LD enrollment drops

After decades of what seemed to be an inexorable upward path, the number of students classified as learning-disabled declined from year to year over much of the past decade—a change in direction that is spurring debates among experts about the reasons why.

The percentage of 3- to 21-year-old students nationwide classified as having a “specific learning disability” dropped steadily from 6.1 percent in the 2000-01 school year to 5.2 percent in 2007-08, according to the most recent data available, which come from the U.S Department of Education’s 2009 Digest of Education Statistics. In numbers, that’s a drop from about 2.9 million to 2.6 million students.

A learning disability—a processing disorder that impairs learning but not a student’s overall cognitive ability—is the largest, by far, of the 13 disability classifications recognized by the main federal special education law. Forty percent of the approximately 6.6 million students covered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, fall into that category.

The decrease in the category goes hand in hand with a decrease in special education enrollment overall, though that change is not as large. The percentage of all students covered under the IDEA fell from a high of 13.8 percent in the 2004-05 school year to 13.4 percent in 2007-08—from about 6.7 million students to about 6.6 million students. Enrollment in the categories of emotional disturbance and mental retardation also went down, but students in those groups make up a far smaller slice of the IDEA pie. At the same time, though, enrollment of students classified as having an autism spectrum disorder or “other health impairment” rose.

[snip]

About 80 percent of children who are classified as learning-disabled get the label because they’re struggling to read. So, scholars say, the dropping numbers could be linked to improvements in reading instruction overall; the adoption of “response to intervention,” which is an instructional model intended to halt the emergence of reading problems; and a federally backed push toward early intervention with younger students before they’re labeled.

Learning-Disabled Enrollment Dips After Long Climb Up
by Christina A. Samuels
Education Week

words, diagrams, & math

Nick Rowe

12-week column on drawing

in the New York Times

Before I got sidetracked teaching myself math, I was learning to draw --- Loved it.

Also, I used to knit. I used to knit a lot. A friend of mine told me that knitting and math yield the same pleasures, and she turned out to be right. So I haven't knitted anything in 5 years, either.

I need a couple more lives besides just the one I've got.

safety first

Coincidentally, we were discussing the "security" system here in my district at the very moment Ed and I were trekking back and forth to the U.S. Open.

At the Open, the threat level appears to be permanently set on orange and security is always high. Security is so high that, when I presented my bag for inspection, the gal behind the table said, "Is that a Kindle? You can't bring that in."

What?

As Ed said, if you can take a Kindle on an airplane, which you can, you should be able to take a Kindle to the Open.

But no. I was supposed to hike two blocks -- uphill and in the sun -- back the way I came in 'til I got to a tent where I could pay another employee five bucks to check my Kindle.

Or, alternatively, I could walk a couple hundred yards back to the ladies' room, secrete my Kindle on my person, present my bag for inspection a second time, and enter the grounds without further ado. Which is what I did.

I told Ed, "Any security system that relies on terrorists to pay some guy five bucks to check his explosive device isn't a security system."

More anon.

lost in translation

caption: Fight fire with fire!
engrish.comhttp://www.engrish.com/
via: km-wordsmith

20 most common errors

from:
The St. Martin's Handbook

via:
Texas Tech University Writing Center

the 20 errors

Another rude awakening

Last year, my first-born was in enrolled in our local public school in second grade, and although he spent 6 or 7 hours there each day, he came home with tons of homework and a good deal more learning remaining. I started to think, “Why am I sending my kids to school, when the school sends them back to me to educate?” A friend later complained to me that when they gave her son a book report, it meant at least 5 hours of her own time working on it with him. Another parent told me how great the tutoring was at the chain store down the street from her. All this got me to thinking: if I’m ultimately in charge of my kids’ education, why do I feel so powerless? . . .

I assumed that the government knows best what, and how, to teach my kids. It’s an assumption I was raised with, one I never challenged, until now. Well, you know what they say about you when you assume…

“It’s always worse than you think?” Well, that’s what we often say around here.

Another parent gobsmacked by our public schools

Back to School: Part One

Testing in Basic Math in Community College

I finally got a copy of Teach Like a Champion. Since I teach at a community college, not everything applies. But I do teach a basic math class. And the book has inspired me to start taking data on my tests. This led me to analyze my tests to see what and how much I test on each topic.

At the end of the summer semester, I used the department written final to see if I could determine how much mastery my students had on each topic that I taught. Unfortunately, I don't have data from the beginning of the semester. But what I found wasn't very good: I measured the mastery on 15 topics by calculating a percent correct for each topic. For example, there were 5 problems on whole number operations and 11 students. This gives a total of 55 problems. Only 76% were answered correctly. If I had to take a guess, I would say that the class probably had over 70% mastery on whole number operations before they came into class. My highest % mastery was decimal operations, fraction operations and dimensional analysis with 93%, 85% and 93% mastery respectively. My lowest topics were divisibility tests and lowest common multiple and prime factorization. I then analyzed each incorrect answer to see what the most common errors were. 66% of the errors were concept errors: either the student didn't answer the question or did not use the correct mathematical technique. 19% of the errors were process error. In this category are errors like the following: a student knows that when multiplying mixed numbers, he must turn the mixed number into an improper fraction, but he does this incorrectly. 7% of the errors were mathematical. Another 8 % were divided evenly between not reducing fractions and sign errors.

So I'm teaching basic math again this semester, and I am trying to determine what I should be doing to ensure mastery. I am going to try curriculum based measurement. This is a technique I read about that is used in some elementary schools. You give students very short exams on a particular topic. Instead of counting the number of problems that are correct, you count the number of correct digits. For example, if a student has to add 99 and 49, there is a possibility of 3 correct digits, not one correct problem. You then do some number crunching and adjust your teaching accordingly. (I realize I'm gliding over this.)

It doesn't seem like any of the other instructors at my community college are collecting and analyzing data like this. If anyone has any links or resources on this topic, I would love to hear about it.

Another article (or two): Is it bad to test students frequently?

Two recent New York Times articles fly in the face of conventional pop psychology and education theory.

An article in last week's Science Section on study habits cites cognitive science research indicating that the act of taking a test can enhance learning:

The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.

As Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis puts it, “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it.”

Next we have a front page article in this weekend's Week in Review on Testing, the Chinese Way, written by Elisabeth Rosenthal, whose children spent a year at the International School of Beijing where "taking tests was as much a part of the rhythm of their school day as recess or listening to stories." Citing personal experience, Rosenthal argues that:

>Young children aren't necessarily aware that they are being "tested."

>Frequent tests give children important feedback about how they are doing.

>Frequent tests offer a more meaningful way to improve self-esteem than frequent praise does.

On this past point, Rosenthal cites Gregory J. Cizek, a professor of educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. “What’s best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the satisfaction of doing better."

Cizek's overall take on testing in schools? “Research has long shown that more frequent testing is beneficial to kids, but educators have resisted this finding:”

Rosenthal concludes on a particularly powerful note:

When testing is commonplace and the teachers are supportive — as my children’s were, for the most part — the tests felt like so many puzzles; not so much a judgment on your being, but an interesting challenge. It is a testament to the International School of Beijing — or to the malleability of childhood memory — that Andrew now says he did not realize that he was being tested. Will tests be like that in a national program, like Race to the Top?

When we moved back to New York City, my children, then 9 and 11, started at a progressive school with no real tests, no grades, not even auditions for the annual school musical. They didn’t last long. It turned out they had come to like the feedback of testing.

“How do I know if I get what’s going on in math class?” my daughter asked with obvious discomfort after a month. Primed with Beijing test-taking experience, they each soon tested into New York City’s academic public schools — where they have had tests aplenty and (probably not surprisingly) a high proportion of Asian classmates.

Articles you may have missed...

I did, while I was out of town.

From the New York Times:  Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

 But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite.

And from the Washington Post, a little opinion on:  School reform's meager results

Standard theories don't explain this meager progress. Too few teachers? Not really. From 1970 to 2008, the student population increased 8 percent and the number of teachers rose 61 percent. The student-teacher ratio has fallen sharply, from 27-to-1 in 1955 to 15-to-1 in 2007. Are teachers paid too little? Perhaps, but that's not obvious. In 2008, the average teacher earned $53,230; two full-time teachers married to each other and making average pay would belong in the richest 20 percent of households (2008 qualifying income: $100,240).

Enjoy.

Oxbridge

It is probably the most important day of your life. Your mind is racing and your hands are trembling at the thought of the erudite questions you are about to be asked, which will determine your future education, career and indeed the rest of your life. Then a man leans forward towards you and says: "Tell me about a banana."

other questions:

"Why isn't this chair acting as a wave?"(Chemistry, Oxford).

"Estimate the number of pebbles on Brighton Beach. If a pebble was given to each person would there be enough for the entire population?" (Natural sciences, Cambridge).

"If you leave the fridge turned on in a thermally isolated room, what happens to the room?" (Physics, Oxford).

Knowledge of a banana may be the key to Oxbridge entry
By Richard Garner
Monday, 6 September 2010

So You Want to Go to Oxbridge?: Tell Me About a Banana

Barry G on just-in-time learning

I think this is my favorite of Barry's articles -- he nails it.

Even worse than the book itself were the discussions in class that came out of it. One event in particular stands out. In a chapter that discussed the difference between "knowing" and "understanding," a chart presents examples of “Inauthentic versus Authentic Work.” In this chart “Practice decontextualized skills" is listed as inauthentic and "Interpret literature" as authentic. The black and white nature of the distinctions on the chart bothered me, so when the teacher asked if we had any comments, I said that calling certain practices “inauthentic” is not only pejorative but misleading. I asked the teacher “Do you really think that learning to read is an inauthentic skill?”

She replied that she didn’t really know about issues related to reading. Keeping it on the math level, I then referred to the chart's characterization of "Solve contrived problems" as inauthentic and “Solve ‘real world’ problems” as authentic and asked why the authors automatically assumed that a word problem that might be contrived didn’t involve “authentic” mathematical concepts. “Let’s move on,” she said.

[snip]

The authors’ approach to how one teaches for understanding is through a process that they call “backward design,” in which educators plan their courses, units and lessons by starting from what they want the end result to be. That is, what should students know, understand and be able to do? The planning process then entails working backwards from there, identifying the content that goes into this, the big ideas, the questions to be explored and so on.

As the authors state, backward planning is not a new idea. In fact, I was a bit confused as to why it is even needed, given that such work has essentially been done in the writing of the textbooks that cover the course material.... But this brings us to another axiom which I have heard repeated in education school, which states that textbooks are a resource and not a curriculum. The authors pick up on this as well and regard using the textbook for planning as a “sin," stating that “The textbook may very well provide an important resource but it should not constitute the syllabus.”

[snip]

In a paean to constructivism and the abandonment of textbooks, Tomlinson and McTighe dispose of the notion that sequence of topics and mastery of skills is important, calling such beliefs the “climbing the ladder” model of cognition. “Subscribers to this belief assume that students must learn the important facts before they can address the more abstract concepts of a subject,” the authors state, and then quote Lori Shepherd, a University of Colorado education professor to make their point:

“The notion that learning comes about by the accretion of little bits is outmoded learning theory. Current models of learning based on cognitive psychology contend that learners gain understanding when they construct their own knowledge and develop their own cognitive maps of the interconnections among facts and concepts.”

In fact, this is the crux of how they approach differentiated instruction. Sequence doesn’t matter. Each student constructs his or her own meaning at their own pace, by being immersed in what the authors term “contextualized grappling with ideas and processes.” What does this mean? There are many examples, but the prevalent pattern of instruction to emerge from the book seems to be one of giving students an assignment or problem which forces them to learn what they need to know in order to complete the task. Say it is quadratic equations. Rather than teach them the various methods of factoring first, with the attendant drills, they might start with a problem such as x^2 + 5x + 6 = 0. The teacher may then provide some activities that illustrate what factoring is, and then provide some exercises. The goal would be to factor the above equation into (x+3)(x+2) = 0 and, from there, lead the students to see that there are two values that satisfy the equation. This is what they mean by “contextualized grappling” as opposed to “decontextualized drill and practice.” It is a “just in time” approach to learning, (my choice of phrase, not theirs) in which the tools that students need to master are dictated by the problem itself by not burdening the student's mental inventory with “mind numbing” drills for mastery of a concept or skill until it is actually needed.

[snip]

They admit that there are times when direct instruction or ‘teaching by telling’ might work extremely well. “There is a need for balance between student construction of meaning and teacher guidance”, they proclaim. That direct instruction would work even better if topics were presented in a logical sequence is not the message of this particular book, however.

[snip]

“Just in time” approaches that work as a model for business inventory work just as well in education, they believe. The result is an approach that is like teaching someone to swim by throwing them in the deep end of a pool and telling them to swim to the other side. For the students who may already know a bit about swimming, they may choose to take that opportunity to learn the butterfly. The teacher might advise the weaker students to learn the breast stroke and provide the much needed direct instruction which they may now choose to learn. Or not.

Let’s move on.

rule of 20

Surprisingly, the vast majority of skills which we try to teach appear to begin the passage from acquisition to fluency-building at roughly the same point —when correct frequencies are somewhere between 14 and 20 per minute, and an accuracy of between 67% and 83% has been achieved. That rule seems to apply to very basic behaviors like pointing to named objects, steps taken while walking, and completing parts of a dressing sequence. The same transition point also seems to apply to very complex behaviors like reading, speaking, and writing digits to solve advanced mathematics problems. Indeed, the rule appears so universal that when Sokolove (note 9) examined circa 3300 programs of children in grades 1 through 6, the “rule of 20” predicted progress in more than 97% of the cases.

Decisions, Decisions
Owen Roberts White
University of Washington
Fall 2000

unfriendly worksheets, part 2

from A Guide to Learning English:

Rule number 2: Be aware of the difficulties of cultural references!

The following text is the first part of the introductory paragraph to a question about car speed:

"The police used to measure the speed of cars on the road by having two PCs some distance apart using a stopwatch. One of them would stand and wave as a car reached him. When the wave was seen by the second PC a stopwatch was started. As the car passed the second PC, the stopwatch was stopped."

The question itself read:

"Is the car exceeding the maximum speed limit in Britain?"

The ESL student who asked for my help with this question was puzzled how a personal computer could stand and wave. He also had no idea what the maximum speed limit is in Britain.

I would like to know how two personal computers can stand some distance apart and use a stopwatch.

unfriendly worksheets

source:
A Guide to Learning English

Pass/Fail

Examination dreams are reported to persist even into old age...
- Time magazine

You will never graduatefrom this dream
of blue books.
No matter how
you succeed awake,
asleep there is a test
waitinmg to be failed.
The dream beckons
with two dull pencils,
but you haven't even taken the course;
when you reach for a book--
it closes its door
in your face; when
you conjugate a verb--
it is in the wrong
language
Now the pillow becomes
a blank page. Turn it
to the cool side;
you will still smother
in all of the feathers
that have to be learned
by heart.

Linda Pastan
1975

in:
The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature
Michael Meyer

edu-fads at home

Found this comment on Jay Mathews' 2009 column about 21st century skills:

One of my friends holds advanced degrees in education, and she used cutting-edge methods to teach her own kids. What she forgot was the classic problem of the teacher being all fired up and motivated, and the student feeling left out of the picture. After all, fundamentals may be old-hat for teachers, but for students they're all new concepts. Her son was all but forgotten in her enthusiasm and fascination with the perpetually new. She has asked me a hundred times what I think is "wrong" with him (answer: "you").

She force-fed her son this and that fad over the years while he quietly turned off to learning. He recently dropped out of the marginal college he was able to squeak into with his middling test scores, yet it is obvious to anyone who talks with him for five minutes that he is very bright. I think he'll probably drop back in some day when he returns for his own reasons, but his mom's incessant buzz-speak about the latest pedagogical gewgaws of the day (I suspect 21st-century skills were part of it) really did a number on him. Poor kid.
1/5/2009 7:10:48

The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills
by Jay Mathews
Washington Post
Monday, January 5, 2009

I wonder if this boy was being homeschooled or afterschooled.

survey: charter support at 65%

Support for charter schools also continued to grow among the public, with 65 percent of respondents saying they would back new public charter schools in their community and 60 percent saying they would support “a large increase” in the number of such schools operating in the United States.

Fewer Americans Back Obama’s Education Programs
By Dakarai I. Aarons
Published Online: August 25, 2010

I'm glad to see this level of support for charters, but I do worry about charters killing off private and parochial schools.

Robert Pondiscio on curriculum vs value-added

When I think of the curriculum and teaching methods I was required to use in my classroom, the idea that my effectiveness might be dependent upon them makes me want to lie down with a damp wash cloth on my forehead. Manipulatives and discovery instead of basic arithmetic? Endlessly revising ”small moments” and teaching the writing process to 10-year olds instead of basic grammar? No time for even basic science, social studies because of district demands for ever larger math and literacy blocks? If it fails, it’s on me? Seriously?

Erin Johnson left a comment:

Robert, Why do you think that the LA Teachers Union (or the national unions) have not highlighted the issue of curricula?

I have recently been in contact with a LA teacher who was rated “more effective” in math by the LA Times. She states that her good rating was probably due to the fact that she “subversively” uses Saxon math instead of her district adopted program. Do ed reformers expect that teachers will subvert the curricula adoption process?

And here is Robert again:

I’m not sure curriculum reform is on anyone’s radar screen in a big way, including the unions. I used to regularly subvert…er…adapt my math curriculum to assure automaticity on basic functions. 5th graders counting on their fingers or multiplying with arrays is an offense to my sensibilities. I had less flexibility on ELA since there was lots of joint planning and execution involved. I’d go as far as saying my school’s ELA program (“It’s not a curriculum, Mr. Pondiscio, it’s a philosophy,” I can still hear the staff developer reminding me) is what turned me into a curriculum advocate.

Curriculum effects and value-added

cart, horse

from Casting Out Nines:

[I]t’s not clear to me that doing “algebra” is a better idea here than just doing straight-up subtraction.  What’s to be gained by saying “the whole is 8; one part is 3; the other part is ____” versus “What is 8 minus 3?” Again, maybe I’m out of touch, but subtraction is a fundamental skill that algebra builds upon; doing algebra before subtraction seems a little backwards to say the least. A kid who is comfortable with subtraction will be able to do these whole/part problems in a snap by using subtraction. A kid doing these “algebra” problems basically has to invent subtraction in order to do them, or else draw pictures of balloons and start counting. It feels like the curriculum is trying to be intentionally nontraditional here, just for the sake of doing things differently rather than because it works better.