Where's Waldo?

I've been skimming the various one-to-one computing initiatives because one-to-one computing is clearly on its way to Irvington.

The images are striking. Teachers are shown squatting behind or beside students (the one-to-one institute has a typical photo) or they are not shown at all.

Looking for teachers on one-to-one websites is like playing a game of Where's Waldo? without Waldo.

Good News in Minnesota

A small but growing number of schools in the Twin Cities metro are going in a good direction. Many are adopting Singapore's Primary Math or the Singapore based Math in Focus.

Independent schools are leading this newest wave. The Blake School went to Math in Focus in grades 1-5 and Primary Math's K program, in Fall 2013.  Minnehaha Academy is going to Math in Focus in Fall 2014 in K-5. Saint Paul Academy is going to Math in Focus in K-5 in Fall 2014. Mounds Park Academy is going to Singapore Math, some variety tbd, in K-5 in Fall 2014. Groves Academy is going to Primary Math in its lower school in Fall 2014. Parochial school Holy Family Academy went to Primary Math in Fall 2013. Providence Academy, a Catholic independent school, is going to Math in Focus in Fall 2014.

Some charters have already been on board, including Nova Classical Academy and Yinghua Academy.

Districts are switching as well. Eagan-Burnsville-Savage district and Robbinsdale district have moved to Math in Focus.

There is more work to do, but this is a great start.

Illinois Teacher of the Year

"Teachers are needed more than ever, but in a very different capacity. We are no longer providing answers. We're providing the questions and the tools to find the answers."
-- Josh Stumpenhorst, 2012 Illinois Teacher of the Year

Quoted by David Ginsburg in R.I.P. Sage on the Stage

Here's my question.

Are parents going to get wind of this any time soon?

This winter my district issued a newsletter extolling the wonders of flipped classrooms and announcing, twice on one page, that the district is 'student-centered.'

So there it is, in black-and-white: flipped classrooms are 'student-centered,' and the retiring curriculum director, who is responsible for the existence of flipped classrooms in my district (& is returning to her position as principle of the 4-5 school) is 'child-centered.'

If I had to guess, I'd say no more than a third of parents here would choose progressive education over traditional, given the choice. The number who believe teachers should not be sages on stages would be even smaller. Unfortunately, the only people in town who know what "student-centered" means--apart from school personnel--are Ed and me. Pretty much.

Will there come a point where parents know what the words their administrators use actually mean?

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.

Just imagine

Utopia can't wait



(As the parent of two autistic kids I've spent years of my life listening to Barney sing "Just Imagine...")

College Board takes leave of its senses

In a new type of advanced government class at Seattle’s Garfield High, the students rarely sit quietly taking notes while their teacher stands and lectures.

Instead, they debate each other. They write legislation. They run for president in mock elections and pretend they’re lawyers arguing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

They sometimes even stand up and holler, as Sanai Anang did recently, playing a member of a Virginia-based group that lobbies for strict immigration controls.

In a simulated public hearing, Anang, who loves to ham it up, jumped to his feet without being recognized and declared, in a mangled Southern accent, “Ee-lee-gals come over and take our jobs. They don’t bee-long here.”

His classmates and teacher Jerry Neufeld-Kaiser cracked up.

They are all part of a teaching experiment that began six years ago in the Bellevue School District when a handful of frustrated government teachers teamed up with University of Washington researchers and turned the usual Advanced Placement curriculum inside out.

[snip]

The [College Board] is watching the teaching experiment carefully, interested in its promising results. In 2012 the board invited project leaders to its A.P. conference to present their ideas to A.P. teachers from across the nation.

It’s important that students gain an in-depth understanding of a subject, said Auditi Chakravarty, an A.P. program vice president. “And that requires more than the passive sit-and-get kind of learning.”

Sit and get.

That's a new one on me.

And when did high-school kids making fun of southern accents (and southern people) become a hands-on learning activity?

We are a long way from debate club.

Cliff Mass has a good comment in the comments thread.

153 words, 3 days

I just spent 3 days writing 169 words.

Good thing I'm not a poet.

Princeton Concludes that America is basically an oligarchy.

Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It's Not a Democracy   
April 16, 2014

A new scientific study from Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page has finally put some science behind the recently popular argument that the United States isn't a democracy any more. And they've found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.

This is a familiar topic to those of us who oppose the Common Core Standards Initiative.  I've been scratching my head, literally for years, trying to understand how Common Core took hold, quietly and quickly, in America's representative republic.  In my state of Missouri, it became clear to me that the "initiative" capitalized fully on the top-down governance structure in our education policies and their implementation.  I believe that Missouri state statutes were violated in the adoption process, but unfortunately, there was no oversight mechanism in place to stop Common Core from the onset.

After researching the opposition to the Common Core Standards Initiative throughout the country for a number of years, there is no doubt in my mind that our American oligarchs were well aware that state legislatures were not equipped to investigate and address adoption of Common Core Standards in 2009-2010. 

(posted by concerned)

Numbers to 20 and the prevalence of making tens

Someone else commented that their impression was that the making tens stuff comes and goes relatively quickly in Singapore math as students learn their addition facts.

I have a couple of comments: first, to take off on what CassyT says, we are handicapped by our length of living. It may seem to the adult whose child has grown that this making tens stuff goes relatively quickly as their mathematical competence comes in. But that isn't true in the time frame of grade 1.

By the end of grade 1, PM has kids doing mental math to 100, so yes,big picture, the specific strategy of making tens doesn't last long. But to the first grader, it's what they do for nearly all year, constantly, repeatedly, and for weeks on end. Successful mastery of it will make the learning of addition and subtraction facts much easier, and students who have committed the answers to memory don't rely on them anymore. That process takes thousands of examples for many children.

Second comment: most people here used Singapore math primarily as a home or after-schooler. Often, the parent was mathematically talented and often, so was the student. Few of these people saw or read in detail about the pedagogy used in PM. Almost none *did* the main portion of that pedagogy: the concrete portion, skipping often to the textbook almost immediately. I will speak more about this in another post.

Here's the outline of the unit showing the prevalence of Making Tens:

Making tens for subtraction, PM standards ed.

As per post below, here are some small examples of how frequent and explicit the making ten strategies are in addition and subtraction in Primary Math, standards ed. This not not meant to be enough to explain these methods, just to show what an actual Teacher's Guide says.

This is a subtraction lesson, the hardest, where you can't just decrement the ones by the subtrahend.

No, it doesn't work this way

Peter Elbow on the composing process

I remember posting this before (or at least discussing it in Comments -- I think I recall gasstationwithoutpumps saying something about wives copy-editing their husbands' work) but I was just cleaning up some old drafts sitting in the queue and found this one, so here it is.

Again.

Still funny after all these years!

Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them

Fundraising flier from Wellesley.

Which pretty much rules out contributions from Wellesley grads who are: a) married to men and/or b) the mothers of boys.

Congratulations Steve H!

Steve had some fabulous news on Thursday!!!

(Has he posted?? In the comments somewhere??)

If he hasn't, I'm not telling!

No more fat versus small envelope surprises

T-minus seven hours and counting. It's like the owls in Harry Potter when the electronic acceptances (or rejections) come in. However, he already has an acceptance, a rejection, and a waitlist (polite rejection), and the acceptance comes with no aid. Thank you out-of-state universities! The scholarships they do give won't come until summer after you have committed. Had I known... So as of now, he isn't going to college next fall. Sooooo many students seem to be rejected or waitlisted so far this year. Students are having trouble getting into "likely" schools (unless they pay full price). Likely and reach school admittances seem to have little to do with academics at all levels, and some schools might reject you because they think they are a safety. If a school can reject you for whatever holistic reason they want, then students can't reliably know what "reach" means. What is the probability of being rejected at all of your schools? My son applied to 10, and I'm thinking that it wasn't enough.

Debbie at Ed Week!

I edited! (So I'm bemoaning a couple of too-long-for-onscreen-reading sentences...

Seeking the Top Score (Part I)
By Helen Yoshida on March 25, 2014 5:34 PM

From 1992 - David Klein and Jerry Rosen on fuzzy math and why we have it

The 1992 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools governs, to a considerable extent, the mathematics curriculum in California's public schools. It is a model of mediocrity. The Framework recommends that calculators be issued to kindergartners and used in all K-12 grades; it strongly discourages placing students by ability or achievement; it advocates that teachers do more "facilitating" and less "teaching;" it discourages testing, and promotes portfolios, "authentic assessment," and "holistic scoring rubrics;" it de-emphasizes basic skills and promotes "cooperative work" over individual responsibility. In short, it is the bible of "fuzzy math."

[snip]

Why is this kind of mediocrity promoted by so many education professors and education experts? We suggest that it is simply good intentions gone awry, resulting in institutionalized "liberal racism." Liberal education experts fear that minority students can't learn real math because of "cultural differences." They recognize that it would be preposterous to lower standards only for those students while maintaining high standards for other groups. Thus, the education experts lower standards for everyone, with "authentic assessment" replacing hard-core, standardized tests, and so-called "higher order thinking" supplanting basic skills.

The clearest refutation of the racism disguised by the Framework comes from the work of Jaime Escalante, the teacher who was immortalized in the movie, "Stand and Deliver." Mr. Escalante proved beyond any doubt that minority students from poor neighborhoods can do as well in mathematics as any other group. His methods were traditional and "non fuzzy."

HOW EXPERTS DUMB DOWN MATH EDUCATION
Los Angeles Daily News
May 31, 1996
HOW EXPERTS DUMB DOWN MATH EDUCATION
by David Klein and Jerry Rosen

Ten years ago, I would have rejected this explanation out of hand.

But today, as a classroom instructor teaching "basic" composition, I wonder.

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: college freshmen whose skills are far below where they need to be can be perfectly intelligent and 'smart' when you stick to spoken language.

They can be and they are.

In fact, it's not necessarily possible to tell which students have better skills and which poorer by listening to classroom discussion.

The Cambridge Pre-U courses are a case in point. I gather Cambridge Pre-U is being sold to districts (and to parents) as a rigorous replacement for AP courses that does not require grouping. All kids, at all levels of skill and ability, can take the same course and it's still advanced.

The reason that claim can be made is that the courses -- at least the one I witnessed -- primarily involve Googling (there is no assigned reading), creating group Powerpoints for presentation to the class, and class discussion. (The class I saw required one paper, written at the end of a year and a half of 'study.')

On the day I visited a Cambridge Pre-U class, one of the students strongly challenged a presentation four other students were giving. Every point the challenger made was dead-on.

Afterwards, the principal told us how wonderful the class is because you can't tell the AP kids apart from the non-AP kids.

Then he said proudly that the student who had done all the challenging was a kid who would never have been allowed to take a regular AP course in his school.

Naturally, that got my dander up. A talented student who hadn't been prepared by his school to take an AP course didn't seem like something a principal should be talking about with anything other than embarrassment and regret.

Today I feel a bit differently.

I certainly believe that the student I saw in action should have been prepared by his school to take one Advanced Placement course by graduation. He was headed for college, and that being the case, preparing him for AP was the school's job.

On the other hand, I now know that being smart and capable in speech does not mean being smart and capable in writing. Not even close.

I also know that writing really is thinking in any number of ways. Which means if you can't write....you're not the smartest person in the room.

So, back to Klein and Rosen. It now seems entirely plausible to me that, like me, a large contingent of education reformers has registered the fact that that underprivileged students fare better talking than writing (or doing math).

Education reformers don't have to have decided consciously to tackle the achievement gap by making math into a discussion subject in order to have done just that.

Allison on big data

12 months ago, you could raise funding for your startup overnight if you were doing "big data" for education (even though the data was quite paltry in size). The future hope of a Diamond-Age like mechanism to have kids worked in flipped classrooms at their ZPD ["zone of proximal development"] all without teachers needing to do anything to differentiate instruction was the holy grail.

6 months ago, the perfect storm of Anti-Common Core backlash, NSA domestic spying, and IRS abuse of 501c4 citizen groups meant Bog Data for Ed was in serious jeopardy.
I first realized this at a talk I was giving at a school that had chosen in May of 2013 to improve their math program: a goal of Singapore Primary Math in K-6, Shoseki in 7, Dolciani in 8, complete with real math training for all teachers and a FT BS math degreed teacher for 6-8. Oh, and state standrads-based standardized tests for the first time ever to measure student progress relative to their peers and state requirements.

The parents were on board in May. I gave the same talk in September, and the climate had changed.

Parents were so anti-data that they wanted no standardized test. Never mind that there was no way to measure student progress without a benchmark.

In order to make some basic determination about where these students were mathematically that first May, MSMI had devised a test based on state sample item. In September, I actually had a parent say to me "I know you took data on my child."

Another parent who stood by as I spoke to a family asking for how I could help their child get a bit of higher content in their math class said "I heard you ask that family for their child's name and grade."

The paranoia was rampant. The push to "opt out" was so great that we were in serious jeopardy of having any way of measuring if we'd done any good, let alone if kids had learn a year's math in a year's time.

Parents no longer trust their schools. This is perhaps the biggest legacy of the politicization of civic institutions. It is earned in many cases, but probably is worse in result than even lousy curricula. It will take a long long time to fix.

On the one hand, people habituate: the bad gets normal, as Temple always said. So this may blow over.

On the other, sans habituation almost at the level of mass amnesia, I don't see how this gets fixed.

I remember, very clearly, the moment a few years back when our district was suddenly required to weigh students, record their weights, and report the data to Albany.

I was furious. Chris had always struggled with his weight and was very sensitive about it (he lost 50 pounds last summer and has kept it off since!): it's not as if overweight children don't know they're overweight.

And it's not as if the grown-ups passing these regulations are universally thin themselves.

Needless to say, I protested, as I always do, and, needless to say, the administration and board blew me off, as the administration and board always do. High-school students would be weighed "with sensitivity," they said. And that was that. Everyone seemed to agree that weighing students and reporting the data to Albany was a bad idea, but admin & board follow regulations, good or bad. Except when they don't, of course.

The obstacle to habituation this time, as I see it: Americans believe that American schools are locally run.

Schools haven't been locally run in a very long time; superintendents speak in tongues, and bamboozled boards rubber stamp. The people vote, but the people don't get the schools they vote for.

Until now, though, parents busy with kids and jobs and volunteer work for the PTSA could lead their lives without knowing the schools aren't run by them, or that our overlords in Albany (or, even worse, Washington) don't give two figs for what we think, want, or hope.

With the constant, visible presence of Bill Gates and David Coleman and Arne Duncan and "Albany" and Washington D.C. in our lives, not-knowing has become a great deal more challenging.

Death by data, Part I've-lost-count

A compelling vision of the data-driven future of K-12 schooling? Or a chilling description of a brave new educational world in which even students' smallest actions are converted to digital data and used to build permanent "learner profiles"?

A new report from London- and New York City-based educational publishing powerhouse Pearson is likely to generate both reactions, depending on whom you ask.

Released this week, "Impacts of the Digital Ocean on Education" is intended as "an aspirational vision of what success might look like" in the rapidly changing world of "big" educational data and personalized learning.

Report authors Kristen DiCerbo and John Behrens of Pearson's Center for Digital Data, Analytics, and Adaptive Learning sketch out a vision in which end-of-year, summative tests of narrowly defined skills and content knowledge are replaced by a constant stream of digital data generated by "in vivo naturalistic tasks" that thoroughly blur the line between assessment and instruction.

Such data—generated from a variety of sources and activities, and focusing on students' social connections and interactions, rather than just their isolated individual experiences—would be constantly tracked and used to update profiles that follow each student across classrooms, grades, and schools, helping facilitate more customized learning experiences for each.

"The devices and digital environments with which we interact are designed to record and store experiences, thereby creating a slowly rising ocean of digital data," DiCerbo and Behrens write in the report. "We believe the ability to capture data from everyday formal and informal learning activity should fundamentally change how we think about education."

Just as big data and analytics have transformed finance, insurance, retail, and professional sports, the report says, they will change education. Until recently, the authors write, data collection and storage was expensive, limited, and isolated, and students' educational records were not portable, easy to share, or able to be quickly analyzed.

But the digital revolution has changed that reality, DiCerbo and Behrens contend. They argue that the abundance of increasingly fine-grained data available to educators "can help pinpoint the moments when learning occurs or a learner's approach to a problem changes" and then be used to help tailor suggestions or recommendations to help each student's learning continue.

'Ocean' of Digital Data to Reshape Education, Pearson Report Predicts
By Benjamin Herold on March 19, 2014 11:24 AM
A tidal wave of data could personalize learning