missouri Assessment Program, according to TERC’s 2004 assessment of its curriculum. Since all Columbia elementary classes began using the program in 2003, the number of fourth-graders scoring proficient or above has increased by 5.1 percent.

A little research shows us something different.

From 2002 to 2003 when Columbia school district implemented TERC, the number of students scoring proficient and advanced dropped by 4.9%

Since 2002, the number of 4th graders scoring advanced has decreased by 2.7%.

8th graders, the last group to go through Elementary school without being influenced by TERC are have approximately 9 percentage points more advanced math students than the 7th graders below them.

So what have I proven? Absolutely nothing, I just cherry picked numbers to contradict the supposed miraculous progress made by implementation of TERC.

Here is what we don't know.

How many teachers decided to supplement TERC after implementation?

How many more parents enrolled their students in tutoring programs after implementation of TERC?

How will Investigations affect students when they need mastery of basic math facts to survive in Algebra?

Who killed JFK?

All these questions are unknown, but who cares. As long as I have a lot of numbers and statistics to cherry pick choose from, I am sure that I can prove whatever I want. It's called math-iness.

P.S. Another School District bites the dust.

blogging frenzy

I have to admit, I am taking a small part of satisfaction at the blogging frenzy that I had a small part in starting off.

Dennis asked me if I knew of any teachers who had implemented DI.

It must of started him wondering, because he decided to ask his readers about it.

As I indicated earlier, it is hard to find anyone who is more critical of American education than KDerosa, and much of his criticism is centered around his belief that we are using the wrong teaching methods, especially at the elementary level. I would love to hear from any elementary school teachers who know more about Direct Instruction than I do. I'd especially like to hear from teachers who have used Direct Instruction after using other methods. I would also love to hear from teachers or administrators who know why so few elementary schools use this method. It is a mystery to me why I've heard so much about Direct Instruction from parents, like KDerosa and Rory, and so little about it from teachers.

After that it snowballed. Joanne wonders about the same thing as Dennis.

RedKudu notes that the education system is biased against DI. (I just discovered RedKudu, but it is an excellent blog).

This is how I was taught I should be suspicious of direct instruction styles, and why I believe many teachers may not be aware of what direct instruction is, especially if they're getting the same information I did. The teacher-centered classroom, I was told, is also sometimes called "direct instruction." Did the presenter have a grudge or some bias? Probably. Was the info misused, or misinterpreted at the meeting I attended? Possibly. But the school latched onto it, we were told to latch onto it, and two schools later, three grades higher, we're still being told this is the way to go even as grades slump, kids drop out, and the minimum skills expectations are lowered every year to make up for the achievement gap.

Liz over at I Speak of Dreams also wonders about DI.

Meanwhile, in the comments of Dennis and Joanne's original posts, debates take place, questions are asked, and everyone comes out a little bit smarter.

Some highlights from the Trenches:

The Guru KEdRosa says: "Here's my theory. The powers that be in education and schools of education are in ignore mode when it comes to DI. At first they tried criticising it and that didn't work so well because it has a large research base with thousands of students showing that it does work better than what the ed schools were peddling. So now they're resigned to just pretending it doesn't exist."

Amen Brother!

ElementaryHistoryTeacher notes that teachers secretly use "di" without permission.

Dennis starts to get pissed off: "After having done the work to earn a Masters a few years ago, and never hearing about Direct Instruction once during that process, while having some other stuff thrown at me that was pure crap, this makes me a little angry."

Ms. BlueBird notes the obvious: "So, if I'm to understand this correctly, for DI to work the class must be at the same level. Yet at the same time, ability grouping is frowned upon big time."

Ms Teacher from California Live Wire, finally acknowledges she is ultimately responsible for everything, and updates her readers on her experiences with DI.

Like a typical teacher she bemoans that it takes away from her creativity, but acknowledges:

So, overall I've been impressed with the growth I've seen in most of my students. Like I said before, some of them used to hate to read and now, they enjoy it. They understand what they are reading and are able to apply it. Much of my criticism has nothing to do with the program itself; rather it has to do with my District's reluctance to do what they promised to do.

Mean while over at Joannes:

Winston Smith says that his students are begging for explicit instruction.

Anna sums up the argument nicely.

I have used Reading Mastery, Engelman’s DI program for teaching reading. At first I did not like it because I did not enjoy teaching from a script. I became a convert when I saw how effectively it taught students how to read. I think sometimes we forget that things which are boring for teachers are exciting for little kids. It would have been more fun for me to work with storybooks and whole language, no question, but I had to remember that the lesson aim wasn’t to entertain me as a teacher — it was to teach students how to read.

Anna... if you read this... start blogging.

Larry Strauss thinks teachers should see themselves as artists. (Funny me. I thought teachers wanted to be considered professionals.)

Dave is all up on Larry Strauss and spouts the usual gobbly gook, and then manages to do the Vulcan mind meld on DI and Discovery Learning.

If DI includes all of rhese components and allows children to explore at times and tackle unstructured open-ended questions for which there is no clear blueprint for solution, then I applaud DI and I guess I’ve been using it all along. If ‘Discovery Learning’ includes all of these components, then I guess I’ve been using it all along and I applaud that too.

Larry seems to get a bit mixed up about what DI really is, but luckily Ken sets him straight.

Larry thanks Ken and asks some questions. Kens answers them.

Coincidentally, this blogosphere conversation happens at the same time as Zig Englemann releases the 5th chapter of his book on Project Follow Through. Zig describes how despite evidence to the contrary, the education establishment does everything in its power to maintain the status quo and repress DI. See D-EdReckoning for a review and summary.

Crossposted at my humble blog.

Update: Catherine is smack on the Project Follow Through conspiracy two posts below.

guess the ending

I defy anyone to guess the ending of this Reuters article on how math anxiety saps working memory. Here's the beginning:

Worrying about how you'll perform on a math test may actually contribute to a lower test score, U.S. researchers said on Saturday.

Math anxiety -- feelings of dread and fear and avoiding math -- can sap the brain's limited amount of working capacity, a resource needed to compute difficult math problems, said Mark Ashcroft, a psychologist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who studies the problem.

"It turns out that math anxiety occupies a person's working memory," said Ashcroft, who spoke on a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Now see if you can determine the spin Reuters puts on this seemingly reasonable story by the last three paragraphs before clicking on the link.

Perry preschool longitudinal study

As I understand it, there are two preschool programs that worked.

Head Start wasn't one of them.

Perry preschool was.

So was the Abecedarian Project.

This is interesting:

One large study that parents really should know about is Project Follow Through, completed in the 1970s. This was the largest educational study ever done, costing over $600 million, and covering 79,000 children in 180 communities. This project examined a variety of programs and educational philosophies to learn how to improve education of disadvantaged children in grades K-3. (It was launched in response to the observation that Head Start children were losing the advantages from Head Start by third grade.) Desired positive outcomes included basic skills, cognitive skills ("higher order thinking") and affective gains (self-esteem). Multiple programs were implemented over a 5-year period and the results were analyzed by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Abt Associates (Cambridge, MA). The various programs studied could be grouped into the three classes described above (Basic Skills, Cognitive-Conceptual, Affective-Cognitive).

source:
jefflindsay.com

Engelmann has a heartwrending scene early on in The War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse where he describes a last-ditch & doomed lobbying attempt to persuade the government to give Head Start an academic mission.

That didn't happen.

Instead Head Start addressed the "whole child," if I may borrow a well-used phrase from our middle school principal: his health needs, his social needs, his (bad) parent or parents and their needs, and all the rest.

In the summer of 1966, the Anti-Defamation League expressed interest in making a film showing the achievements of the disadvantaged black preschoolers we had been working with at the University of Illinois. Two years earlier, these kids had been selected for the project as four-year olds on the basis that they came from homes that were judged particularly disadvantaged and nearly all of them had older siblings in classes for the mentally retarded. These kids came to our school half-days as four-year-olds and as five-year-olds.

The school, The Bereiter-Engelmann preschool, received a lot of bad press. It was called a pressure cooker. Sociolinguists took shots at it on the grounds that we ostensibly did not understand "black English," or even know the difference between "thinking and speaking."

Despite our alleged mental deficiencies, we managed to teach these kids more and make them smarter than anyboy else had done before or after. That was our goal, particularly with this first flight of kids--to set the limits to show what could be done. We felt that this demonstration was particularly important because Headstart was looming in the wings, and it was clearly moving in a direction of being nothing more than a front for public health, not a serious educational project. We saw this as a great contradiction because disadvantaged kids were behind their middle class peers in skills and knowledge.

Kay Hymowitz picks up the story from there:

Head Start rested on the reasonable assumption that crucial to fighting poverty was to compensate for what was—or, more to the point, was not—happening at home. If poor kids arrived at school less prepared than their more well-to-do counterparts, well, then, give them more of what those other kids were getting: more stories, building blocks, and puzzles, more talk, more edifying adult attention—as well as good nutrition and health care....Poor kids would get a concentrated injection of middle-class child rearing in preschool, and they would start school ready to learn, to achieve at the same rate as their better-off peers, and eventually to live as well as they did.

Except it didn’t work out that way....from the first time they parsed the data, Head Start researchers found that while children sometimes enjoyed immediate gains in IQ and social competence, these improvements tended to fade by the time kids hit third grade. The failed promise of Head Start might best be captured by a visit I made several years ago to a Head Start program in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a cheerful and orderly place that would satisfy anyone’s definition of quality child care. As I was leaving, an administrator introduced me to a young woman of 21 or so just arriving with her four-year-old. “This is Sonia,” he said proudly. “She went here when she was a little girl.” Not only had Head Start failed to prevent a poor child from becoming a teen mother, but a Head Start administrator didn’t even seem to think that it was supposed to. For him—and, one suspects, for many teachers and parents—Head Start had come to be nothing more than a nice neighborhood preschool; it wasn’t meant to change lives, and it boasted with institutional pride of what elite private schools and colleges call legacies.

What's Holding Black Kids Back?
City Journal
Spring 2005

and see:

Bridging Gaps Early on in Oklahoma

Failing Grade: Siegfried Engelmann Developed an Amazingly Effective Form of Teaching. Why Don't You Know His Name?
Richard Nadler

more fun with Iowa

Not only is Christopher better at fraction computation than whole number computation, he also scored better at solving multi-step problems than single-step.

Ed says the entire message of the ITBS scores is that across the board he's got good conceptual knowledge, so-so skills.

Which is pretty much the mission of his school.

Understanding without know-how!

That's the ticket!

The ITBS scores also clarify the limits of learning at home. I had an email the other day from a dad who said that most of the learning kids do happens at home, anyway, so what I should do is just focus on getting Christopher into classes with the best teachers and forget about the tracking & gatekeeping & politics.

I didn't have a succinct answer to that, apart from "He's not going to learn physics at home."

The succinct answer is that a child living with educated parents will acquire quite a lot of knowledge at home through incidental learning.

What he will not acquire is skills.

If your dad just so happens to be a historian, you can learn a lot about history talking to him about geography and history every night before bed. (Christopher scored in the 99th percentile on social studies.)

You can't learn how to do decimal computation rapidly and accurately by hanging out with your folks.

Nor can you learn how to punctuate a sentence.

So - workbooks!

Anyone know of a good punctuation workbook? (percentile rank: 68)

p.s. We are redoubling our efforts on spelling. (percentile rank: 64)

Innumeracy in the NYT

Okrent has an editorial in the NYT.

the Kitchen Table Math effect

Ever since I met Carolyn and all the Commenters here I've lived in mortal fear of deficient fraction knowledge in my child.

So that's his highest score on the three computation subscales.

Fractions.

He's better on fractions than he is on whole numbers.

Another revelation: he's pretty terrible on decimals.

sheesh

ITBS & math in Irvington

So.

First piece of potentially useful information to emerge from the ITBS.

I have a kid who is scoring in the top 12th percentile of the entire country in math, but the school can't guarantee him a seat in the accelerated math class come fall.

They can move him down.

Moving him down would be no problem.

They can print finds subject matter difficult on his report card.

They can tell us "Christopher is the only child having a problem."

These things they can do.

They cannot "guarantee" him a seat in the accelerated (that's accelerated, not "Honors") course come fall.

Eighty-eighth percentile.

We'll be discussing this with the district.

We won't just be talking about our child, either. Everyone else gets the same treatment. We have dozens of very bright kids who are easily capable of learning this material not learning this material because they've moved to the non-accelerated course.

The "accelerated" middle school math class has been structured and taught as a wash-out course.

This is the course that's supposed to separate the men from the mice.

Teacher was instructed by her superiors to "hold down the number of As."

It's time for the district to offer norm-referenced standardized testing to families who are interested.

Let's find out where Irvington kids stand compared to their peers in the rest of the country.

Then the district needs to explain to parents and taxpayers why kids scoring at the top of the country cannot take algebra in 8th grade in Irvington, NY.


still in the game

The ITBS scores were incredibly good news.

I'm saving the reading score for its own separate post; that's how good it was.

But the math scores were a cause for joy.

After all this....after being tracked out of algebra-in-the-8th-grade to begin with, after failing 1/3 of his course in fourth grade, after suffering through nearly two years in a supremely bad "accelerated" course....he is scoring in the top 12th percentile of the country.

In fact, he may be higher than that, because he scored quite low on "probability & statistics," I presume because he hadn't studied the topic when he took the test. (I had him take every sub-test.)

We can fix the computation score (75th percentile).

And we'll carry on working on his math education, with the goal of moving him as far into the 90s as possible.

I think we can do it.

We have friends - more than a few - whose kids reached high school with SAT math scores in the 500s. One of these kids scored nearly a perfect 800 on verbal; after months of SAT tutoring I think he only made it to the low 600s on math. Months of tutoring. By the time you reach junior year in high school, it's just too late.

On the SAT the 88th percentile is a score of 660. (pdf file)

The ITBS has a less selective test-taking population than the SAT. I don't know how to adjust for that statistically.

Still.

What these scores tell me is that he's still in the game.

That's good news.

get your recentered SAT scores right here

Thanks to David I have a link that works.


2000 SAT I Mean Score Equivalents


Under the heading "how politics works," contributors and readers who are attempting to improve their schools should probably do screen grabs of this page for safekeeping. Very few parents know the SAT was recentered (I didn't), and the 70-point gap between the old Verbal scale and the new is a reality check.


Defining Literacy Downward
Diane Ravitch

Originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the SAT was designed in the 1920s as an inexpensive, objective predictor of students' ability to do college-level work. It was developed as a multiple-choice alternative to written examinations in subjects like literature, history, science, mathematics, and foreign languages. The old "college boards" were subject-matter examinations, individually graded by teachers and professors. By contrast, the SAT was an intelligence test, graded by machine. When World War II broke out in 1941, members of the College Board decided to adopt the multiple-choice SAT in place of the time-consuming written examinations.



Scores on the SAT range from 200 to 800, with a mean of 500. In 1963-64, average scores reached an all-time high of 478 on the verbal portion and 502 in mathematics. After that year, however, the scores dropped steadily until 1980, when they leveled off with verbal scores at 424 and the mathematical average at 466.



In 1977, a blue-ribbon panel commmissioned by the College concluded that the steep erosion in SAT scores was due in part to the diversification of students taking the test, but also to lowered expectations, an increase in nonacademic elective courses, the assignment of less homework, grade inflation, and a diminution of thoughtful reading and writing. It concluded that the score decline was significant but not irreversible.



In recent years, states and colleges have raised standards in order to improve academic achievement. In response, students are now taking more advanced courses in mathematics and the sciences. Because of higher enrollments in courses like algebra and geometry, SAT mathematics scores have improved. Verbal scores, however, have not. As of 1995, the SAT mathematics score had increased to 482 (and it was up another two point in 1996)--not very far from its historic high in 1963-64-- but the verbal scores scarcely budged, never rising above 431. (This is not, as some might think, caused by the increased diversity of test-takers, the verbal scores of non-Hispanic white students have not risen above 450 in twenty years).



There are three clear lessons to be drawn from the very different trend lines on the SAT's mathematics and verbal tests. First, increased numbers of racial and ethnic minorities in the college-going pool were not the primary cause of the long score decline. In fact, by 1995, the proportion of students who scored over 600 (21%) in mathematics was higher than it had ever been (and the proportion of students who scored over 600 on the verbal test was consistently small at only 7 percent) . Second, students who take advanced courses in mathematics do better on the SAT than those who do not; or, effort in school is rewarded with improved test scores. Third, for the past generation, the United States has had a huge and unaddressed problem in the teaching of the English language.



Why did verbal scores remain in the cellar? One need only read the abortive "national English standards" to see the incoherence and jargon that has invaded the field of "language arts" in recent years, apparently driving out concern for careful use of the English language. If English teachers believe that any usage is acceptable, then it is not surprising that students would perform poorly on a test that requires knowledge of the English language's grammar, structure, and vocabulary.



Faced with sharply dissimilar trends on the verbal and mathematical portions of the test, the College Board chose to "recenter" the SAT. By psychometric and statistical fiat] The Board made the de facto averages in mathematics and verbal tests similar and higher. Beginning in 1995, it arbitrarily declared that the abysmal verbal average in the 420s was now to be treated as a 500, while the respectable 479 on the mathematics test was also converted to a 500. The reasons, the College Board said, were entirely technical.



What has been the practical result of the "recentering"? The SAT has "normalized" poor performance, both in comparison with the past and in comparison between the verbal and mathematical tests. Using the old mean, the mathematics scores are consistently higher than the verbal scores over the past thirty years; now the once-embarrassing verbal scores appear to be substantially higher on the trend lines than mathematical scores until the past few years, which is the exact opposite of the truth.



The latest report shows that the new national verbal score is 505 and the mathematics score is 508. Now we are to believe that verbal performance is slightly above average when it was more than 70 points below average only last year. The difference between excellent performance in mathematics and truly terrible performance on the verbal test has been eliminated by nothing more than legerdemain (even though the College Board made the verbal test easier last year by banishing questions about antonyms). On the recentered scale, the verbal "average" was recomputed by the College Board as a phenomenal 530 in 1972 at the very time that scores were falling. Thus, recentering not only falsifies the quality of performance in the present but in the past as well.

The old average was a standard that American education aspired to meet; the new averages validate mediocrity. We now know what the average of today's student performance really is, but the SAT no longer serves as a standard toward which today's students may aspire. (This is comparable to the difference between NAEP's proficiency levels--which describe what students know and can do--and its achievement levels--which compares students' performance to what they ought to know and be able to do.)



Does it matter? The value of standards is that they cause us to exert effort. Whatever our line of work, we need performance standards that show what can be done with effort; without realistic and high expectations, we can't expect improved performance.

The official word here in Irvington, with SAT scores of 578 V & 602 M, is, "Our scores are outstanding."

That's it.

The middle school principal actually said, at a Board meeting, that the kids who are "struggling" are the only ones he's concerned about.

The district has no apparent goal of raising achievement levels for children scoring 3 or 4 on the state test, though lip service is paid to raising 3s to 4s.

Precious time and energy are directed toward the goal of keeping kids out of Honors courses, accelerated math courses, Earth-Science-in-the-8th-grade courses, etc.

I have never heard a single administrator talk about improving instruction so that more students can benefit from advanced work.

Not one, not ever.


SAT test
sample SAT test
get your recentered SAT scores right here

Dan Willingham on overlearning

Practice Makes Perfect - But Only If You Practice Beyond the Point of Perfection

I've just found this link again for Samantha.

Question: Just how much should students practice what they learn? On the one hand, it seems obvious that practice is important. After all, "practice makes perfect." On the other hand, it seems just as obvious that practicing the same material again and again would be boring for students. How much practice is the right amount?

Answer: It is difficult to overstate the value of practice. For a new skill to become automatic or for new knowledge to become long-lasting, sustained practice, beyond the point of mastery, is necessary. This column summarizes why practice is so important and reviews the different effects of intense short-term practice versus sustained, long-term practice.

That students would benefit from practice might be deemed unsurprising. After all, doesn’t practice make perfect? The unexpected finding from cognitive science is that practice does not make perfect. Practice until you are perfect and you will be perfect only briefly. What’s necessary is sustained practice. By sustained practice I mean regular, ongoing review or use of the target material (e.g., regularly using new calculating skills to solve increasingly more complex math problems, reflecting on recently-learned historical material as one studies a subsequent history unit, taking regular quizzes or tests that draw on material learned earlier in the year). This kind of practice past the point of mastery is necessary to meet any of these three important goals of instruction: acquiring facts and knowledge, learning skills, or becoming an expert.

We've just come to this realization with Christopher: he is nowhere near "procedural fluency" with any kind of computation beyond his math facts.

Ed had been complaining that Christopher "doesn't know his math facts," which was ticking me off since I was there for many, many Saxon Fast Facts sheets; he certainly does know his math facts.

Turns out Ed doesn't know what the phrase "math facts" means; he was thinking "math facts" means "computation."

(question: Is this man living in the same house I'm living in?)

I had subliminally noticed that Christopher is too slow on computation, but of course I'm intensely focused on just getting him through the course in one piece. (I'm defining "one piece" as "grade goes back up to a B.") Also, I'm trying to write books.

So: blind spot.

Yesterday we got the ITBS results and - bingo. He's strong on everything in math except computation. (The computation test was hard. Lots of problems; very short time to work.)

math: 88th percentile
computation: 75th percentile

Eighty-eighth down to 75th: that seems like a huge difference to me.

Ed says when he works with Christopher he's still having to write out a division problem in order to divide a number by 2.

Obviously I let him drop out of KUMON way too soon.

I'm going to fix this problem with edhelper. (Susan & instructivist both like that site, iirc.) The KUMON sheets were too much, and were getting far too expensive since it's the same price every week no matter how many worksheets you do.


how to remember something forever

This is serendipity. I've found the passage I was searching for the other day:

Although practice takes on a different character for the longer-term, it is no less important. Studies show that if material is studied for one semester or one year, it will be retained adequately for perhaps a year after the last practice (Semb, Ellis, & Araujo, 1993), but most of it will be forgotten by the end of three or four years in the absence of further practice. If material is studied for three or four years, however, the learning may be retained for as long as 50 years after the last practice (Bahrick, 1984; Bahrick & Hall, 1991). There is some forgetting over the first five years, but after that, forgetting stops and the remainder will not be forgotten even if it is not practiced again. Researchers have examined a large number of variables that potentially could account for why research subjects forgot or failed to forget material, and they concluded that the key variable in very long-term memory was practice.*(see below *) Exactly what knowledge will be retained over the long-term has not been examined in detail, but it is reasonable to suppose that it is the material that overlaps multiple courses of study: Students who study American history for four years will retain the facts and themes that came up again and again in their history courses.

* It is likely relevant that there is not only more practice in this case, but that the practice is distributed across time rather than concentrated in a few months (see former column, "Allocating Student Study Time.")

help desk: chemistry

My sister is studying animal science, and she failed chem last year. She's only got one more chance to retake it (next semester) before she fails the course. So she wants to get started on it so that she can pass this time round.

I thought there was a Saxon Chemistry (after all, there is a Saxon Physics) but there isn't. Julie really liked the fact that you're always practicing what you've done before, as while she is incredibly smart she has memory problems. So she can learn it all, but unless it is practiced to automaticy she's got less chance than an average learner, because she's got no memory.

So, what are some good books for her to use? I don't know how mathematically heavy the course is, but probably not very. But we need some materials that she can work on alone and learn enough chem to pass and hopefully enough to pass well.

Any ideas?

Samantha (aka Sam-is-mad)

know wonder learn

Apparently know-wonder-learn charts are hot stuff in the activating prior knowledge biz.

I like this one.

I like this one because of the 4th column. (The others all have 3.)

It's the unintended irony that appeals to me.

The unintended irony being that, really, when you come right down to it, nothing you're likely to research and write in middle school is going to make a whole lot of sense.

Especially not if your teacher makes you fill out a graphic organizer.

(Sorry. Just kidding.)

chart:
Maryland Department of Natural Resources

ITBS

best thing I ever did

really

more t/k

how to Google

good advice from a Commenter (David?):

if you put into google:

site:collegeboard.com SAT percentile

you find all sorts of goodies.

no kidding

comments feed

I looked at the javascript, and other than the fact that the variables were all declared on one line (which shouldn't have been a problem, or if it did cause a problem, should have caused the whole script to fail, and not the dates of the comments displayed to be screwed up), saw nothing. The script itself is on another site, like a blogroll from blogrolling.com. The code here merely sets variable values, like the number of comments to display and so forth.

Note that I changed the number of comments to display, and that worked fine. The problem isn't here.

So I went to the page for the widget and read through the comments. A number of people are having the same problem. No fix has been suggested (and since the script is on another site, I can't look at the code and see if anything there is wrong), but a couple of people have said that blogger has screwed up its comments feed. That could be what's going on. Without being able to look at the actual script code, though, that's just a guess.

help desk

Christopher did great on his ITBS (more later), but he's STILL amazingly low on measurement, comparatively speaking!

After all this time!

At this point I'm pretty sure I have no idea what "measurement" means as defined by mathematicians and the people who develop tests.

What does "measurement" on a 7th grade standardized test mean?

And how should I teach it?

Any resources?

How about the Key Curriculum books?


question: Does "measurement" mean geometry?

I'm thinking it may.

Simple geometry - perimeter, area, etc. Those concepts have been pushed way down in the state curriculum; they're no longer even covered in workbooks titled "Geometry."

I haven't done much reteaching of simple geometry; the accelerated course mostly assumes the kids just know it, whether they've been taught it or not....

Is that it?

Does "measurement" in grade 7 mean what I think of as "geometry"?


update

Just checked my Singapore Math books.

Huge amount of simple geometry, all labeled "measurement."

I think I'll start with 3B and go foward.

Meanwhile Saxon Algebra 1/2 is languishing unused.

grrr...

classic word problems

distance problems (pdf file)

finance problems (pdf file)

mixture problems (pdf file)

solving coin problems (pdf file)

work problems (pdf file)

source:
MOL Handouts

integrated math, yay or nay?

Linda Moran is looking into it. She cites this post by Matt Abe:

What is integrated ("reform") math? It is a way of teaching math in which traditionally separate subject areas, such as algebra and geometry, are integrated into one course of study; and it integrates math with non-math subjects and real-world experiences.

Strands!


whole stuff taught wholly

This is more constructivist Romanticism.

The Romantics believed in wholes (I gather).

Not in parts.

Nature is a whole....therefore reading is a whole & math is a whole etc.

That appears to be the jist (speaking as a person who knows nothing about intellectual history, of course).

Interdisciplinary this, that, and the other is the same idea.

The middle school model, planned for our middle school, was going to be all interdisciplinary teaching all the time.

That's constructivism: teach everything all the time in one big blob.

No component skills!

No starting small and building up!

No baby steps!

This is why we have, in our middle school, a Regents Earth science course that can be handled only by students scoring in the top 10% of the country on the CTBS.

The kids have to swallow the subject whole.

Which probably means they're coming into the course having mastered lots of background knowledge to begin with.

School never looks at that.

We look at "maturity."

"Mature" students can "conceptualize."

"Immature" students can't "conceptualize."

I wonder if this attitude has anything to do with our middle school being worried about not making AYP?

help desk

Does anyone know where I can find a ranking of SAT scores by percentile?

That is, I want to know percentile ranks for various scores.

Thanks.


update

David found a link!

SAT Percentile Ranks (pdf file)

Thank you!


next question

Does anyone have an idea of how scores on the ITBS correlate with scores on the SAT?