IQs up, verbal intelligence down

Andrew Gelman on Science, Nature, & Nature Neuroscience:

As Seth points out, the authors write that many of the mistakes appear in "such prominent journals as Science, Nature, and Nature Neuroscience." My impression is that these hypercompetitive journals have a pretty random reviewing process, at least for articles outside of their core competence of laboratory biology. Publication in such journals is taken much more of a seal of approval than it should be, I think. The authors of this article are doing a useful service by pointing this out.

Suspiciously high correlations in brain imaging studies

Coming across this observation was a case of synchronicity, because I had just yesterday put the finishing touches on a citizen's op ed re: technology vs critical thinking, which I was inspired to write after skimming an article in SCIENCE.

Politically speaking, the article, Technology and Informal Education: What Is Taught, What Is Learned, serves my purposes (my purposes being: I'd like my district to stop buying SMART Boards and start assigning lots of good books for homework). But even on a skim-through, I found problems.

Greenfield's most interesting claim, which I believe until I learn otherwise, concerns the famous rise in IQ scores:

In the midst of much press about the decreasing use of the print medium and failing schools, a countervailing trend may come as a surprise: the continuing global rise in IQ performance over more than 100 years. This rise, known as the Flynn effect, is concentrated in nonverbal IQ performance (mainly tested through visual tests) but has also occurred, albeit to a lesser extent, in verbal IQ (1-5).... Increasing levels of formal education and urbanization were particularly important [as causes of the rise in IQ] in the United States and Europe in the first half of the 20th century (9, 10). More recently, technological change may have taken the dominant role. The changing balance of media technologies has led to losses as well as gains. For example, as verbal IQ has risen, verbal SATs have fallen. Paradoxically, omnipresent television may be responsible for the spread of the basic vocabulary (11) that drives verbal IQ scores, while simultaneously the decline in recreational reading may have led to the loss of the more abstract vocabulary driving verbal SAT scores (6, 12, 13).

The changing balance of media technologies has led to losses as well as gains. For example, as verbal IQ has risen, verbal SATs have fallen. Paradoxically, omnipresent television may be responsible for the spread of the basic vocabulary (11) that drives verbal IQ scores, while simultaneously the decline in recreational reading may have led to the loss of the more abstract vocabulary driving verbal SAT scores (6, 12, 13).

Technology and Informal Education: What Is Taught, What Is Learned
by Patricia Greenfield
Science 2 January 2009:
Vol. 323. no. 5910, pp. 69 - 71

In short, it's not "intelligence" that's gone up, it's scores on the visual scales and basic vocabulary.

Verbal intelligence -- that would be the SAT-V kind of intelligence that predicts college success (and, yes, SATs do predict college success) -- is down.

Unfortunately, Greenfield attributes the decline in verbal intelligence to technology, kids, and parents, not schools. Visual media have replaced books at home; therefore kids can't read challenging texts or think because "reading for pleasure" is the key to critical thinking.

So what should the schools do now that kids can't read?

They should stop using books & switch to PowerPoint:

Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.

"As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know," said Greenfield, who has been using films in her classes since the 1970s.

"By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said.

Talk about the bad becomes normal.

+++++

Number one: I'm aware of no evidence that "reading for pleasure" produces high verbal intelligence scores (though I assume it helps), and I am aware of informal evidence that reading for school is essential.

Number two: you can't teach verbal disciplines by means of pictures. Period. Ed was working on K12 education back when California teachers were attempting to deliver "sheltered instruction" to ELL students. In theory, sheltered instruction involves a number of strategies, but in practice it meant trying to teach language-based disciplines using pictures instead of words. It didn't work.

PLUS, when it comes to PowerPoint, I am as one with Colonel H.R. McMaster (now Brigadier General McMaster):

McMaster is a humanist, with a doctorate in history, who is allergic to the military’s culture of PowerPoint presentations where the jargon and diagrams do the thinking for you. He once told me that if an idea couldn’t be put in paragraph form, it didn’t deserve consideration.

And number three: wtf?

Kids aren't doing any reading outside school so they should do less reading inside school, too?

Gelman is right.

voodoo correlations in social neuroscience

I've always been skeptical of big behavioral claims based on brain scan data.

Turns out I was right.

Here's Andrew Gelman (and here, too).

Brain imaging studies under fire (naturenews)

interview: Have the Results of Some Brain Scanning Experiments Been Overstated? (Scientific American)

LEHRER: What is a "voodoo correlation"?

VUL: We use that term as a humorous way to describe mysteriously high correlations produced by complicated statistical methods (which usually were never clearly described in the scientific papers we examined)—and which turn out unfortunately to yield some very misleading results. The specific issue we focus on, which is responsible for a great many mysterious correlations, is something we call “non-independent” testing and measurement of correlations. Basically, this involves inadvertently cherry-picking data and it results in inflated estimates of correlations.

To go into a bit more detail:

An fMRI scan produces lots of data: a 3-D picture of the head, which is divided into many little regions, called voxels. In a high-resolution fMRI scan, there will be hundreds of thousands of these voxels in the 3-D picture.

When researchers want to determine which parts of the brain are correlated with a certain aspect of behavior, they must somehow choose a subset of these thousands of voxels. One tempting strategy is to choose voxels that show a high correlation with this behavior. So far this strategy is fine.

The problem arises when researchers then go on to provide their readers with a quantative measure of the correlation magnitude measured just within the voxels they have pre-selected for having a high correlation. This two-step procedure is circular: it chooses voxels that have a high correlation, and then estimates a high average correlation. This practice inflates the correlation measurement because it selects those voxels that have benefited from chance, as well as any real underlying correlation, pushing up the numbers.
One can see closely analogous phenomena in many areas of life. Suppose we pick out the investment analysts whose stock picks for April 2005 did best for that month. These people will probably tend to have talent going for them, but they will also have had unusual luck (and some finance experts, such as Nassim Taleb, actually say the luck will probably be the bigger element). But even assuming they are more talented than average—as we suspect they would be—if we ask them to predict again, for some later month, we will invariably find that as a group, they cannot duplicate the performance they showed in April. The reason is that next time, luck will help some of them and hurt some of them—whereas in April, they all had luck on their side or they wouldn’t have gotten into the top group. So their average performance in April is an overestimate of their true ability—the performance they can be expected to duplicate on the average month.

It is exactly the same with fMRI data and voxels. If researchers select only highly correlated voxels, they select voxels that "got lucky," as well as having some underlying correlation. So if you take the correlations you used to pick out the voxels as a measure of the true correlation for these voxels, you will get a very misleading overestimate.

This, then, is what we think is at the root of the voodoo correlations: the analysis inadvertently capitalized on chance, resulting in inflated measurements of correlation. The tricky part, which I can’t go into here, was that investigators were actually trying to take account of the fact they were checking so many different brain areas—but their precautions made the problem that I am describing worse, not better!

Of course, now I'm wondering whether there is anything I think I know about brain & behavior that is not based on non-independent analysis.

world's smartest mouse

I didn't know mice could walk tightropes.

Of Two Minds

Backwards Identities and Identities in Context

I ran into an understanding problem with my seventh grade son a while back. (I teach him algebra at home because it would really screw up his
schedule if he took the 8th grade class at school. The school was flexible about this and it was better than the online course the school
offered.) He had to take an equation and change it into the slope-intercept form of a line:

y = mx + b

(where 'm' is the slope and 'b' is the y-intercept)

and then graph it. When he rearranged the equation, he came up with:

y = 3 - x/2

He couldn't figure out what 'm' was. We've been over this in the past, but not so much in context. He couldn't "see" the equation properly. I
know that I instantly see things in equations that he doesn't see, but I found (once again) that I have to reinforce the message. I think a big
problem is that the identities are so simple. What could be simpler than:

a/1 = a

What about what I call backwards identities, like:

a = a/1

My son know this because I've drilled it into his head. Everything is a fraction or a rational expression; if you don't see a dividing line, you
can put one in there. This was big back when I taught him about dividing fractions. What if you have something like this:

5 / (3/4)

The invert and multiply works fine if you know that 5 = 5/1.


Another simple identity is: a*1 = a

What about: a = 1*a ?

for something like x/2, you can look at it as (1*x)/2

Although this :

(a/b) * (c/d) = (a*c)/*(b*d)

is not a basic identity, many don't see it in reverse.

I could rewrite

(1*x)/2

as

(1*x)/(2*1) = (1/2)*(x/1) = 1/2 * x

By the time his textbook gets to the slope-intercept problems, they assume that these simple(?) things are not an issue. But, I've mentioned before that it took me until about my junior year (trig class) in high school before I really mastered all of these things.


(Side note: I hate text math even though I'm forced to do that in my programs. Math is 2D. It's graphics, not text, and I can "see" so much more when I write equations on a piece of paper. Dividing lines are horizontal, not slashes, and there is no place for a '^' in math. Kids need to do
math with a pencil and paper. OK. I got that out of my system, almost.)


So, lately, I've been trying to teach my son how I "see" equations and all of my tricks or understandings I had to figure out myself. I've talked
about these things a little bit in the past. I'll see if I can hit the highlights.

When you look at an equation:

1. Look for the terms. These are the big "chunks" of the equation that are separated only by a '+', '-' , or '=' sign. It doesn't matter how complicated the terms are, circle them and ALWAYS include the preceeding '-' sign with the term.

All equations look like this:

... (term) + (term) = (term) + (term) ...

Since the sign belongs with the term, there will always be a '+' between terms. I've told students to look at it this way:

25 - 3x is really 25 + (-3x)

and

15 - x is really 15 + (-1*x)

This helps when you get to something like:

15 - 3(x-2) or 15 - (x - 2)

Many students just don't know what to do with the '-' sign. If you think of it as:

15 + (-3)(x-2) or 15 + (-1)(x-2)

Then there should be less mistakes.


2. You can change the position of any term on one side of the "=" sign just by moving it. (a+b = b+a) The key is that you have to keep the sign
with the term. (If you don't see a sign, it's a '+'.)

Some students have a hard time doing this:

3 - 10x = -10x + 3

They just don't know what to do with the '-' sign. I automatically write equations so that they don't start with a minus sign, but I should probably not do that.


3. You can change the position of a term from one side of an equal sign to the other by changing the sign of the term. Even if you see
complicated integral signs floating around, this still works. I'm not sure why, but I've always thought of it as swinging (?) a term from one
side of an equation to the other and changing the sign. I've noticed that because my son can be sloppy, he makes simple mistakes when he formally subracts or adds terms from both sides. My "swinging" method reduces writing and his sloppy mistakes.

This brings up another topic. I've been really strict with my son about clearly writing each algebraic change on a separate line. Doesn't
everyone remember this from 7th and 8th grade? I've told my son that this prevents silly mistakes and makes it easier for the teacher to read. He
doesn't like to rewrite equations, so he makes the next change to the same equation. If he makes a silly mistake and the teacher can't see it,
then it will be marked completely wrong. If it's clear, he might get partial credit.

The next level is to "see" the terms.

4. Find and circle all of the factors in each term. these are the things that are simply multiplied and divided together. If you don't see the
dividing line, divide the term by 1. (a = a/1) If you see multiple dividing lines, make sure you know what is the overall numerator and
denominator. All terms are fractions or rational expressions. Note that it's harder to "see" the factors of a rational expression in text using
'/' as the dividing line.


(Side Note 2: Order of operations is really all about math as text. The first time it was formally taught to me was when I started to program.
You should never see anything like 4/8/2 in math. Even with programs, nobody should ever write something like that even if you know exactly how the compiler handles order of operations. It should be written as (4/8)/2. But that's really ugly. Paper and pencil math is beautiful.)

Factors are easy to see if you're talking about somehting like 3x/2. The numerator has (3)(x) and the denominator has (2).

But what about [3x^2(3x-5)^1/3] / [(x-5)(y+1)]

Note that I can't "see" this term as well as if it was in a nice 2D, graphic form.

The exponent always belongs to the factor just to the left. My son has had trouble with this. It's (3) * (x^2), not (3x)^2.

You have to see the factors instantly: (3), (x^2), (3x-5)^1/3 for the numerator, and (x-5), (y+1) for the denominator.


5. Any factor in the numerator can change position with any other factor in the numerator. Likewise for the denominator. It's surprising that
when terms get more complicated, students freeze up. They don't see it as a*b = b*a.


I think that order of operations affects this. It's driven into kids heads. They are given problems where they have to evaluate expressions in one particular order. What they think of as "understanding" is really a rote process. Order of operations is mostly for computer language compilers because they have to have some rote process to correctly evaluate expressions from left to right.

When I look at a complicated term (or equation), I never think of order of operations. I think about what I can do with it. I can rearrange factors however I want in the numerator or denominator as long as I know the rules, and the rules aren't defined by order of operations.


Here is something else to "see".

6. You can move any factor to or from the numerator or denominator by changing the sign of the exponent. If you don't see an exponent for a
factor, then it's 1. These sorts of steps come from what I call backwards identities or rules. Students have to know that the rules work both
ways.

My son knows very well the distributive rule, but he still has a hard time factoring:

(3x - 12x^2) = 3x(1 - 4x)

He doesn't feel comfortable with what to do when the 3x is factored out. He has to realize that 3x = (3x)*(1), a backward identity.


Most learn something like this:

x^(-1) = 1/x

but can't see that this means that you can bring a factor up from the denominator into the numerator by changing the sign of the exponent; the
backwards form of this rule.

One might talk about order of operations when you have two operations next to each other, but to apply them to a term or an equation is wrong.

This is a little bit of how I see equations. I hope it helps.

The "Global Achievement Gap" muddle

An editorial by Sandra Stotsky, member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, reveals misrepresentation in the author's "study" of MIT graduates. He supposedly found that only a few MIT students mentioned anything "more than arithmetic, statistics and probability" as useful to their work.

It's a great read!

meet the parents, part 2: classroom discipline

Robert Pondiscio has a post up about James Rogers' tantrum on the subject of parents & kids.

What, then, has made the Nevada education system go from good to average to less than average since the 1960s when Nevada's high schools won multiple awards for being the best in the nation....The state of K-12 education in the state of Nevada is where the public - that is you out there - has allowed it to sink. Your only relationship with the education system is to ship your unprepared kids to school not with the expectation of success, but with the demand that an education system, inadequately funded, develop and/or repair children that you as a parent did not prepare for school or support while your children attended school.

And so on.

Teacher Anne's response caught my attention:

I have been a teacher for 35 years. When I started teaching, the children I taught were eager to learn, respected me, and other adults, had manners, and worked hard. Now, I have children who do not do homework, who have no bedtimes, who talk back, who have little or no desire to actually get an education, and who do not understand the values of hard work or accountability.

I've been thinking about classroom discipline lately.

It seems to me that all students should be entitled to attend cheerful, orderly schools.

Period.

A cheerful, orderly school should be the bare minimum.

So, assuming that kids today really are more difficult to deal with (I don't doubt it), schools have to adapt. It's that simple. Teach the kids you have.

Someone else may have a better idea, but my thinking is that schools need to hire behaviorists to perform functional assessments of student behavior, create positive behavior plans for students who need them (regardless of whether those students are or are not "classified"), then teach teachers how to use the plan -- and support teachers while they're learning.

Since Palisadesk has told us that ed schools no longer teach classroom management (which seems to be the case), it falls to public schools to provide this training, which mean teachers must have real "professional development" when it comes to classroom management. By "real" I mean a person like Mary Damer who comes into the classroom, directly instructs teachers in how to keep a group of kids on task & well mannered, and supports the teacher while he or she is mastering the skills involved.

The behaviorist should also help administrators develop a school-wide plan for hallway, restroom, and playground calm, as well as for orderly and efficient trips to the principal's office.

Basically, I think schools should forget about hiring "school psychologists" and get into the business of hiring school behaviorists. We'd all be a lot better off.

Last but not least, students whose difficulties can't be managed by one teacher heading one classroom without help should be taught in smaller classes elsewhere in the building. That classroom, too, should be cheerful and orderly -- and this I know schools can do because my two autistic children have been taught in cheerful orderly classrooms by teachers who know what they're about.

Of course, that's not what's happening. I've heard from teachers who have worked in urban schools where children with severe behavior problems were kept in classrooms on the orders of central administration. Neither the teacher nor the building principal had the authority to remove these children, who in some cases were so violent and erratic that all learning stopped and classmates lived in a chronic state of stress and fear.

Such policies -- the teacher called them "radical inclusion" -- are unethical.

Students should be entited to attend school in a cheerful and orderly environment, and the people who are responsible for creating and sustaining that cheerful and orderly environment are the grownups in charge.


the parents

Which brings me to the parents.

Yes, in the best of all possible worlds children would have two-parent families in which Mom and Dad see eye to eye and the kids go to bed on time at night.

But we don't live in the best of all possible worlds, and there are limits to what a parent can do from home to control his child's behavior at school.

Special ed parents are always dealing with this. I remember talking to a mom who was working as an aide in her developmentally disabled daughter's special needs school. The daughter had all kinds of behavior problems in addition to delays (ditto that), and every time the child acted up in school the teacher would pick up the phone and telephone the mom, who was in another part of the school dealing with another child in another classroom. She'd get these calls all day long! Finally she finally told the teacher, "I am here, I'm not there. I can't do anything about my daughter's behavior over the telephone."

Of course schools should be pow-wowing with parents and working together with them on behavior issues if possible. But even when you have competent parents who are doing their best, the fact is that nobody trains parents, either, and because we parents are our own bosses, it can sometimes take a while to realize we're on the wrong track. At least, that has happened to me at times. "The bad gets normal," as Temple says: when problems develop gradually, you don't notice them. Instead, the new bad situation becomes the new normal. The parent may not even realize there is a problem.

That can happen with kids and families, and I know it's happened to me.

The point is: the school has to be responsible for student behavior while students are at school.

Whatever it takes.

stereotype threat redux

If you're interested in the not yet peer reviewed study of Obama's inauguration and its effect on test scores, it's probably worth reading this (long) 2-year old post on stereotype threat.

Stereotype threat is real; I've experienced it myself more than once in my life.

My worst experience, which is mortifying to this day, happened at Dartmouth.

When I was at the college, there were a tiny number of women attending classes as the first group of co-eds.^* Everywhere we went, we were surrounded by a sea of men. This meant that I rarely opened one of the remarkably heavy doors to the big old buildings on campus, because if a Dartmouth boy got to the door first -- and a Dartmouth boy always did get to the door first -- he opened the door for me.
's always
So I was used to having the enormous, heavy, old wood doors opened for me by Dartmouth boys.

One day I found myself walking alone towards the student center, nobody around but me. The student center was a new building, and its entry door was a standard-issue, see-through glass job, weighing what all such doors weigh and easily opened by a 4-year old child.

I clutched. There was no one around me to open the door ---- and I spent a split second thinking that if there was no one to open the door, I wouldn't be able to get in. This was a conscious thought.

It was appalling.

Worse yet, I was a raging feminist at the time. Mary Daly,^** Andrea Dworkin -- you name the angry feminist author & I'd read her, underlined her, & annotated her up the ying-yang. I wanted a career & success, and I wanted a career and success in a world filled with men who had careers and success. I was on a Mission from God.

So there I was, Mary Daly aficionado; I'm walking to the Student Center, and I'm consciously asking myself, "How will I get inside the building if nobody opens the door?"

Ever since that moment, and especially in light of my revelatory experience of stereotype threat on a television game show, I've wondered about this phenomenon.

First of all, how conscious is stereotype threat most of the time? I have no idea. All I know is that there have been 3 occasions in my life during which I have become consciously aware that I (apparently) believed I could not do things men can do. Like open doors, for instance.

But how many times did I unconsciously activate this thought?

And second: does overcoming stereotype threat require a certain personality?

I've thought about that a lot. I was a scrapper, and have always been happy to scrap with myself, if need be. (Not coincidentally, I'm sure, very often I do need be.) The only reason I managed to prevail on the game show was that I was so furious with myself that I was more or less able to get out of panic mode and into battle mode.

But suppose I hadn't been a scrappy person?

Suppose I'd been a meeker sort of person?

I think the outcome of the game tells me the answer. All three contestants appeared to be scared witless, and the contestant who won was the contestant who managed to work up a bit of wrath. (Which reminds me: I've got to get a post up about the research on success and "Agreeableness," one of the five personality factors psychologists seem to have reached consensus on.^*** Turns out super-successful people really aren't as nice as not-super-successful people, just like everyone thinks. Research shows.)

Back on topic: I'm very keen to see the effects of an Obama presidency on young black people ... and in fact I have already seen one such in my own house: C. (the other C.) has cut his dreadlocks! He said it was time for a change. I told him: OK, now you have to go to law school.

Funny thing: I have changed my blonde hair back to its original brown, and I have done this entirely because Michele Obama is a black woman who has black hair. Don't ask me why.

Fortunately, it's working out fine. I say "fortunately," because it doesn't always. Back when Hillary was First Lady & she cut her hair, I cut my hair, too, and I looked like he**.

That's not all. When George Bush was elected president, Ed bought me a pair of cowboy boots; plus I have two Sarah Palin skirts, which I bought on sale and wear to school board meetings.

Point is: people are weirdly social & sociable, and we spend a lot of time copying the folks around us or above us. That's the moral of Alex the parrot, who couldn't learn one-on-one, but learned brilliantly when he had a model to copy & compete with.)

These are interesting times.

That said, I still don't like the stimulus bill.



Obama and the stereotype threat (Frontal Cortex)
D-Ed Reckoning on the nitty gritty
Stimulus Bill Would Provide Flood of Aid to Education

^* aka "co-hogs," which was not a term of affection. You could be sitting in a lecture hall, minding your own business, and suddenly, from behind, you'd hear: "Look at the co-hog taking notes."

^** I wish to heck I'd kept my old copy of Gyn/Ecology. I'd love to read all the stuff I wrote in the margins. otoh, how excruciating would that be? Thank God I never kept a journal.

^*** Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are by Daniel Nettle

Conflicker follow-up

follow-up from Allison & redkudu on "eradicating the program before it is used":

Allison:

...they would be sending instructions to the infected computers the same way that you distribute a virus in the first place. essentially, they'd be trying to infect your computer with a "good" worm that replicated itself and sent itself to everyone on your email list, etc.

And while it sounds cool, think about how badly it could go wrong.

redkudu:

...if it's illegal for someone to commandeer your computer into a botnet, it's probably illegal to create something which also gets into the computer to give you a warning, maybe?

I just got a virus (several actually) a few weeks ago that ripped my computer to shreds and I had to get support. I had to give all kinds of agreements to allow the support folks to get in my computer from where they were and try to chase the virus down. (I could see what they were doing on my own screen, and she was in Asia somewhere.)

Interesting.

Does anyone know what's going on with Conflicker now?

my thoughts exactly

Last year, two labor economists, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, published a book called “The Race Between Education and Technology.” It is as much a work of history — the history of education — as it is a work of economics. Goldin and Katz set out to answer the question of how much an education really matters. They are themselves products of public schools, she of New York and he of Los Angeles, and they have been a couple for two decades. They are liberals (Katz served as the chief economist under Robert Reich in Bill Clinton’s Labor Department), but their book has been praised by both the right and the left. “I read the Katz and Goldin book,” Matthew Slaughter, an associate dean of Dartmouth’s business school who was an economic adviser to George W. Bush, recently told me, “and there’s part of me that can’t fathom that half the presidential debates weren’t about a couple of facts in that book.”

The Big Fix by David Leonhardt
The New York Times February 1, 2009

That's what I said!

And, just in case you were thinking I'd slacked off on my mission to bring Goldin and Katz to the masses (or, failing that, to the long-suffering readers & writers of kitchen table math, who have now been exposed to a couple dozen posts on the topic of Goldin and Katz)....well, I haven't.


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been
the golden age: a NYC teacher remembers
the White House cites Goldin & Katz

New Rochelle School Refuses Emergency Medical Care for Student with Multiple Fractures

We have a story up on the Talk of the Sound in New Rochelle which is both sad and disturbing. I thought it worth sharing here.

Last fall, a Latino student in evident pain was brought to the nurse’s office by a fellow seventh grader at a local middle school in New Rochelle, NY. The boy told the school nurse he had slipped with his arms outstretched onto a concrete surface and was in severe pain. The nurse handed the boy a bag of ice and called the boy’s mother to come pick him up from school. The mother, although a legal resident, does not speak English well. The nurse did not speak spanish. When the mother tried to ask the nurse to call for an ambulance. the nurse refused and hung up. At the school, the mother asked again for an ambulance. The nurse demanded the mother leave and, according to the mother, threatened to call Child Protective Services on the mother for - get this - failing to get her child medical treatment. It turns out the child had multiple fractures - both arms, from the wrist to the elbow. When the mother called the next day to notify the school that her son would be unable to return to school due to two broken arms the district shifted into damage control mode. The boy was absent from school for more than two months and only recently returned.

You can read about the whole sorry mess at Talk of the Sound. KTM readers will recall the name Anthony Bongo as the school principal and serial violator of the New York Indoor Clean Air Act who allegedly looked the other way when a white supervisor hung a stuffed monkey on a noose as a "joke" to the school's black employees.

Interview with Jay Mathews on "Work Hard. Be Nice."

Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt did an hour with Jay Mathews tonight as Jay promotes his new book about KIPP, and the rising stars that come out of Teach for America. Here's a transcript. Here's a podcast. It's a nice interview, largely because it's long enough to tell a lot of stories.

SMART Tables?

scroll down

What Homework is Necessary?

I know there's been plenty of discussion on the efficacy of homework here. Just wanted to point out a post on Dy/Dan, for those that don't already subscribe:

I Do Not get Homework At All Sometimes

The comments are interesting. Most lean to the Alfie Kohn view: homework=worthless. I know I'm not alone in believing that math takes practice.

For those of you in the know, where's the research?

another satisfied customer

re: the fields bond

The local news is filled with reactions from Irvington's many & myriad administrators and assorted higher-ups (2000 kids; 11 administrators; 2 Teaching-Learning Facilitators; 1 Chief Information Officer & Technology Coordinator^*).

My favorite commentator thus far: the soon-to-be-tenured Athletic Director, who is quoted in the high school newspaper saying, "For me it’s not about having the best sports programs, but being able to give our students the first-rate facilities that they have in all their other school-related activities."

First rate facilities, so-so programs -- makes sense to me.

Then tonight I found this letter to the editor, which I'd missed.

The budget process has begun, and it won't be pretty. The district will raise taxes as high as it is legally able to do without voter consent, and it will spend the money on the things administrators want, not the things parents and taxpayers want. Thus our 11 administrators and our 3 tenured non-administrators will devote their time to infusing 21st century skills & media literacy -- both of which appear in our newly approved 20-page Strategic Plan -- into the curriculum.

College preparation & SAT skills will be left to the tutors, as per custom.

That's not good.

from the letter:

Irvington must focus on attracting home buyers to our village. I sold real estate for ten years. The prevailing reason young families want to buy a home in a community is based on the school's academic programs and SAT scores. Never did a buyer ask me about the condition of a field. They also weigh the tax burden.

I have made that very point to the board! College prep and SAT scores, I said: win-win. Good for kids, good for parents, good for taxpayers who don't have kids in the schools. Put 'em on the Plan.

Nope. No such luck.

Twenty pages of Goals, Objectives, Activities, Resources, Person(s) Responsible, Timelines, and Evidences of Attainment, and there's no room for college prep.


^* Who has tenured Technology Coordinators?

the sky is falling

enough with the hands-on collaborative 21st century group learning

Vicky S on group learning:

Here's another reason not to use group work in instructional settings. Instructional groups by definition contain no experts. In real life groups (at work, for example) each person brings a specialty to the table. That's what makes group work preferable to individual work in selected circumstances. But when the object is to supply the students with a body of background knowledge and a framework within which to analyze newly acquired knowledge, there is nothing more efficient than good lecture by an expert in the subject. Oh, and let's not lose sight of the fact that the information delivered will be correct.

Thank you.

Jeanne Chall on decline at the top

The 1970s and 1980s brought additional reasons for discontent. The first was the continuing decline of scores on the Scholastic Achievement Tests (SATs), the decline having begun even as early as the 1960s. Another cause for growing concern was the low achievement particularly among poor and minority children on the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]. Since 1969, NAEP (also known as "The Nation's Report Card") has conducted periodic assessment of the academic performances of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders in a range of subjects. At first it was thought that the SAT score decline resulted from growing number of low-income students taking the SAT for the first time. Later, it was found that the absolute decline in scores was even greater among the most able students (Chall, 1989). After years of debate as to whether SAT scores had significantly declined, the College Board changed its standards (permitting a "pass" with lower scores.)

Recommendations to improve educational achievement varied widely. Some championed a stronger focus on open education--calling for greater emphasis on student motivation and interest--while others called for more instruction-centered solutinos--higher educational standards and greater rigor. The most influential of the many proposals at the time was A Nation at Risk, the Report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE, 1983). Its proposed solution was largely teacher-cntered: a more rigorous curriculum, reintroduction of traditional courses of study, and more-difficult, challenging textbooks.

Other proposals for teacher-centered solutions appeared during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a series of studies that compared achievement in public schools with that in private and parocial schools, Coleman and Hoffer (1987) found that students in private and parochial schools tested higher on academic ahievement than those in public schools. The investigators attributed the differences to the heavier focus of the private and parochial schools on teacher-centered practices such as the use of discipline and assigning homework and grades.

The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom
by Jeanne S. Chall
p. 41-42

in a nutshell:

• Jeanne Chall's 1989 study of the 16-year decline in SAT scores (1964-1980) found the largest decline in scores amongst the top students
  

• A Nation at Risk recommended teacher-centered classrooms and the "reintroduction of traditional courses of study"
  

• Coleman and Hoffer found that classroom discipline and teacher-centered instruction were the reasons why private & parochial school students did better than students in public schools
  

Until tonight, I hadn't made the connection between classroom discipline and direct instruction.

Of course, it's obvious that if you're in favor of the latter, you're in favor of the former. You have to be; you can't do direct instruction without classroom discipline.

But it hadn't occurred to me that if you're opposed to "drill and kill" you might also be ambivalent about teachers maintaining law and order inside the classroom.

Jeanne Chall

Jeanne Chall (1921-1999)

Born in Poland, Chall emigrated as a girl to New York City with her family. She graduated from the City College of New York in 1941 with a B.A. (cum laude). She became an assistant to Irving Lorge, who directed educational research at Teachers College, Columbia University. She then served as research assistant to Edgar Dale at the Bureau of Educational Research at Ohio State University, where she received an A.M. in 1947 and a Ph.D. in 1952. Her review for Dale of the existing research on readability led to her Readability: An Appraisal of Research and Application (1958) and a keen appreciation of the value of historical synthesis. Dale's and Chall's collaboration culminated in their Dale-Chall Formula for Predicting Readability (1948), which combined vocabulary complexity with sentence length to evaluate text readability. (Chall updated it in 1995.) Between 1950 and 1965 Chall rose from lecturer to professor at City College. These years brought a lifelong collaboration with Florence Roswell on the diagnosis and treatment of reading difficulties, and led Chall to question whether some methods were superior to others in preventing reading failure.

In 1965 Chall moved to Harvard University to create and direct graduate programs in reading for master's and doctoral candidates. An excellent clinician herself, she founded the Harvard Reading Laboratory in 1967 (now named after her), directing it until her retirement in 1991. She was a member of numerous scholarly organizations, editorial boards, policymaking committees, and state and national commissions. She served on the board of directors of the International Reading Association, 1961 to 1964, and on the National Academy of Education's Commission on Reading that resulted in the report Becoming a Nation of Readers (1985). She received many professional awards, the last given by the International Dyslexia Association in 1996.

Chall was engaged in both practice and research, often at the same time. For more than fifty years she taught students of all ages, including remedial ones, and advised schools. She was a consultant for children's encyclopedias, an educational comic book, educational software, and educational television, including the children's literacy programs Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Between the Lions.

Chall's most important professional contribution was a byproduct of the professional furor over Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read–and What You Can Do About It (1955). Flesch attacked the prevailing sight word methodology of teaching reading, claiming that reading professionals had ignored their own research. With beginning reading instruction now on the national agenda, the Carnegie Corporation funded a study that Chall conducted from 1962 to 1965. She reviewed the existing research, described methods of instruction, interviewed leading proponents of various methods, and analyzed two leading reading series of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The results appeared in her Learning to Read: The Great Debate (1967).

Chall identified what she called "the conventional wisdom" of reading instruction: that children should read for meaning from the start, use context and picture clues to identify words after learning about fifty words as sight words, and induce letter–sound correspondences from these words. Like Flesch, she concluded that this conventional wisdom was not supported by the research, which found phonics superior to whole word instruction and "systematic" phonics superior to "intrinsic" phonics instruction. She also found that beginning reading was different in kind from mature reading–a conclusion that she reaffirmed in her Stages of Reading Development (1983), which found that children first learn to read and then read to learn. She recommended in 1967 that publishers switch to a code-emphasis approach in children's readers, which would lead to better results without compromising children's comprehension.

Chall's Learning to Read quickly became a classic. Major textbook publishers reacted by emphasizing more phonics earlier in their series, although no publisher already committed to initial whole word instruction switched to systematic phonics. Chall's book was updated in 1983 (and 1996) with even stronger research findings to support its conclusions, but by 1983 textbooks of all kinds were under attack from the Whole Language movement, which condemned textbooks as a genre. The climate was an unsympathetic one for Chall's coauthored study Should Textbooks Challenge Students: The Case for Easier or Harder Textbooks (1991), which explored the relationship between the decline in difficulty of textbooks between 1945 and 1975 and lower SAT scores. Chall's coauthored study of thirty low-income urban children, The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind (1990), was also not universally well received. Whole Language proponents criticized it for relying on outdated tests; social scientists complained that it did not adequately explain its ethnographic techniques.

Chall showed her regard for the reading instruction of the past by reissuing, largely for home schooling use, stories from school readers of the 1880s to 1910s, titling them the Classic American Readers (1994). She had already given her own collection of over 9,500 imprints related to the history of reading research and the teaching of reading, spanning more than two centuries, to the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Monroe C. Gutman Library.

Chall's last work, published posthumously, was The Academic Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom (2000). In it, she divided American instruction into "child-centered" and "teacher-centered" approaches, suggesting that the twentieth century was dominated by the former (discovery approaches) in spite of research that supported the superiority of the latter (explicit teaching). Earlier, Helen Popp had persuaded her to coauthor a contribution to explicit teaching: a handbook for teachers, Teaching and Assessing Phonics (1996). The Chall-Popp Phonics program was completed after her death (2000).

Written in a climate in which many members of her own profession still disdained explications of the English writing system, the 1996 handbook is true to many of Chall's core concerns: teaching reading, particularly to at-risk children, and research-validated explicit instruction.

Are the Classic American Readers still available?


LA TIMES obit
A Tribute to Jeanne Chall by Gail Kearns
Jeanne Chall Shows What Really Works in the Classroom by Linda Bevilacqua (Core Knowledge)
tributes: American Educator 2001

kids & online learning - please send stories

Palisadesk found a Forbes excerpt of Clayton Christensen's Disrupting Education , which sparked some emailing back and forth about people's experiences with online learning.


This is mine:

I don't understand why online learning has been such a flop thus far. Colleges & universities sank a fortune into "distance learning" in the 1990s & it didn't work. Hasn't worked for me, either.

I think it might have to do with a social element in learning, a la Alex the parrot, who learned virtually nothing in one-on-one, stimulus-response teaching. Irene Pepperberg adopted a "model-rival" learning situation in order to teach Alex. In "model-rival," you have the bird, the trainer, and another "student," who is a person. Pepperberg taught the lesson to the human student and when Alex watched his rival learn the answer and get the reward, he learned.

No one had ever been able to teach birds until trainers changed the paradigm to a social learning set-up.

Parrots are highly social, and so are we.

I subscribed to ALEKS a couple of years ago &, while I thought it was great, I stopped using it. I went back to my math books, which seem "warmer," somehow (maybe because I use them sitting in a room with people?)

Otoh, I'm sticking with Fluenz. I've grown to like the educational telepresence, and books don't talk or record my voice so Fluenz has the advantage there.

Where I can see online learning making a big difference is in homeschooling, where a parent is managing the curriculum.

from Concerned Parent:

I'm certain you're on to something with the lack of social aspect of online learning. As much as ALEKS has been a good supplement, it's definitely not a replacement for math learning. My kids perform better if I'm nearby. They'll actually call me over because they think they're stuck and once I'm there they don't need me to help. I end up watching over their shoulder while they quiet my help with, "I get it Mom." And yet, they don't want me to leave. They'd rather have me there.

me again:

I'm positive there's some weird social "thing" about online and computer learning. Online learning is one of those things that makes perfect sense ---- until you actually try it.

My own case is so "illogical."

I've never UNsubscribed to ALEKS; I'm still paying for it on grounds that it's a terrific program and I'm going to get back to it. Now that I don't have to teach math to C., I'm not in emergency mode; in theory I never have to look at a math book again. And yet I'm plowing through the Dolciani Algebra 2 book, in spite of the fact that I've already plowed through the Saxon Algebra 2. I'm repeating Algebra 2 using a book, not ALEKS.

Why am I doing this?

I don't know why.

My guess is that I'm doing Dolciani's Algebra 2 because C. is doing it! People do what other people do.

back to Concerned:

Absolutely. I hadn't really thought about that aspect of computer learning until you brought up the social aspect. Another interesting observation I didn't mention ocurred when S. was working with Headsprout. She could do the whole thing on her own without a hitch (it's designed that way), but she much preferred if one or preferably both of her siblings watched her do it. They giggled at the silly images, and encouraged her to keep going. I didn't realize that this is probably a need common to most of us. We're very much like Alex the parrot, indeed.

here's my sister:

Online learning is really not going to work for many learners unless it is “live,” say a skyped in lesson. My daughter took her 8th grade Algebra I, among other things, on line through a canned program. She found it very difficult. She said she absolutely preferred having a teacher she could talk to. We tried several on-line programs while we home schooled – three different ones in math trying to find a good fit. She was most comfortable with a program where the instructor was actually standing there teaching and switching back and forth to an artsy chalkboard where examples popped up as he continued talking. She did best with it, but still struggled and wanted a teacher. She missed raising her hand and asking for clarifications. All she could do was stop the program, rewind, and replay. I do fret a bit about the on-line hype.

and, later on:

I really am worried about the new buzz of on-line instruction. I spoke to a 50ish man in his PhD program for education. He has a masters in music and taught music at the middle school for years. He said on-line learning was absolutely the next wave and that the classroom was failing miserably. He left mainstream education to serve as a principal of a continuation school and he knows education is a mess. However, I don’t think on-line is the answer either. I’m afraid it will end up the way of the SMARTBoards. We’ll spend tons, revamp all our programs for on-line, only to later find out it doesn’t work as well as a live classroom. M. is very bright; she's 15, taking all her high school classes in junior college and earning As in courses designated by the UC system as transferable to 4-year universities. If struggled with on-line education, you have to wonder.

I talked to Tex, too:

...What about courses where there are scheduled class/discussion times online. I've read about them, and my only experience with anything similar is participating in "webinars."

Webinars that I've been part of include a screen presentation and a conference call format, with discussions monitored by the leader. I imagine sometimes the discussions are only online, but this would seem to address some of the social issues.

Kids, and many adults, feel a strong sense of community with their online chat friends, who may or many not be friend in RL (real life). Couldn't this carry over to successful online learning for teens?

That's my question.

Obviously, people spend a lot of time hanging out on the web, chatting with friends, Twittering, updating, etc. (Which reminds me: I have to figure out LinkedIn, finally.) My social life is mostly online these days.

So would Skyped-in courses work for a lot of kids?

Or is there some funky in-person effect in teaching & learning that we aren't aware of and don't understand? (Speaking of which, some of you may remember the various times I've mentioned that C. couldn't learn his math facts using online flash cards but mastered them at once when he wrote them on the Saxon work sheets - turns out there is research connecting handwriting to learning! I'll get that posted.)

If you or your kids have had experience with online learning, I'd love to hear about it.

I'm finishing up with another mention of The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dorner, a life-altering book about solutions that seem logical in theory and fail in reality.

Thanks to Dorner, I am now a committed fan of pilot studies and test cases; I believe that in most walks of life nothing should be "implemented" on a grand scale before it's been tried locally & on a small scale first.

I think this blog post is a pretty good summary of the book:

The thesis: "...we have been turned loose in the industrial age equipped with the brain of prehistoric times." Simply stated, most human beings are terrible at managing complex systems. Dorner's students run a model of a small fictitious African village -- changing variables like cattle stocks, food stores, arable land. Invariably the students kill off the entire "population" through their miss-planning

As it turns out, good managers of complex systems showed common approaches:

1) They started by laying out clear, measurable goals -- they didn't just jump in and start pulling levers.

2) Good managers acted "more complexly." Their decisions took different aspects of the entire system into account, not just dominant factors.

3) They tested their hypotheses. The bad participants failed to do this. Instead of generating hypotheses, they generated "truths."

4) The good participants asked more "why" questions.

5) They showed high capacity to tolerate uncertainty. They didn't get caught up in the "methodism" of bad managers.

George F. Colony's blog

I love this book jacket.

Engelmann's rules for installing a new curriculum

The constructivist MIT: doing away with the big lecture

Fascinating article on MIT's shift away from teaching physics in the "standard" way, with a professor doing a main lecture 3 hours a week.

The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

Some bits you might find interesting: clickers! Homework due several times a week! And the biggest of all: attendance counts!

The new approach at M.I.T. is known by its acronym, TEAL, for Technology Enhanced Active Learning....A $10 million donation from the late Alex d’Arbeloff, an M.I.T. alumnus, co-founder of the high-tech company Teradyne, and former M.I.T. corporation chairman, made the switch to TEAL possible. The two state-of-the-art TEAL classrooms alone cost $2.5 million, Professor Belcher said.

The article says the failure rate is down, and performance is up. But then again, with required attendance, the failure rate could easily drop.

Is this constructivism? Are the teachers teaching any more? Or guides on the side? Well, guess what? The students hate it.

from the MIT paper, The Tech, in 2006:

"Most students do not bother to hide their dislike for TEAL. Their list of grievances is long and oft-repeated: the physical set-up of small tables makes it difficult to see the lecturer, the numerous homework assignments are tedious, the in-class problems are gone over too quickly, the students strong in physics end up doing all the work, and so on."


it continues:

Though student complaints are numerous, a number of changes have in fact been integrated into TEAL since its inception. Professor Eric Hudson, course administrator for 8.02T, has worked on modifications including more undergraduate teaching assistants in the classroom, fewer experiments (a drop from 18 to 10), and an emphasis on faculty training. Still being tested is the new AIM screenname iheart802, which will allow students to instant message a TA during class.

But even with the changes, the irrefutable fact remains: students are uninspired by the course. Dourmashkin admits that “students don’t like to go to class,” while Professor John Joannopoulos, who teaches a section of 8.02T this semester, said that there is a “tendency for students to be lax and lose concentration.”

Freshman Sarah Levin ’09, currently a TEAL student, said that “all of TEAL is so unmotivating because it’s so tedious that I don’t put any effort into the class and because of it I’m losing a good percentage of my grade just by lack of attendance.”

Shaw sees this problem as well. “Students come out of TEAL with a dislike for physics, and they seem less inclined to major in physics. TEAL has never done a good job in instilling a sense of why [learning] this is important.”

but I think this is the giveaway:


There are “lots of ways to do active learning,” Belcher said, citing a study conducted at Harvard that exhibited stronger learner gains than TEAL in a lecture environment with regular student involvement. “The important thing is to have students interact with students,” he said.

ah, yes, that's why I was such a poor student at MIT. Because I interacted so seldomly with STUDENTS! uh....no....not exactly.


another student's comments on TEAL:

I strongly suspect the NOOLT ("No One Likes Teal") phenomenon occured because TEAL, as I overheard someone whose name I can't remember say, "is the perfect example of when too much technology can be a bad thing."

We sit in tables of nine in groups of three. Each group has a computer to enable the learning process. Most of the time, though, it's used to watch the power point that's already projected in four (or more) different places around the room. (Sometimes these computers are used for Facebook. We're going to ignore that data.) In the beginning of the year, we took a diagnostic test and we were assigned to tables in a fashion that would keep an even distribution of physics background at the tables (meaning that all the people who took AP Physics in high school wouldn't sit in the same place).

This is all geared towards collaborative learning, which is nice in theory, but what happened in my experience is that the people at the table who knew what they're doing would work through the problem, and I would be left in the dark in terms of where this equation came from and what that one means. The idea was to learn from eachother, except that I feel that we do plenty of this while working on p(roblem)-sets. Personally, I'd like classtime to be geared more towards learning from the teacher.

And finally, this one culled from the comments on the NYT article:

This article is wildly misleading about the success of TEAL. As a member of the class of 2009, I was one of the first students required to participate in TEAL of I chose to take 8.01 (Mechanics). I then took TEAL again for Electricity and Magnetism (8.02).

If you notice in the pitcure, the TEAL classroom is a windowless, dark room that causes drowsiness better than any cold medicine. Each class is 2 hours long and you work with two other people that you have not chosen yourself. On fridays, you are to complete a small quiz with these people and all three of you recieve a grade for it. What ends up happening is the one person in the group does the problem and has no real motivation to explain it to you other than common courtesy.

The grades may have gotten better, but that is only because you get a grade for sitting there as well as about a thousand other assignments that are due at a thousand different times.

Here is a rundown of what you have to do for a TEAL class:

Weekly problem sets (4-10 hours), class time (5 hours), 1 quiz (1 hour), twice weekly "mastering physics" assignments online (each can take as little as 5 min and as much as two days to complete), Office hours, almost always necessary (3 hours)

The system does not foster an interest in Physics, but further enhances your distaste for it. My memories of the classes have nothing to do with the material, but with trudging through the snow to get to sunday office hours because despite all of this technology, the problems were STILL too difficult to do without help, with sitting in my room with 5 other friends trying to finish the online mastering physics assignment before the midnight deadline looking for the midnight deadline, and waking up at 8AM for a 9AM TEAL class knowing I'd be asleep by 9:15.

Do not be fooled by MIT's spokespeople. TEAL is very unpopular among students. Especially me.

Of course, MIT is an odd place, where the number one pastime is hating MIT. The unofficial student motto is "IHTFP", which stands for "I hate this place." So maybe this is just par for the course.

easy is better

from Steve:

My son has a teacher who is known for making her 7th grade social studies class hard. The idea is to toughen the kids up for high school. The assumption is that real learning is a difficult process. I feel like telling her that any teacher can make a class hard. It's more difficult, however, to make the class easy. There seems to be the idea that if you make learning easy, kids will never learn to do it on their own. You have to take an indirect, or discovery approach to really remember the material.

What if you came up with a direct, easy approach that could teach kids about fractions, percents, and decimals. Would you not use it? [answer: no] Thematic, real world, group discovery learning is supposed to be fun, interesting, and effective in both what you learn and how your learn. Too bad it doesn't work and wastes a lot of time. That's OK, because they want to emphasize the process and not the results. Perhaps that's why they don't like tests. Answers are not as important as the process.

I have no patience with educators who pride themselves on being "hard."

Hard work: yes, if (and only if) the kids are learning a lot. Hard to understand, hard to learn: no.

Ditto for the idea that a school's job is done once students have been "challenged." As I once told the now-retired science chair here: If I wrote challenging books, instead of books on challenging subjects that people can read and understand, we wouldn’t be living in Irvington. As a general rule, people don't like hard stuff. They like easy stuff, and rightly so:

Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz wanted to see if they could motivate a group of 20-year-old college students to exercise regularly—not an easy task. They gave all the students written instructions for a regular exercise routine, but they used a simple but ingenious method to make the how-to instructions either cognitively palatable or challenging: Some got instructions printed in Arial typeface, a plain font designed for easy reading. Others got their instructions printed in a Brush font, which basically looks like it’s been written by hand with a Japanese paintbrush; it’s unfamiliar and much harder to read.

There are a lot of ways to make something mentally palatable, or not. You can used clear and simple language, or arcane vocabulary words; simple sentences or convoluted sentences with lots of clauses. The psychologists chose typeface because it’s easy to manipulate in the lab. After the students had all read the instructions, they asked them some questions about the exercise regimen: how long they thought it would take, whether it would flow naturally or drag on endlessly, whether it would be boring, and so forth. They also queried them on whether they were likely to make exercise a routine part of their day.

The findings were remarkable. Those who had read the exercise instructions in an unadorned, accessible typeface were much more open to the prospect of exercising: They believed that the regimen would take less time and that it would feel more “fluid” and easy. Most important, they were more willing to make exercise part of their day. Apparently, the students’ brains mistook the ease of reading about exercise for ease of actually doing the pushups and crunches, and this misunderstanding motivated them to actually think about a life change. Those who struggled through the Japanese brushstrokes had no intention of heading to the gym; the reading alone tired them out.

A Recipe for Motivation
by Wray Herbert

If schools were accountable for results, you'd hear a lot less twiddle-twaddle about "challenge" and "hard." Just ask KUMON. Or Fluenz. Or Pimsleur. Or hell, just about anyone trying to sell you an educational product of any kind. Do book publicists write ad copy telling folks, "Buy this book. It's hard"?

No. They don't.

Even Jay Mathews has modified his approach to the "Challenge Index." In the past, all schools made it onto the list if they had a high number of students taking AP courses & the AP test. How students actually did on the test wasn't part of the index; hence the term "Challenge." The Challenge Index measures challenge, not achievement.

[pause]

Remind me again.

Exactly what are we paying these people to do?


make them struggle
education professors: students must struggle
KUMON: "work that can be easily completed"
handing it to the student

what is "eradicating the program before it is used"?

Exciting news in yesterday's Times: a digital Pearl Harbor is on its way.

(Really?)

A new digital plague has hit the Internet, infecting millions of personal and business computers in what seems to be the first step of a multistage attack. The world’s leading computer security experts do not yet know who programmed the infection, or what the next stage will be.

[snip]

Worms like Conficker not only ricochet around the Internet at lightning speed, they harness infected computers into unified systems called botnets, which can then accept programming instructions from their clandestine masters. “If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships steaming toward us on the horizon,” said Rick Wesson, chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer security consulting firm based in San Francisco.

[snip]

Computer security researchers expect that within days or weeks the bot-herder who controls the programs will send out commands to force the botnet to perform some as yet unknown illegal activity.

Here's the part I don't understand:

The worm has reignited a debate inside the computer security community over the possibility of eradicating the program before it is used by sending out instructions to the botnet that provide users with an alert that their machines have been infected.

“Yes, we are working on it, as are many others,” said one botnet researcher who spoke on the grounds that he not be identified because of his plan. “Yes, it’s illegal, but so was Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus.”

Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide
New York Times 1-23-2009

What does this mean?

Wall Street Journal says it's not time to panic.

Fine.

I'm counting on the Wall Street Journal to tell me when it is time to panic.

Poster Boy for the Continued Need for Spelling Instruction

Sometimes spell check doesn't cut it.

advertisements for myself, part 2

But to remark that “Animals Make Us Human” is a slightly lesser book than “Animals in Translation” is like saying Randy Newman's “Good Old Boys” is a slightly lesser album than “Sail Away.” If you liked the first one, you’re going to like the second.

The Joys and Pains of Being an Animal
By DWIGHT GARNER

Boy.

I'm having a very good week.

Ed and I heard Temple speak at the 92nd Street Y last night. She was wonderful. Her mom was there, too. She's 80 years old, I believe, and she told us she's speaking to parents of children with autism all over the country. She'd taken the bus in freezing snow and slush to come see Temple.

That was a funny autism thing.

I had wangled free tickets by asking Temple to get them for me, but I didn't ask for anything else, so Ed and I went early and stood at the front of the line so we'd get good seats. When the lady standing behind us found out I was Temple's coauthor, she asked why we weren't already inside.

Why we weren't already inside was: Temple is autistic & doesn't think of these things, & I'm so used to autistic people that it doesn't occur to me to think of them, either.

Meanwhile Temple's mom had taken the bus in freezing snow & slush and bought her own ticket. When she got there someone was aghast that Temple's mom had purchased a $27 ticket to hear her own daughter, so they told her she could have a free ticket to something else at the Y, an offer she snapped right up.

She told us something interesting.

She said the Bettelheim era hadn't affected her because she lived in Boston and everyone was a Calvinist. They didn't believe in Freud, and they didn't get on the couch.


The Creation of Dr. B by Richard Pollack

7th grade depression starts in first grade

Students’ successes in the first grade can affect more than their future report cards. In a new study, University of Missouri researchers found links among students’ weak academic performance in the first grade, self-perceptions in the sixth grade, and depression symptoms in the seventh grade.

“We found that students in the first grade who struggled academically with core subjects, including reading and math, later displayed negative self-perceptions and symptoms of depression in sixth and seventh grade, respectively,” said Keith Herman, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. “Often, children with poor academic skills believe they have less influence on important outcomes in their life. Poor academic skills can influence how children view themselves as students and as social beings.”

In the study, MU researchers examined the behaviors of 474 boys and girls in the first grade and re-examined the students when they entered middle school. Herman found that students who struggled academically with core subjects, such as reading and math, in the first grade later showed risk factors for negative self-beliefs and depressive symptoms as they entered sixth and seventh grade. Herman suggests that because differences in children’s learning will continue to exist even if all students are given effective instruction and support, parents and teachers should acknowledge student’s skills in other areas.

Recognizing Children's Successes In All Areas May Prevent Teenage Depression

This is a case of naturalizing what is. If schools grouped kids homogeneously and used precision teaching or Direct Instruction, you wouldn't see the less-talented kids developing depressions 5 years down the line. Even without precision teaching or Direct Instruction, you wouldn't see depression. You wouldn't see it because these kids wouldn't be struggling. They'd be taught at their level, they'd be given the time they needed, and they'd learn.

Here's Engelmann:

Rule 3: Always place students appropriately for more rapid mastery progress. This fact contradicts the belief that students are placed appropriately in a sequence if they have to struggle—scratch their head, make false starts, sigh, frown, gut it out. According to one version of this belief, if there are no signs of hard work there is no evidence of learning. This belief does not place emphasis on the program and the teacher to make learning manageable but on the grit of the student to meet the “challenge.” In the traditional interpretation, much of the “homework” assigned to students (and their families) is motivated by this belief. The assumption seems to be that students will be strengthened if they are “challenged.”

This belief is flatly wrong. If students are placed appropriately, the work is relatively easy. Students tend to learn it without as much “struggle.” They tend to retain it better and they tend to apply it better, if they learn it with fewer mistakes.

Student Program Alignment and Teaching to Mastery
by Siegfried Engelmann
July 1999

I think it's time to look into the emotional costs of heterogeneous grouping. Having lived through 3 years of my own child struggling through a class that was over his head, I can tell you that it's not good for the child. Heterogeneous grouping is no picnic for the kids on the bottom.


ability grouping & SAT score decline
ability grouping in Singapore
stagnation at the top - Fordham report
Tracking: Can It Benefit Low Achieving Children?
Linda Valli on tracking in 5 Catholic high schools, 1
Linda Valli on tracking in 5 Catholic high schools, 2
"school commitment" in Valli's study of tracking in Catholic high schools
7th grade depression starts in 1st grade

always worse than you think

In July, the 9th Circuit court ruled that a strip-search of an 8th grader by school authorities looking for prescription-strength Ibuprofen pills violated the student’s rights under the Fourth Amendment.

A panel of the court ruled 8-3 on July 11 that officials at an Arizona middle school “acted contrary to all reason and common sense as they trampled over” the privacy interests of Savana Redding. By a vote of 6-5, the panel held that the assistant principal who ordered the strip-search was not entitled to qualified immunity from liability in the student’s lawsuit.

Ms. Redding was searched in 2003 as part of an investigation into the possession of over-the-counter and prescription medications by students at Safford Middle School in the Safford school district.

After receiving a report that Ms. Redding, who was 13 at the time, had been distributing Ibuprofen pills to fellow students, school officials searched the girl’s backpack, then asked a female administrative assistant to go through her clothing. Ms. Redding had to remove her pants, lift the waist band of her underpants, and lift her shirt and pull out her bra band, according to court papers. No contraband was found.

Ms. Redding and her parents challenged the school officials’ actions as a violation of her Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches. They lost before a federal district court and before an initial three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit court. But the 9th Circuit granted a review by a larger panel of judges.

In that decision, the 9th Circuit majority said the strip search was “excessively intrusive,” especially considering that school officials were relying on an uncorroborated tip from another student who had been caught in possession of the pills.

[snip]

The school district’s appeal of that decision in Safford Unified School District v. Redding (Case No. 08-479) was also supported by national school groups. The NSBA and the AASA called for the Supreme Court to provide greater guidance to school administrators about the legality of student searches.

The 9th Circuit court’s ruling “unfairly places school officials in the position of being sued and held personally responsible for good faith decisions intended to protect the health and safety of students entrusted to their care and tutelage,” the education groups said.

Supreme Court to Weigh IDEA, Strip-Search Cases
Published Online: January 16, 2009
EDUCATION WEEK Vol. 28, Issue 19

You have to love the fact that the National School Board Association, aka "elected representatives," is weighing in against the child and her parents, aka "voters."

You also have to love the fact that this girl was strip-searched on the say-so of a kid who actually had prescription-strength Ibuprofen in her possession.

liveblogging the inauguration

Ann took a job teaching English at the U.S. embassy. She woke up well before dawn throughout her life. Now she went into her son's room every day at 4 a.m. to give him English lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. She couldn't afford the élite international school and worried he wasn't challenged enough.

The Story of Barack Obama's Mother
By Amanda Ripley
TIME
Wednesday, Apr. 09, 2008

Varmland Waltz

at Muji.com

Click on Muji Play.

I discovered Muji at the JetBlue terminal - beautiful!

Muji pens give Energels a run for their money.

This concludes my Vacation Report.

Muji in Soho

Muji global

coming soon to a school district near you, part 2

reading workshop

What did you learn about reading today?

What did you learn about yourself as a reader?


I spent two hours Googling "Reading Workshop" and "Writing Workshop" this weekend. I don't know why.

The amazing sameness of it all (assist - enhance - reflect) got me to thinking.....is public education a cult?

A half-trillion dollar a year, taxpayer funded, government monopoly cult?

"Seinfeld teaches history"

at the Cooperative Learning Community

I'd never seen this before. (A Karen H find)

here's what trade winds look like

The winds blow all the time.

All

The

Time

The Amsterdam Manor Hotel has been renovated, I think.

This is what it looks like these days.

Here are people talking about it.

worst Monday of the year

it's today!

Animals Make Us Human

Number 13 on the NY Times bestseller list this weekend.

blue is my favorite color

Divi tree

"Divi trees, a common site in Aruba, grow at a forty-five degree angle because of the wind that constantly blows. In Aruba, lost tourists are told to follow the divi trees, as they always point to the hotels."

About.com

beach hair

Google has an answer for everything if you can figure out the key word.

beach hair at flickr

beach hair search flickr

I love beach hair

Beach Hair (closeup)

look at my shiny hair

"Surf Spray gives hair loads of texture and volume, so you can get that tousled, salt-water effect (without the sand in your suit)."





in Aruba

way, way, way off-topic

Aruba!

This is really what the place looks like; the ocean is bright turquoise. I always thought those images had been Photoshopped but they haven't. Amazing.

Aruba is only 12 degrees or so above the equator, and the trade winds, which are humid, never die down, making the place wet & arid at the same time. The island is covered in cactus but the air is moist and so are you.

The result for humans: movie star hair. I'm serious. My hair looked pretty much like that every day we were there, only better: shorter, shiner (way shinier), & no roots. Also no stylists. All I had to do was brush out the dreadlocks I woke up with each morning, et voila. It was a dream come true. I speak as a person with the kind of hair one normally sees on P.E. teachers.^*

So here's my question: is there any way to produce Aruba hair in New York in January?

Also: why would trade winds make hair shiny? I understand the volume part; hair gets bigger when it rains.

But where does the shine come from?

I need to know.


^* Benfield Sports College

recent comments are back!

excellent!

I'm back, too.