First College Visit

I thought people might like to hear about college visits. (BTW, our son is a rising junior.) Perhaps others would like to add their experiences. We stopped at Oberlin on the way back from Interlochen to see their music conservatory. A tour of the college is a separate tour. You can apply to either or both. You can be accepted to the conservatory but not the college. Only about 20 percent of the total 2800 students are in the conservatory, and of those, maybe 25 percent are doing dual degrees - in both sides. Oberlin is very comfortable. You can see everything in about a half-hour of driving around. The college tours take longer. There really is only one hotel (so-so) in town. After about 10 blocks in any direction, the curbs stop and the farms take over. It's a small school lovers dream. The best part of the college is the complete focus on undergraduates. The downside is that maybe it's a little bit too insular. What feels initially comfortable might end up feeling quite different later on. Then again, it was summer and the place was dead. Also, some non-music students like the idea of going to a college with a conservatory attached. My niece is one of those, and she also went to look at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. My brother-in-law really liked Lawrence. My niece liked Oberlin, but chose the College of Wooster. I think that a little snootiness slips out at times. My niece gave one example about Oberlin, and at a college fair, my son said the recruiter talked to him like a child. However, our tour host (student) was very nice. That variation is probably normal, but my brother-in-law talked about the Oberlin aura that exists in the midwest. We're from New England and Boston casts a bigger influence. I don't think my son sees himself in the very flat middle of farmland. We also did a drive by of Yale. We did their on-line virtual tour, but not the real tour. Our son liked their use of separate colleges and could see himself there, but what are the details? We don't know yet. It seems that one can make very little of any college. The question is what opportunities do you have if you try? How much do you have to compete for those opportunities?

Morningside error correction procedure

From my notes from the Morningside Academy Summer School Institute, in this scenario students are reading words on the board out loud:

Common error patterns

• Guessing
• Attending to shape of word
• Attending to only part of the word

Error correction

• NAÏVE LEARNERS: Pre-correct by underlining part of word you predict will be an error
• NAÏVE LEARNERS: Focus & change only the error portion (“I heard something else”) - DON'T write a whole separate word beside the word that was misread
• Erase only part of word and write in what you heard
• Erase multiple times – go back & forth between the word written correctly & the word written incorrectly
• EXPERIENCED LEARNERS: Discrimination correction [see below]
• Rule of thumb: 5 correct practices for every error

To explain, with naïve learners," which I take to mean beginners, if the word on the board is "tree" and a student read "tray," you would erase the double-e and write in 'ay.' You would not write the word "tray" beside the word "tree."

With experienced learners, you do write the word "tray" beside the word "tree," and then have students go back and forth between the two, reading each correctly.

Unfortunately, I no longer recall the reason for this distinction between beginners and more advanced students. I think it had to do with making sure beginners focus on the exact part of the word they are misreading.

update 8/13/2012: Children with developmental disabilities who have been taught to read with sight words may not be able to learn well from either of these discrimination procedures.

palisadesk on students reading different words than the ones on the page

I write this post to another board a few years ago to explain a major cause of these errors as in Catherine's example:

In fact there has been some solid research on this phenomenon. I can't cite chapter and verse off the top of my head, but it was done by Engelmann or perhaps others in the DI community, and investigated just that pattern you mention: children who consistently misread when for then, of for from, where for there, and similar errors of words that are usually both syntactically and visually similar. [Catherine here, interrupting for a moment: the problem I was asking about mostly involved substituting one preposition for another.]

I may not be summarizing the research 100% correctly, but the gist of it is that what we are seeing is the result of the learner having been presented with two very similar things at the same time (or almost the same time), and not having been taught either one to mastery, so that the two became fused in memory in an indistinct way, and one would be randomly substituted for the other. In the case of most of these word substitution errors, the child is correct some of the time and incorrect some of the time -- so s/he doesn't ALWAYS read "when" for "then" or vice-versa. S/he randomly says one word or the other whenever s/he is presented with either of the duo. Over time, this habit becomes a neural circuit and a learned response that is very resistant to change. It rarely is self-corrected, the way some other decoding errors are, because the misreading usually makes sense even if it is incorrect (it may not make the CORRECT sense, but it is not unintelligible). "Julia talked to Edith when she went to the mall" means something different from "Julia talked to Edith then she went to the mall", but the inaccurate reader is unlikely to notice. It's not like the horse/house instance, where if a child reads "The rider mounted his house" s/he will usually recognize that can't be right.

The DI research indicated that children easily learn what they called misrules (usually due to poor or misleading initial presentation) , and these word substitution errors fall into that category. The more the error is practiced, the harder it is to supplant it and engrave a correct response. It may take hundreds of corrections of when/then errors before the reader reliably gets those words right (has a new neural pathway). Many examples of b/d confusion are the same thing - they are not visual discrimination errors in most cases, but are simply instances of children not having learned one of the pair thoroughly before the other was introduced. When words *are* visually similar, the likelihood of confusion is increased, but the visual similarity is not the cause of the confusion. Some children, for instance, repeatedly confuse other letter pairs, or words, that bear no resemblance to each other -- r and g, for instance, and further inquiry usually finds these were introduced about the same time, the child was not provided with adequate practice to mastery, DID remember that it was either one sound or the other, and would randomly say either /g/ or /r/ when presented with either stimulus (leading teachers to say "he knew it yesterday!" when they don't appreciate the randomness of the response -- but randomness within a very narrow range of options, usually only 2 or 3). One student I had consistently confused the words "and" and "said" which had no relation or resemblance to each other, but were introduced the same week on his classroom "word wall."

One effective remedial strategy -- not the only one -- is to teach these pairs explicitly, but first one word at a time. With when/then, for instance, practice writing the word, dictating "when" sentences, reading phrases and sentences with "when" and stories with "when" (reminding the student at the outset that /when/ is the word s/he will encounter, and no discrimination between when and then will be required); then do the same with the other in the pair, then mix them up -- but have the student slowly and carefully sound out each word if necessary. The solution to those misrule/misreading learned errors is careful and targeted practice to mastery.

One analogy I use (if someone thinks of a better one, please share) is to compare the student's experience confusing when/then to someone with a drawer full of socks -- let's say 30 pairs of socks, half of them grey and half of them black. If you pull two random socks out of the drawer, you will get a matched set half the time. It may not matter much that you get a mismatched pair the other half. Unless you have some reason to pay attention, you don't need to change anything. A grey sock and a black sock keep your feet warm, so what?

I had an experience a couple of years ago that made me aware of how this process works. I had to go around and do an attendance-taking chore first thing in the morning and check off two or three students in several classrooms (long story why -- not interesting). Most of the students I knew, and I would just look in the door and see if they were there and mark the attendance sheet. One Grade 4 class, however, had 2 girls on this list, both of whom were new to me. They did not look anything alike, really -- different ethnicities, one much taller, but both wore hijab and had very unusual first names. When I was first introduced to them, I failed to ensure I knew which one was which by solidifying identifying details in my mind. Usually, both were present, and I'd look in and say to myself, There's N. and there's F -- good -- but I could have N and F mixed up, I just noted they were both there. They would straighten me out when I met them in the hall, if I addressed them by the wrong name, but I continued to mix them up for months. I realized partway through the year that this was a similar error to the mislearning children sometimes do:

--I was introduced to 2 new items to learn at the same time, and they shared some common features but I did not spend time to adequately solidify recognition of the special features of each

-- I was frequently required to rehearse my mislearning but not in a situation where it mattered if I was correct or not, and where I rarely received corrective feedback so that I could stop myself and say, Wait a minute, N is the shorter one, or some other identifying factor.

-- The more times I repeated my random error (it was random because half the time I got their names right), the more likely I was to repeat it in the future.

-- the problem was solved by one girl moving, so after that I knew the remaining girl's name. Even so, a year later, I sometimes addressed that girl by the other girl's name. The experience did provide me with an insight into how these misrules/ mislearnings happen.

The DI research into this was part of their development of the Corrective Reading Program. They did a lot of empirical testing to find out how many times students needed to get those confusions corrected before they would master them and be error-free. The number of correction required varied with the age of the student -- the longer s/he had been making the error, the more correction required. Secondary students needed many more corrections than primary students. They have published some of this data, but it is not (probably) of that great an interest to most people. The principle of mislearning and misrules and how to correct them is of general interest, however.

So is the preventative measure, one of which is to introduce the items separately (sometimes separated by long periods, days or weeks or months), ensuring each is learned to mastery (in the case of word reading, by sounding-out all through the word, and segmenting all-through-the-word for spelling). At the upper grade levels, the DI programs also have students spell the words aloud in addition to blending and segmenting them. I've been meaning to look up the research on this (I know they included it because it improved results in large-scale field trials) but don't remember the details. Oral spelling of the words is not a feature of the programs for beginning readers.

Other programs I have heard of (not the DI ones) take the bull by the horns and DO introduce commonly confused items together -- but emphasize practice to mastery right at the start, so that the confusion and "practicing mistakes" does not have a chance to occur.

No doubt there are many other reasons why individual students get particular words wrong, but many of these common substitution errors do seem to share the same features and have similar origins. Many beginning readers are not expected to master correspondences or be accurate in their word reading (if they "make meaning" it is enough) so the Engelmann hypothesis and experimental data explain the phenomena I usually see.

I'm going to look through my notes from Morningside re: "close-in non-examples." I remember them having a distinct procedure for teaching two mixed-up words.

Jeff Hawkins: memory is intelligence, intelligence is memory

I've just read the transcript of Hawkins' talk, which is posted along with the video.

Maybe this is overstating matters, but on a quick read-through of the transcript my impression is that pretty much everything Hawkins says it as odds with pretty much everything constructivist educators believe:

Intelligence is not behavior.

Intelligence is not computation.

Intelligence is memory.

Memory is memory of sequence.

The point of memory is to predict what comes next.

"[T]he neocortex is just memorizing."
"You cannot learn or recall anything outside of a sequence."
"[I]ntelligence is defined by prediction."
"[P]rediction of future inputs is the desired output."

The education establishment has for many years denigrated both memory and sequence in favor of critical thinking, problem solving, spiraling and history taught as themes instead of narratives.

Meanwhile actual experts persist in knowing stuff and in organizing the stuff they know in coherent sequences.

On the other hand, constructivists have picked up on the idea of 'pattern' and 'prediction' in a way instructivists arguably have not....but the injunction that students must 'look for a pattern' (math) and 'make predictions' (reading) seems often to be a means of avoiding sequence (math) and the kind of ordinary nouns-come-after-prepositions-type prediction Hawkins is talking about.

I don't know whether Hawkins is right, of course. Reading the transcript, I wanted to hear him talk about cognitive illusions and the invisible gorilla. (I don't remember whether he discusses illusions in his book with Sandra Blakeslee.)

From the transcript :

So what is the intuitive, but incorrect assumption, that's kept us from understanding brains? Now I'm going to tell it to you, and it's going to seem obvious that that is correct, and that's the point, right? Then I'm going to have to make an argument why you're incorrect about the other assumption. The intuitive but obvious thing is that somehow intelligence is defined by behavior, that we are intelligent because of the way that we do things and the way we behave intelligently, and I'm going to tell you that's wrong. What it is is intelligence is defined by prediction.

[snip]

The AI people said, well, the thing in the box is a programmable computer because that's equivalent to a brain, and we'll feed it some inputs and we'll get it to do something, have some behavior. And Alan Turing defined the Turing test, which is essentially saying, we'll know if something's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human. A behavioral metric of what intelligence is, and this has stuck in our minds for a long period of time.

Reality though, I call it real intelligence. Real intelligence is built on something else. We experience the world through a sequence of patterns, and we store them, and we recall them. And when we recall them, we match them up against reality, and we're making predictions all the time. It's an eternal metric.

[snip]

You're all being intelligent right now, but you're not doing anything. Maybe you're scratching yourself, or picking your nose, I don't know, but you're not doing anything right now, but you're being intelligent; you're understanding what I'm saying. Because you're intelligent and you speak English, you know what word is at the end of this -- (Silence) sentence.

[snip]

You still have that alligator brain. You do. It's your emotional brain. It's all those things, and all those gut reactions you have. And on top of it, we have this memory system called the neocortex. And the memory system is sitting over the sensory part of the brain. And so as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain, it also goes up into the neocortex. And the neocortex is just memorizing. It's sitting there saying, ah, I'm going to memorize all the things that are going on: where I've been, people I've seen, things I've heard, and so on. And in the future, when it sees something similar to that again, so in a similar environment, or the exact same environment, it'll play it back. It'll start playing it back. Oh, I've been here before. And when you've been here before, this happened next. It allows you to predict the future. It allows you to, literally it feeds back the signals into your brain; they'll let you see what's going to happen next, will let you hear the word "sentence" before I said it. And it's this feeding back into the old brain that'll allow you to make very more intelligent decisions.

[snip]

So what is the recipe for brain theory? First of all, we have to have the right framework. And the framework is a memory framework, not a computation or behavior framework. It's a memory framework. How do you store and recall these sequences or patterns?

Jeff Hawkins TED talk

Haven't watched it yet, but it's probably worth the time.

Here's the blurb:

Treo creator Jeff Hawkins urges us to take a new look at the brain -- to see it not as a fast processor, but as a memory system that stores and plays back experiences to help us predict, intelligently, what will happen next.

Jeff Hawkins pioneered the development of PDAs such as the Palm and Treo. Now he's trying to understand how the human brain really works, and adapt its method -- which he describes as a deep system for storing memory -- to create new kinds of computers and tools.

dialect mismatch & the achievement gap

One current [research] focus is on the so-called "achievement gap," which refers to the lower achievement of poor and minority children in school, particularly in areas such as reading. We have begun a project that examines factors that affect African American children's early school achievement, funded by a significant seed grant from the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. This research is being conducted by Julie Washington and Jan Edwards (Comm Dis), David Kaplan (Ed Psych), Maryellen MacDonald, Jenny Saffran, and myself (Psychology), as well as several other faculty. The focus is on ways in which language background affects early school achievement. Most African American children speak the dialect termed African American English, whereas the language in the school is some version of "standard" (also called "mainstream") American English. This dialect mismatch has many effects on the African American child's school experience; it makes tasks such as learning to read literally more difficult than for children for whom there is no dialect mismatch. Our studies focus on young children's knowledge of the alternative dialects, factors that affect ability to switch between dialects, and ways that negative effects of the mismatch can be ameliorated. The idea is to provide supplementary language experiences early, when the child's plasticity for language is high. We can also use our computational models of reading to predict where dialect differences will interfere with progress, and how experience can be structured to improve performance.

Mark S. Seidenberg
Donald O. Hebb Professor
Hilldale Professor
Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Overview of Research

Seidenberg's "connectionist" model of language learning and grammar contradicts Chomsky:

[S]ince Chomsky's early work, knowledge of language has been equated with knowing a grammar. Many consequences followed from this initial assumption. For example, if the child's problem is to converge on the grammar of a language, then the problem does seem intractable unless there are innate constraints on the possible forms of grammar. What if we abandon the assumption that knowledge of language is represented as a grammar in favor of, say, neural networks, a more recently developed way of thinking about knowledge representation, learning, and processing? Do the same conclusions about the innateness of linguistic knowledge follow? The answer is: not at all.

Our goal, then, has been to articulate an alternative framework for thinking about the classic questions listed above. This is not easy: traditional grammarians have about a 40 year lead on us, and only a few linguists actually think the alternative approach will succeed. However, it's a very interesting moment in the study of language. For many years the study of language was dominating by theoretical linguistics, particularly syntax. More recently, there have been important insights coming from outside of traditional grammatical theory: from computational modeling, from studies of the brain bases of learning and neurodevelopment, from renewed interest in the statistical properties of language (which were ignored for many years following Chomsky's famous observations about the statistical triviality of sentences such as "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously").

Chomsky and his followers have always had their critics. However, there was never an alternative theory that could explain basic facts, such as how children acquire language under the conditions that they do. I think for the first time we have the major components of such a theory in hand. And they suggest the remarkable possibility that the standard conclusions about the nature of language and how it is acquired are just dead wrong. This would be an incredible turn of events, a major development in the intellectual history of the study of language.

That's why it's an interesting moment to be studying language.

publications

Knowledge of fractions & division predict success in algebra

When I first started writing kitchen table math, with Carolyn Johnston, Carolyn told me that fractions are the math cliff.

Yesterday, Glen left a link to a new study in Psychological Science confirming the critical importance of fractions -- and long division -- to a child's future success in algebra:

Our main hypothesis was that knowledge of fractions at age 10 would predict algebra knowledge and overall mathematics achievement in high school, above and beyond the effects of general intellectual ability, other mathematical knowledge, and family background. The data supported this hypothesis.

and:

Early knowledge of whole-number division also was consistently related to later mathematics proficiency.

and:

The greater predictive power of knowledge of fractions and knowledge of division was not due to their generally predicting intellectual outcomes more accurately.

More from the article:

ABSTRACT
Identifying the types of mathematics content knowledge that are most predictive of students’ long-term learning is essential for improving both theories of mathematical development and mathematics education. To identify these types of knowledge, we examined long-term predictors of high school students’ knowledge of algebra and overall mathematics achievement. Analyses of large, nationally representative, longitudinal data sets from the United States and the United Kingdom revealed that elementary school students’ knowledge of fractions and of division uniquely predicts those students’ knowledge of algebra and overall mathematics achievement in high school, 5 or 6 years later, even after statistically controlling for other types of mathematical knowledge, general intellectual ability, working memory, and family income and education. Implications of these findings for understanding and improving mathematics learning are discussed.

[snip]

Marked individual and social-class differences in mathemat- ical knowledge are present even in preschool and kindergarten (Case & Okamoto, 1996; Starkey, Klein, & Wakeley, 2004). These differences are stable at least from kindergarten through fifth grade; children who start ahead in mathematics generally stay ahead, and children who start behind generally stay behind (Duncan et al., 2007; Stevenson & Newman, 1986). There are substantial correlations between early and later knowledge in other academic subjects as well, but differences in children’s mathematics knowledge are even more stable than differences in their reading and other capabilities (Case, Griffin, & Kelly, 1999; Duncan et al., 2007).

These findings suggest a new type of research that can con- tribute both to theoretical understanding of mathematical development and to improving mathematics education. If researchers can identify specific areas of mathematics that consistently predict later mathematics proficiency, after controlling for other types of mathematical knowledge, general intellectual ability, and family background variables, they can then determine why those types of knowledge are uniquely predictive, and society can increase efforts to improve instruction and learning in those areas. The educational payoff is likely to be strongest for areas that are strongly predictive of later achievement and in which many children’s understanding is poor.

In the present study, we examined sources of continuity in mathematical knowledge from fifth grade through high school. We were particularly interested in testing the hypothesis that early knowledge of fractions is uniquely predictive of later knowledge of algebra and overall mathematics achievement.

One source of this hypothesis was Siegler, Thompson, and Schneider’s (2011) integrated theory of numerical development. This theory proposes that numerical development is a process of progressively broadening the class of numbers that are understood to possess magnitudes and of learning the functions that connect those numbers to their magnitudes. In other words, numerical development involves coming to understand that all real numbers have magnitudes that can be assigned specific locations on number lines. This idea resembles Case and Okamoto’s (1996) proposal that during mathematics learning, the central conceptual structure for whole numbers, a mental number line, is eventually extended to rational numbers. The integrated theory of numerical development also proposes that a complementary, and equally crucial, part of numerical development is learning that many properties of whole numbers (e.g., having unique successors, being countable, including a finite number of entities within any given interval, never decreasing with addition and multiplication) are not true of numbers in general.

One implication of this theory is that acquisition of fractions knowledge is crucial to numerical development. For most children, fractions provide the first opportunity to learn that several salient and invariant properties of whole numbers are not true of all numbers (e.g., that multiplication does not necessarily pro- duce answers greater than the multiplicands). This understanding does not come easily; although children receive repeated instruction on fractions starting in third or fourth grade (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2006), even high school and community-college students often confuse properties of fractions and whole numbers (Schneider & Siegler, 2010; Vosniadou, Vamvakoussi, & Skopeliti, 2008).

This view of fractions as occupying a central position within mathematical development differs substantially from other theories in the area, which focus on whole numbers and relegate fractions to secondary status. To the extent that such theories address development of understanding of fractions at all, it is usually to document ways in which learning about them is hindered by whole-number knowledge (e.g., Gelman & Williams, 1998; Wynn, 1995). Nothing in these theories suggests that early knowledge of fractions would uniquely predict later mathematics proficiency.

Consider some reasons, however, why elementary school students’ knowledge of fractions might be crucial for later mathematics—for example, algebra. If students do not under- stand fractions, they cannot estimate answers even to simple algebraic equations. For example, students who do not under- stand fractions will not know that in the equation 1/3X = 2/3Y, X must be twice as large as Y, or that for the equation 3/4X = 6, the value of X must be somewhat, but not greatly, larger than 6. Students who do not understand fraction magnitudes also would not be able to reject flawed equations by reasoning that the answers they yield are impossible. Consistent with this analysis, studies have shown that accurate estimation of fraction magnitudes is closely related to correct use of fractions arithmetic procedures (Hecht & Vagi, 2010; Siegler et al., 2011). Thus, we hypothesized that 10-year-olds’ knowledge of fractions would predict their algebra knowledge and overall mathematics achievement at age 16, even after we statistically controlled for other mathematical knowledge, information-processing skills, general intellectual ability, and family income and education.

Early Predictors of High School Mathematics AchievementRobert S. Siegler1, Greg J. Duncan2, Pamela E. Davis-Kean3,4, Kathryn Duckworth5, Amy Claessens6, Mimi Engel7, Maria Ines Susperreguy3,4, and Meichu Chen4Psychological Science 23(7) 691–697

reading on auto pilot

Teri leaves this account of 'nonconscious reading':

I have wondered a bit on this topic, particularly because I do a WHOLE LOT of reading aloud to the kids and it's always curious to me what my mind can get away with while I'm reading.

I was a bit spooked one day to realize that ... I could be thinking about something else completely and still be chugging along, and the kids didn't notice a thing. Now, I had no idea what I'd been reading, and I obviously couldn't read with much animation or emphasis or expression, but it was going in the eyes, through the brain and out the mouth without disrupting the any of the other thoughts I was having.

This actually is quite handy, though, because it allows me to read ahead while I am reading so I can edit "on the fly" fairly smoothly.

Basal ganglia strike again...

how many words can readers predict?

re: readers predicting and mis-predicting words, here are Stanovich and Stanovich:

Another problem concerns the assumptions that have been made about the properties of contextual information. It is often incorrectly assumed that predicting upcoming words in sentences is a relatively easy and highly accurate activity. Actually, many different empirical studies have indicated that naturalistic text is not that predictable. Alford (1980) found that for a set of moderately long expository passages of text, subjects needed an average of more than four guesses to correctly anticipate upcoming words in the passage (the method of scoring actually makes this a considerable underestimate). Across a variety of subject populations and texts, a reader’s probability of predicting the next word in a passage is usually between .20 and .35 (Aborn, Rubenstein, and Sterling, 1959; Gough, 1983; Miller and Coleman, 1967; Perfetti, Goldman and Hogaboam, 1979; Rubenstein and Aborn, 1958).

Indeed, as Gough (1983) has shown, this figure is highest for function words, and is often quite low for the very words in the passage that carry the most information content.
How research might inform the debate about early reading acquisition
Keith E. Stanovich, Ontario institute for Studies in Education and Paula J. Stanovich, University of Toronto | Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423
Volume 18, Issue 2, 1995, pp 87-105

Here's the abstract from the NYU study, which is quite fascinating (I need to read it again...):

Research in object recognition has tried to distinguish holistic recognition from recognition by parts. One can also guess an object from its context. Words are objects, and how we recognize them is the core question of reading research. Do fast readers rely most on letter-by-letter decoding (i.e., recognition by parts), whole word shape, or sentence context? We manipulated the text to selectively knock out each source of information while sparing the others. Surprisingly, the effects of the knockouts on reading rate reveal a triple dissociation. Each reading process always contributes the same number of words per minute, regardless of whether the other processes are operating.

and, from the text:

The question is: if parts, wholes, and context all play roles in object recognition, do the mental processes associated with them interact? Does impairing one process impair the others as well? Or, alternatively, if we remove one process, will the others continue working, unaffected? To explore this question, we turn to reading.

We want to know how people quickly and effortlessly recognize an object when there are a vast number of possibilities. Ordinary reading demonstrates this amazing human skill. In studying object recognition, reading is one of the few cases where one knows the composition: letters are parts, words are wholes, and sentences provide context. Using reading, we can attempt to isolate and measure the contributions of parts, wholes, and context to the recognition of words as objects.
Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation
Denis G. Pelli*, Katharine A. Tillman
PLOS One | August 2007 | Issue 8 | e680

I'm going to knock off for tonight - will try to get some more up tomorrow.

A couple of quick notes, though:

• The study looks at decoding -- reading the words accurately out loud -- not comprehension.  
• "Context" in this study means syntax: the grammatical order of words in the sentence. The authors manipulated context by switching words around. Here's the example they give: contribute others. the of Reading measured - Trying to read this series of words, you have no "context clues" at all, i.e. no syntax to tell you 'a verb has to come next.' 

update 8/9/2012:

from the Eurkalert announcement:

Readers in the study read passages from a Mary Higgins Clark novel. The text was manipulated to selectively knock out each process in turn while retaining the others. Whole word shape was removed by alternating case: “sHe LoOkEd OvEr hEr ShOuLdEr.” To knock out the whole language process, the order of the words was shuffled. To knock out phonics, some of the letters were replaced with others.

Pelli and Tillman’s results show that letter-by-letter decoding, or phonics, is the dominant reading process, accounting for 62 percent of reading speed. However, both holistic word recognition (16 percent) and whole-language processes (22 percent) do contribute substantially to reading speed. Remarkably, the results show that the contributions of these three processes to reading speed are additive. The contribution of each process to reading speed is the same whether the other processes are working or not.

“The contributions made by phonics, holistic word recognition, and whole-language processes are not redundant,” explained Pelli. “These three processes are not working on the same words and, in fact, make contributions to reading speed exclusive of one another.”

Weekly Reader, RIP

in Education Week:

After more than 80 years of providing student-friendly twists on current events, the classroom magazine Weekly Reader will be folded into Scholastic News, Scholastic Inc. has announced.

The consolidated magazine will be called Scholastic News Weekly Reader and will be published weekly in print during the school year, said Hugh Roome, the president of professional and classroom magazines for the New York City-based Scholastic. Junior Scholastic, the most popular classroom magazine in middle schools, will merge with Current Events, a middle school magazine published by Weekly Reader.

The news late last month, which followed Scholastic’s purchase of Weekly Reader in February, came with conflicting stories on whether the publication was given a fair chance to survive on its own.

Weekly Reader had approximately 60 full-time employees. Mr. Roome said 30 Weekly Reader employees in New Jersey were laid off, some employees based in former parent company Reader’s Digest’s White Plains, N.Y., office would be kept on, and others were offered “preferential treatment” in applying for new jobs.

Weekly Reader was distributed to pre-K-6 classrooms on Friday afternoons in the form of a magazine, with articles about current events catering to different age groups. In its heyday, from the 1970s to early 1990s, the publication reached millions of students nationwide, offered at an annual rate on the cheap, most recently for $4-$5 per student.

Its main competitors were Time for Kids, a newsmagazine for the elementary grades, and Scholastic News. Scholastic News publishes 28 titles, reaches 30 million pre-K-12 students, and also dates back to the early 20th century, according to its website.

At the time of the purchase, Weekly Reader had been on the market for “a little while,” after years of declining circulation and changes to its corporate structure, Mr. Roome said. Scholastic initially had no intention of consolidating Weekly Reader but wanted to see how its brand and content fit with Scholastic’s, Mr. Roome said.

Valuable Subscriber Base

But sources close to Weekly Reader said that Scholastic’s main interest was in Weekly Reader’s subscriber base, and that a decision to consolidate it into Scholastic News was made before the purchase.

“They bought a competitor and essentially put it out of business,” said Neal Goff, a former president of Weekly Reader, who worked there from 2004 to 2010. “They reduced the field from three competitors down to two.”

[snip]

Circulation for the publications dipped to around 6.5 million in the late 1990s and early 2000s as more competitors entered the market, but Mr. Goff said the publication’s problems didn’t arise until 2007, when Ripplewood merged the company with Reader’s Digest, the general-interest-magazine company the private-equity firm had recently purchased for $1.6 billion.

By 2009, Reader’s Digest went bankrupt, Weekly Reader became “starved for resources,” and circulation dropped, Mr. Goff said. But the magazine moved toward online editions and digital subscriptions relatively early, and profit margins remained positive, though stagnant, he added.

[snip]

Weekly Reader Folds Into Scholastic News
By Jason Tomassini
Published Online: August 7, 2012
Published in Print: August 8, 2012, as Scholastic Stops Printing Weekly Reader
Vol. 31, Issue 37, Page 12

2007...2009...sometimes I wonder what's going to be left standing when this is over. Whenever it's over.

Horace Mann on letters and spelling

I came across the original source of Horace Mann's characterization of letters (and words!) as "skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions":

A LECTURE ON THE BEST MODE OF PREPARING AND USING SPELLING-BOOKS
Delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, August, 1841
by Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education
Common School Journal, Volumes 3-4 | p. 9-16; 25-32

My subject is Spelling-Books, and the manner in which they should be prepared and used for teaching the Alphabet, Orthography, and Pronunciation of the English language. I ought to say, of the English languages, for we have two English languages; one according to which we write, another according to which we speak.

True!

I need not occupy any time, to prove that the ability to spell with uniform correctness, is a rare possession amongst our people. It has not unfrequently been suggested that intelligence in the people is so necessary for the preservation of a republican government, that no person should be allowed to vote who could not both read and write. If, however, the suggestion means that no person should be allowed to vote, but such as could write without failures in spelling, I tremble at the almost universal disfranchisement. Our republic would be changed to an oligarchy at once.

[snip]

The advantages of teaching children, by beginning with whole words, are many. Nothing has to be untaught which has been once well taught. What is to be learned is affiliated to what is already known. The course of the pupil is constantly progressive. The acquisition of the language, even from its elements, becomes an intelligible process. The knowledge of new things is introduced through the knowledge of familiar things. At the age of three or four years, every child has command of a considerable vocabulary consisting of the names of persons, of animals, articles of dress, food, furniture, & c. The sounds of these names are familiar to the ear and to the organs of speech, and the ideas they represent are familiar to the mind. All that remains to be done, therefore, is to lead the eye to a like familiarity with their printed signs. But the alphabet, on the other hand, is wholly foreign to a child's existing knowledge. Having no relation to any thing known, it must be acquired entirely without collateral aids. In learning words, too, the child becomes accustomed to the form of the letters, and this acquaintance will assist him greatly in acquiring the alphabet, when the time for learning that shall arrive. I do not see, indeed, why a child should not learn to read as easily as he learns to talk, if taught in a similar manner.

[snip]

If we would know how to please children, we must know the sources of their pleasure. ... The principal sources are brilliant and variegated colrs, impressive forms, diversified motions, substances that can be lifted and weighed, and all whose dimensions, therefore, can be examined.

[snip]

In regard to all the other sources of pleasure, -- beauty, motion, music, memory, -- the alphabetic column presents an utter blank. There stands in silence and death, the stiff, perpendicular row of characters, lank, stark, immovable, without form or comeliness, and, as to signification, wholly void. They are skelton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions; and hence it is no wonder that the children look and feel so deathlike when compelled to face them. .... Now, it is upon this emptiness, blankness, silence, and death, that we compel children to fasten their eyes. To say nothing of the odor and fungousness of spelling-book paper, who can wonder at the energy of repulsion exerted upon quick-minded children by this exercise?

Apparently mimeograph paper sniffing was after Mann's time.

welcome to Kindergarten

CT's experience meeting her daughter's Kindergarten teachers:

Recent anecdote. My daughter is starting kindergarten (part-time) this year, and she and I just met with the kindergarten teachers. When I was talking with one teacher about something, the other quietly (without telling me she was about to do it) tested my child on the kindergarten sight words, which she read off quickly, having been taught to read already with Engelmann's Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

It was funny to see the teachers' faces change when I told them that my child had never done sight words. You'd think sight words were some sort of absolutely indispensable part of learning to read. A good phonetic reader can read most sight words without ever seeing a sight word flashcard; the rest can be taught as they come up in other reading instruction.

Training versus education, or Why don't constructivists like phonics?

Why don't constructivists like phonics?

I had always assumed E.D. Hirsch's account explained it: constructivists are the philosophical descendants of Romantics, and Romantics believed that nature is a whole and should not be dissected, analyzed, broken down into component parts, etc. Wholeism, in other words. Romantics extended this belief to teaching and learning.

Constructivists are Romantics, and Romantics are Whole-ists, so: whole child, whole language, whole math, histogeomegraph....

Here's Hirsch:

The romantic poet William Wordsworth said, “We murder to dissect”; the progressivist says that phonemics and place value should not be dissected in isolation from their natural use, nor imposed before the child is naturally ready. Instead of explicit, analytical instruction, the romantic wants implicit, natural instruction through projects and discovery. This explains the romantic preference for “integrated learning” and “developmental appropriateness.” Education that places subject matter in its natural setting and presents it in a natural way is superior to the artificial analysis and abstractions of language. Hands-on learning is superior to verbal learning. Real-world applications of mathematics provide a truer understanding of math than empty mastery of formal relationships.

Reading Matthew Hunter's article on constructivism in British schools, though, I saw the constructivist antipathy to phonics in a new light:

The much publicised debate over "phonics" versus "whole word" methods sounds arcane, but it is really quite simple. "Phonics" involves teaching pupils to match individual letters to sounds, so that they can combine these sounds to make words. The teaching of phonics requires an orderly, teacher-led classroom, and in its technical approach is often characterised as boring and off-putting for young children.

For that reason, "whole-word" methods have been promoted for the last half-century as a more child-centred alternative. Instead of didactically instilling an understanding of which letters make which sounds, whole-word teaching encourages pupils to "discover" how to read by first matching words with meanings, then slowly building an understanding of letter-sounds. This method promises that pupils, to a large degree, will teach themselves. As one whole-word apostle claimed, it will lead to the "withering away of the teacher".

The most important distinction between the two methods is that one works, and one does not. This has not stopped generations of "progressive educators" from eschewing the teaching of phonics, not because of any perceived ineffectiveness but because its didactic methods are repugnant to their ideology. As a result of these teachers indulging their romantic ideals, 11-year olds arrive at secondary school unable to read and write.
Child-Centered Learning Has Let My Pupils Down
MATTHEW HUNTER| June 2012

I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I had never thought of this.

During the Summer School Institute at Morningside Academy, Kent Johnson talked about the difference between training and education. Most of what he was teaching us was how to train students, not how to educate them. Training comes before education.

from my notes:

[The] test for training [is]: “I’m teaching them something I know & they don't know. I want them to be as smart as I am.”

That's training, and for Kent training is (generally) not about discovery, while education may be.

For some time now, I've been frustrated that schools aren't giving students the practice they need.

But now, reading Hunter in the wake of attending the Institute, I think it's probably more accurate to say students aren't getting the training they need.

The reason they aren't getting the training they need is likely to be the fact that the concept of training seems almost intrinsically to require, or at a minimum suggest, an "orderly, teacher-led classroom" and a "technical approach."

and see:
balanced literacy - the video
histogeomegraph: preventing the tragedy of content isolation

question for reading teachers

I've emailed palisadesk & now am posting.

Here is a reading issue I've seen before: a student who, reading out loud, replaces prepositions with other prepositions, sometimes reads verbs incorrectly (e.g. "walk" for "walking" or vice versa), and sometimes reads the wrong pronoun (e.g. "she" instead of "he" or vice versa).

It's as if the student is predicting the next word he or she expects to read, reading that word out loud, and not noticing that the prediction was wrong.

What is going on in cases like these?

And what does one do about it?

the chart I'd like newspapers to use from now on

re: "writing is rewriting" at the New York Times

the chart:













the data:

how to find the chart (it's not easy):

1. GO TO Bureau of Labor Statistics
2. MOUSE OVER Data Bases & Tools
3. Under "Customized Tables," CLICK on News Release Tables: link takes you to Historical News Release Tables
4. Under "Access to Historical Data Series by Subject: Previous years and months," CLICK wizard to right of "Browse labor force, employment, unemployment, and other data by subject": link takes you to Access to historical data series by subject
5. SCROLL DOWN to Employed Persons & CLICK Most Requested Series
6. CHECK Civilian Employment-Population Ratio - LNS12300000
7. CLICK Retrieve Data et voilà:
8. Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey
9. CLICK "Include graphs" if you want to include graphs

64.6% of the population employed in 2000
58.4% employed today

update 8/8/2012:
unemployment rate has been decoupled from the employment-population ratio



update update 8/8/2012:
Here is Scott Sumner explaining why level NGDP-targeting is not inflationary. (I don't entirely follow, but am passing this along.)

And here is Boston Federal Reserve president Eric Rosengren endorsing NGDP targeting. Sumner writes: "Two down, 17 to go."

"NewsDiffs"

re: "writing is rewriting" at the NY Times, Anonymous tells us that the story changed 9 times (!) and leaves a link to NewsDiffs.

Wow!

Never heard of NewsDiffs, and obviously it's something I need to have heard of.

I love ktm Commenters.

"writing is rewriting" at the New York Times

I'm not sure how journalism works these days.

Last Friday, shortly after the BLS released payroll data showing 163,000 jobs created in July, the Times posted its story. The American economy, it said, had "continued" its "long slog upward from the depths of the recession." That was the lede.

The next paragraph reported that the economy was "just barely treading water."

I found this exasperating. Where jobs are concerned, the economy has not "continued" a long slog "upward." Employment crashed in 2008 and never came back, and there's an end to it. The economy is slogging sideways.

But even more annoying in some ways, to me at least, the metaphors are mixed. Barely treading water is not compatible with continuing a long slog upward. One is up, the other is down, or down as much as up. A person who is just barely treading water is not gaining altitude, and I'm pretty sure I remember a time when anyone working for the New York Times would have known this without having to think about it.

A half hour or so later, the story changed. Someone had cleaned up the mixed metaphor, which was good, but the story itself had gotten worse.

The lede was the same--the economy was still slogging upward (not true for jobs!)--but now the 2nd paragraph opened with the observation that while the payroll survey was better than economists had expected, "no one is yet popping champagne corks."

Yet?

I saw one estimate showing that if the economy continued to produce 163,000 new jobs every month from now on it would take 8 years -- 'til 2020 -- to return to the employment level we had in 2007. Eight years to produce a jobs recovery for a 4-year 5-year slump (to date): nobody uses 'yet' in a context like this.

And nobody pops champagne corks at the end of an 8-year slog.

So Take 2 was even more exasperating, and then finally a third version of the story cropped up:

America added more jobs than expected last month, offering a pleasant surprise after many months of disappointing economic news. Even so, hiring was not strong enough to shrink the army of the unemployed in the slightest.
Hiring Picks Up in July, but Data Gives No Clear Signal
By CATHERINE RAMPELL | Published: August 3, 2012

This is the same story! We've gone from the economy slogging upward to economists not popping champagne corks to an army of the unemployed not having been shrunk in the slightest, and all of this in just a couple of hours.

How does this happen?

How do mixed metaphors and bad metaphors get through copy editors at the Times, and how does a story completely change meaning within just a few hours?

I'm wondering whether, these days, news organizations post stories as soon as they possibly can, knowing they can clean things up later.

Do newspapers deliberately post first drafts these days?

update 8/8/2012: Anonymous leaves word that the story changed 9 times.

(click on the images to enlarge)

Terry

I heard a lot about Terry while I was at Morningside Academy's Summer School Institute.

Eric [Haugton, one of the creators of precision teaching] helped his wife Elizabeth plan for a kindergarten student named Terry Harris. Terry had cerebral palsy, and walked with crutches. Elizabeth was teaching him to write his name. It had taken from September to Christmas vacation to teach Terry how to write his first name. Elizabeth wondered if there wasn’t a better way to teach him to write his last name. Even though there were only four new letters to teach, it still seemed like a daunting task. Eric asked her if Terry could write 250 to 200 vertical stokes in a minute. Elizabeth mentioned that Terry was quadriplegic — Eric replied, “I didn’t ask what he looks like, Elizabeth — can he do 250 to 200 vertical strokes per minute or not?” Elizabeth admitted that she didn’t think so. “Can he do 140 to 120 zero’s in a minute?” Again Elizabeth said he probably could not. “Those are the elements that make up the compounds for every letter or number we write. If they are not fluent, then learning to write numbers and letters will fail.”

Returning to school Elizabeth and Terry spent the next three weeks working on strokes and 00s. Terry went from about 50 vertical strokes to over 175, and from 25 zero’s to over 90. “But Terry and I were getting tired of this drill, and we were ready to try going back to writing his name.” So they did; how long did it take for Terry to learn to write Harris?

Terry learned it in five minutes.

LESSONS LEARNED: Eric Haughton and the importance of fluency
Wicked Local Hingham | January 22, 2012

Autistic children often spend years learning the same things over and over and over again in school.

What would happen if all of these students were moved from "discrete trial"/80% mastery criteria to precision teaching/fluency training?

10 faulty notions

William L. Heward's list:

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

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

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

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

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

PTSAs behaving badly

Just my opinion, but I don't think it's a good idea for New York state PTSA leadership to get in the business of protecting special ed children from their parents.

onward and upward

from Education Week:

For years, bands of educators have been trying to free history instruction from the mire of memorization and propel it instead with the kinds of inquiry that drive historians themselves. Now, the common-core standards may offer more impetus for districts and schools to adopt that brand of instruction.
Published Online: July 30, 2012
History Lessons Blend Content Knowledge, Literacy
By Catherine Gewertz

I bet Ed's going to be happy to hear that.

For the record, Ed is not keen on memorization in history classes, either, although his views on that score shifted steadily as Chris went through school. I remember Ed once telling a friend of ours, "I used to want schools to drop AP courses. Now I want Chris to take as many AP courses as he can possibly manage."

That was pretty funny.

Have I mentioned that Ed was one of the people who invented the DBQ? He doesn't like my saying that because he thinks it's entirely possible someone else invented the DBQ before his group did, but I don't think that matters. If Ed and his colleagues didn't invent the DBQ, they re-invented it, which is good enough as far as I'm concerned.

Good enough or bad enough. I remember back when Chris was coming home with one DBQ after another ... in 4th or 5th grade ... which was the first time I heard Ed had been involved in inventing the damn things. Thanks, hon!

Hoist by your husband's petard.

wolf dogs at Louisiana State Penitentiary - photos

I don't think you need a subscription to the Wall Street Journal to see these, but let me know if you do.

Pretty sure the article is free, too:

July 31, 2012, 8:09 p.m. ET
Prison's Guards Are Part Wolf, All Business
Bitten by Rising Cost of Human Guards, Louisiana Prison Deploys Canine Hybrids at Night; 'They're Going to Catch You'
By GARY FIELDS

down and out in the UK

Erica Meltzer sends a link:

Jane Mitchell was the daughter of a lorry driver. Reflecting on her education during the 1940s, she wrote: "I enjoyed the mental drill and exercise I was put through, even the memorising from our geography book of the principal rivers and promontories of the British Isles . . . It never occurred to me to question the purposes or methods of what we were made to do at school. The stuff was there to be learned, and I enjoyed mopping it up."

Jane went on to become a classics lecturer at Reading University. It is hard to imagine a child of her background taking so academic a career route today. Then again, it is hard to imagine that such a child today would receive the rigorous education she enjoyed.
Child-Centered Learning Has Let My Pupils Down by Matthew Hunter | Standpoint June 2012

Reading the whole thing now.

Independent George reflects

re: sticky wages at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Independent George writes:

You know you've been fully immersed into the canine world when the first thing you think about when reading an econ article on a math blog is how they've gotten the dogs wrong.

I cracked up when I read that.

Since I, too, find dogs majorly fascinating, I'm posting Independent George's second Comment:

The other red flag from your quoted passage is "120 pounds". Wolves don't naturally grow anywhere close to that size, which makes me question how much wolf is actually in those supposed hybrids.

I will say, though, that wolves ARE scary; when you see those yellow eyes staring at you in the yard, I completely understand how that would deter a prisoner escape. True wolfdogs behave very differently from dogs, and we're genetically hardwired to spot the difference. The very thing which causes the intimidation is also what makes them so unruly. And the lesson from the Belyaev experiments is that you can't have both - the behavioral traits are tied too strongly to the physical appearance.

I first grasped the "genetically hardwired" understanding between people and dogs when Christopher was age 7.

Unfortunately, Safari ate my post, so I will have to reconstruct it later.

in which I am vindicated at last

For years Ed bugged me about exercise and weight loss (he is super-thin and exercises a LOT), and for years I said exercise did not cause weight loss for me and exercising more would not solve the problem.

I was right.

Hah!

Revised weight loss predictor

sticky wages redux

off-topic:

Having become something of a sticky wage aficionado, I was amused to see this story, which may be the ultimate sticky-wage scenario:

Wolf, a 120-pound canine cross between a wolf and a malamute, paced his pen, staring out with amber eyes. In a few hours, his work shift would begin.

He's part of a squad of wolf dog hybrids working nights at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a local answer to the kinds of budgetary strains felt at many of the nation's prisons.

Nobody yet has tried to overpower or outrun them. Lou Cruz, 55 years old, who's serving life for a murder he committed in Jefferson Parish near Gretna in 1981, said inmates are keenly aware of the four-legged security force prowling the perimeter.

"You might run," he said, "but they're going to catch you."

The wolf dogs, as they are called here, are the brainchild of Warden Burl Cain and his staff, and they were brought in last year in response to a steady decline in the prison's annual budget from $135 million five years ago to $115 million today. The prison, which is known as Angola, has laid off 105 out of 1,200 officers, and 35 of the 42 guard towers now stand empty on the 18,000-acre prison grounds.

The animals regularly guard at least three of the seven camps that make up the complex.

Mr. Cain says the wolf dogs are a strong psychological deterrent. "The wolf ate Grandma," he said.

They also save money. The average correctional officer at Angola earns about $34,000 a year, a prison spokesman said. By comparison, the canine program, which includes about 80 dogs—the wolf hybrids along with other breeds for other tasks— costs about $60,000 annually for medical care, supplies and food.
Prison's Guards Are Part Wolf, All Business By GARY FIELDS

So we have wolf dogs earning $750 a year working side by side with humans earning $34K.^* And the warden is collecting his retirement salary along with his regular salary.

Having Googled a bit, I haven't found reports indicating that the prison cut wages or imposed furloughs before laying off people and hiring dogs. But even if they did, sticky wages are in play.

Assuming total compensation is $50K per officer, the prison could hire back all 105 employees if they reduced compensation of the 1095 remaining employees by $4,375. (Somebody check my math, please!)

That never happens.

^* I don't know whether $34K includes benefits.

Not your father's bell curve

money-back guarantee at Morningside Academy

Morningside Academy offers a money-back guarantee for progressing two years in one in the skill of greatest deficit. Summed across its 23 years, Morningside Academy has returned less than one percent of school-year tuition. (p. 7)

[snip]

The summer school program offers a money-back guarantee for progressing 1 year in the skill of greatest deficit. Summed over 23 years, Morningside Academy has returned less than two percent of summer school tuition. (p. 10)

The Morningside Model of Generative Instruction: What It Means to Leave No Child Behind by Kent Johnson & Elizabeth M. Street

money back

from my notes taken during the Summer School Institute at Morningside Academy:

We put our money where our mouth is. [In special education] every year you gain [just] 6 months & get farther and farther behind. Instead of gaining 6 months, we want you to gain 2 years for 1 year in the chair [i.e., one year in Morningside].

The kids gain two years. [They are] not lifers in special ed. We want them to gain a lot and grow a lot.

People say it’s impossible.

If we don’t [produce 2 years gain in 1 year], we give the parents the money back.

There are a couple of riders: students have to attend [school], and parents have to support the program. Parents have to be involved in daily report card.

········

Parents are required to attend one class a year on how to read and understand the daily support card. The parent has to interact with the Support Card or they lose the guarantee – [and] the parent can’t just give kids money for lots of [As]

[At Morningside, an equal sign on the Daily Support Card is the equivalent of an A.]

The parents do give tangible rewards: you pick dessert, you pick the video. Parents tie rewards to positive interactions in the family.

Or the family could just have a discussion with the child [if grades on the Daily Support Card are not what they should be].

The Support Card is a jumping-off point for parents. The parent can talk about each category, and the categories are very specific.

QUESTION: How do you know the parent has interacted with the Support Card?

If you see the child hasn’t been taking the Support Cards home – if that pattern shows up – or if the kid doesn’t care if he gets a point; that means the parent doesn’t care. Then [we] call the parent in for a conference, & at every conference we talk about 'How are you interacting with the Support Card?'

palisadesk explains the dead man's test

palisadesk writes:

Where I found the "Dead Man Test" useful was in goal-setting and problem solving. For instance at school support team meetings, we might be considering a 2nd grader who is always out of seat, interrupting others, fooling around. When we try to focus on specific plans of action, with measurable steps and goals, it is not unusual for for goals like "stops shouting out" to make the list.

Enter the Dead Man Test. I'm usually taking the notes, so I lead off with, What do you want to see Student X DO?

I may get another answer that describes what we DON'T want. Then I point out, '"Don't interrupt" fails the Dead Man Test. If a dead person can do it, it's not a behavior. " After some laughter we can refocus on what it will look like if the student behaves the way we want:

--stays on task for 3 minutes
--raises hand before speaking
--puts completed assignment in basket...

...and so forth. It's a matter of looking at things in terms of what you WANT to see (usually, in increments, so that you can develop the habits or skills) instead of what you DON'T WANT.

A maxim I remember from long ago is, You get more of what you pay attention to. The Morningside people make a great deal of observing and reinforcing the appropriate behaviors and study habits -- real behaviors, not "dead man" non-behaviors.

Milton Friedman on what schools would be like with vouchers

from Scott Sumner's blog today:

I didn’t realize until now that today would have been the 100th birthday of my favorite economist. So I don’t have a post prepared. My favorite Friedman comment was in response to someone asking him what sort of schools would be provided under a voucher system. I believe he replied something to the effect; “If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t favor vouchers, I’d just instruct the public schools to operate that way.”

I love this observation, though of course the punchline is completely wrong. It is not possible to 'instruct the public schools to operate' this way or that. Public schools do what they do.

Probably true of most institutions and organizations, not to mention people.

(?)

They [ STILL! ] Do What They Do!! ;D

When I read this article, it made my blood boil! Amazing that this junk makes it into print! (Since it's Monday, you may want to put reading this one on hold...) Is Algebra Necessary? NYTimes Sunday Review, Opinion Pages I agree with rknop that "the core of his argument is the ultimate in anti-intellectualism"

Marna on Morningside Academy

Marna writes:

My daughter is learning disabled from a stroke at birth. This is her 3rd VERY SUCCESSFUL summer at Morningside Academy. When she started, she had completed 5th grade and was testing at 2nd Grade 0 month for writing. This year at the end of 7th grade, she tested 6th grade 6th month on most of her writing EXCEPT on the essay portion, which she scored 9TH grade!!! When she started Morningside academy, she couldn't construct a paragraph, let alone an essay. This year she is in their Study Skills class and loving it. I have taken many of their ideas about fluency and applied them to my math tutoring and math class business (I teach homeschooling math classes at co-ops) with much success.

I TOTALLY agree with Catherine. I wish our local schools would take a page from Morningside Academy. We are local;you would think they would, especially after the big flap in Seattle about the horrid math curriculum that parents did not like

It's the best.

No question.

FedUp Mom on emotional vs academic problems

FedUp Mom writes:

I am thoroughly skeptical of the ability of "experts" to determine whether a child's problem is emotional or academic.

Our Younger Daughter was refused admission to a LD school on the grounds that her problems were "emotional and behavioral, not academic." After a year of a great deal of academic work on our parts, guess what -- no more emotional or behavioral problems on her part.

It turned out that her emotional problems were caused by underlying academic problems. Basically, she wasn't learning how to read, which caused anxiety, which caused bad behavior.

Right.

the dead man's test

For years I have puzzled over the weirdness of diets and dieting.

When you're on a diet -- when I'm on a diet -- I'm trying to not do something. Not eat ice cream, or not eat potato chips, or not take 2nd, 3rd, or 4th helpings, or not consume any one of a gazillion different things a person would happily wolf down if calories were not an issue. Conceivably, the list of things I'm trying not to eat is infinite.

This has always confounded me. Infinite notness: does that even make sense? I mean, sure, the universe is infinite and all, but does infinite notness make sense as a plan?

Say you're a human being confronting a challenge or pursuing a goal: don't you usually make a plan to actually do something?

Take a concrete step or two?

Formulate a plan of action?

Assuming the answer is generally speaking 'yes,' where do diets fit in? With a diet, the basic idea is to spend 16 hours a day not doing something, so is not doing something the plan?

Not eating junk 16 hours a day every day from now on?

Is not doing something doing something?

I find the whole thing mystifying, and I always have.

The best answer I've come up with is that not doing something isn't doing something, not really. And, as a corollary, not doing something when it comes to food is harder than doing something.

My foray into quasi-veganism seems to support my hunch, but until yesterday I had no idea what research had to say on the subject if anything.

Turns out the precision teaching folk figured it out long ago:

The Dead Man Test

The dead man test was devised by Ogden Lindsley in 1965 as a rule of thumb for deciding if something is a behavior. The need for such a test stems from the importance of focusing on what an organism actually does when attempting to understand or modify its behavior. It serves as a guideline for the identification of whether the "behavior" of interest could be performed or measurably demonstrated by a "dead man."

The question posed by the dead man's test is this: Can a dead man do it? If the answer is yes, it doesn't pass the dead man's test and it isn't a fair pair -– for example "behave appropriately 80% of lunch hour" -– then it is not a well written goal. If the answer is no, you have a fair pair. For example:

Suppose that you wanted a fair pair target behavior for "swears at peers." Let's say that you came up with the target behavior "does not swear at peers." Does this pass the dead man's test? No. A dead man could refrain from swearing at peers. What would be better? How about "speaks to peers without swearing"? This passes the dead man's test because a dead man does not have the power to speak.

Don't eat ice cream is definitely something a dead man can do.

On the other hand, Stop eating ice cream is not something a dead man can do.

sigh

I'm going to eat an apple tomorrow.

here's something you won't see at a precision teaching school

The 100-Book Challenge.

Apparently, the 100 Book Challenge is yet another program that produces parent uprisings.

The people at Morningside say Robert Dixon's Reading Success is the best reading program on the market.

For writing, they use Anita Archer's Sentence Refinement. (Can't remember whether they use Archer's content reading programs for fluent readers -- I'm thinking they do.)

I'm back!

Wow.

That was intense. Eight-hour classes during the day, 3-hour reading assignments at night, tests each morning, no family, no dogs, no kitchen, AND a whole new group of classmates to get to know --- Working memory blowout!

By the end of the Week 2, I was having mini-blackouts in class. I would be sitting in my Learning Position, wearing my Learning Expression and Tracking the Speaker with my eyes, and....I would suddenly come to and have no idea how much time had passed since the last time I actually heard something the speaker said. It was like SAT reading, only for listening.

Plus try jumping rope 100 times inside a hotel room. (I hit 100 in June.)

All worth it.

I've just spent two weeks of my life witnessing what is probably the best teaching on earth.

Many notes to share.