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“I love my Vit-a-mix,” she continued, enunciating each syllable, before launching into a highly complimentary review of the company’s return and repair policy. “I love it so much, I would recommend it to the dead!”My thoughts exactly.
COOK: What are you looking into now? Where do you see the field going in the future?Number one: most college applicants seem to write personal narratives. As far as I can tell.
PENNEBAKER: One of the most fascinating effects I’ve seen in quite awhile is that we can predict people’s college performance reasonably well by simply analyzing their college admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.
To me, the use of nouns -- especially concrete nouns -- reflects people’s attempts to categorize and name objects, events, and ideas in their worlds. The use of verbs and pronouns typically occur when people tell stories. Universities clearly reward categorizers rather than story tellers. If true, can we train young students to categorize more? Alternatively, are we relying too much on categorization strategies in American education?
The Secret Language Code
Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns
By Gareth Cook
... only 43 percent of SAT takers among this year's freshmen are ready for the academic rigors of college studies.
... The SAT Benchmark score of 1550 is associated with a 65 percent probability of obtaining a first-year GPA of B- or higher, which in turn is associated with a high likelihood of college success. Studies show that students who meet the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark are more likely to enroll in a four-year college, more likely to earn a higher first-year GPA, and more likely to earn a higher first-year GPA, and more likely to persist beyond the first year of college and complete their degree.
Students planning to major in some of the liberal arts and sciences performed significantly better than many who are aiming at more vocationally oriented degrees. Students wishing to major in multi/interdisciplinary studies earned the highest combined SAT score (1757), followed by the physical sciences (1673), English language and literature (1665), and social sciences (1661).
Significantly lagging behind were students hoping to major in three of the most popular fields -- education (1442), psychology (1484), and business management and marketing (1497). Some of the lowest scores came from students wanting to major in parks and recreation (1328) and construction trades (1274).
[Henriksson] hastens to add, however, that the book is not a criticism of teachers. Society's interest in what is current tends to eclipse attempts to focus on history. "We are bombarded with an array of material, and it is hard for kids to sort out what's important and what's not. We are losing our common body of knowledge. Teachers are battling uphill against an information revolution that devalues the past."On the subject of common knowledge, I'm pretty sure I have only one student who knew what an adjective was when the semester began.
Still, Henriksson, who teaches a world history survey course taken mostly by college freshmen, points out that many students lack the most basic historical and geographical background. At the beginning of a recent term, he says, he distributed a series of basic history and geography questions to 80 of his students. The majority did not know that Dublin is in Ireland. "Either they never absorbed what they were taught, or they were never exposed to it," Henriksson said.
Some students confuse periods of history in their essays, Henriksson notes, citing the following example from the book: "Wars fought in the 1950s and after include the Crimean War, Vietnam, and the Six-Minute War. President Eisenhower resorted to the bully pool pit. John F. Kennedy worked closely with the Russians to solve the Canadian Missile Crisis."
Some students are simply confused, however, including the one who claimed, "Judyism had one big God, named 'Yahoo.'"
Based on his own experience, Henriksson says, the following general understandings represent the basic accurate historical knowledge one can assume of U.S. college students:
- At some point "in the distant past," the United States fought a war of independence against a major European or Asian power.
- George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon were presidents of the United States. Washington was the first president and Lincoln was in office a long time ago.
- The United States still suffers from the legacy of slavery, whenever that occurred.
- The Civil War, which took place sometime between 1750 and 1930, had something to do with slavery.
- Adolf Hitler, "a foreigner of some kind," was a bad person.
- There was at least one world war but not more than three.
Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind, observes that with increasing abundance, people want unique products and services: “For businesses it's no longer enough to create a product that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful.”1Remember those days? The days when "increasing abundance" could simply be assumed?
Edel went to a college in Pennsylvania and Melinda to one in New York. Both have undergraduate degrees in elementary education, yet they both recalled how lost they felt when they first stood in front of a classroom. They hadn’t done nearly enough student teaching, they felt, and, in any case, the student teaching they had done hadn’t prepared them to deal with issues, as Edel put it, “like poverty, drugs, crime, and hunger” that she was seeing on a daily basis.Speaking of classroom management, organization, and lesson planning, I am trying to figure out how to make my computer act like Google.
In desperation, Edel sent a note to one of her college professors asking for help. (He gave her a few pointers.) Melinda recalls thinking that even the most basic elements of her job — classroom management, organization, lesson planning — were things she had to figure out on her own, after she had begun teaching. When I asked them what they had learned in college, they shouted in unison: theory! (Denise went on to get a master’s degree in education, which she laughingly described as “not exactly hands-on.”)
Three Sisters (Not Chekhov's) by Joe Nocera | NY Times | Published: September 27, 2013
A Broken SubjectThis is a remarkable passage.
At the start of this new millennium, throughout much of the K-12 English curriculum, grammar is a broken subject. If you find yourself just not knowing what to do about grammar-how to teach it, how to apply it, how to learn what you yourself were never taught-you are not alone. Grammar is often ignored, broken off altogether from the teaching of literature, rhetoric, drama, composition, and creative writing. Grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts. Perhaps you've set aside time for labeling parts of speech, correcting errors, and modeling effective use of punctuation, but you may feel unmoored: you wonder whether the grammar you learned in school (what little there may have been) is sufficient or if the methods you learned by are up-to-date. And you certainly wouldn't be alone if you were embarrassed to reveal to your colleagues all that you don't know about grammar. Grammar feels like a frowning pedant reproaching you for not knowing enough about subject-verb agreement, for blithely ending sentences with prepositions, for splitting infinitives without even understanding what that means, for promiscuous use of commas and flagrant case violations. And, even if you speak and write with a confident tongue and well-schooled hand, you may tremble at the thought of trying to get your students to write complete sentences.
You are not alone. The obstacles to revitalizing the teaching of grammar are several. One is that our profession has lost sight of the connection between studying grammar and learning to read and write. As Robert J. Connors recounted in "The Erasure of the Sentence," our interest in analyzing sentences has faded since the 1970s. Today it is the process of writing, along with originality, authenticity, and personal writing, that we value. The change has left sentence-level work--even such proven approaches as sentence combining-in shadow. We're not comfortable encouraging students to be original and authentic one minute and then assigning them exercises in sentence structure the next. Many English departments, and highly respected English teachers, argue forcefully that sentence-level work is mechanical, behavioristic, antihumanistic, and, most scorn-worthy of all, boring.I'm sorry.
It's application time. Not only is there the Common App, but some colleges have their own app systems. My son also has a couple of other online apps (with essays) to fill out and we haven't even gotten to the scholarship season. The question for today is what to do about things like hours per week for activities. When you talk about a sport, people know that it's seasonal. Then again, some do three or four season soccer. My son does music year-round, and in the summer at camp, he could claim that it's 8 hours or more a day what with classes and practicing. If I convert this into a year-round weekly average, one might think that his hours are padded. This must also be an issue for sports kids and their summer camps. Do admissions people have red flag indicators on hours per week? Are their unwritten rules about how this number should be calculated? How about travel time to lessons or events?
Then there is the limited space for explaining extracurriculars and positions/awards. They want to make a holistic judgment about an applicant, but they give you extremely limited space to make your case. I know they don't want to see all sorts of fluff, but not only do they limit the number of activities you can enter, they give you almost no space to explain anything about the important ones.
Does anyone have any advice about this? Do you look for options to add in additional clarifying information? It seems that in their efforts to standardize format and to limit application thickness, they are missing critical information for their holistic decision. Essays are another whole topic. They were going over potential essay topics in my son's AP English class and one student talked about (the ideal place essay) how he wanted to talk about mowing the lawn. The teacher thought that was a good idea. Essays remind me of docudramas; heavy on the drama and light on the docu.
I went to a meeting at our school the other night where they said that they were changing from an unweighted GPA to a weighted GPA. Although our school calculates a class rank based on weighting courses, it's not in a typical GPA format. Actually, it's more accurate because it doesn't use buckets. However, many colleges look at whatever GPA is shown on the transcript and an unweighted GPA based on 4.0 rarely looks good against a weighted GPA based on a maximum of 5. An admissions person from our state university gave an example of how the head of admissions once said that he was "not comfortable" with someone's GPA even though he should have known it was unweighted. I was surprised to learn that many colleges value GPA, but don't bother (probably a money issue) to calculate their own even though they know there is no national standard even for weighting. It's also interesting that some people can make bad holistic decisions.
They said that across the nation, many colleges are ignoring class rank even if it is adjusted for class size. If the class rank is the only thing that reflects the difficulty of the courses taken, it will be ignored and the college may just look at the unweighted GPA. So much for holistic consideration. The admissions person said that one might get rejected in the first cut and never get to any sort of holistic evaluation. And even in the holistic process, your numbers can help or hurt. So the goal is to maximize your numbers to get into the highest holistic academic/EC bucket you can.
One formula is the Academic Index used by Ivy League colleges. Apparently, it dropped its rank portion (dependent on class size) and added in one based on GPA, although it requires recalculating the GPA into a standard form.
There is also this, which gives a spreadsheet calculator.
Although AI was developed for athletes, they calculate it for all students.
The first part is based on your SAT scores, the second part is based on your SAT II scores, and the third part is based on your GPA. The link above talks about a GPA table supplied to the eight universities, but it doesn't explain how the GPA is calculated. It appears to use a weighted scale where the top score is 4.3. I haven't found out how this number is calculated. The spreadsheet then proceeds to choose the higher score associated with each of the two GPA numbers. It's always struck me that the SAT scores make up two-thirds of this index. Colleges might include a fudge factor if they know something about a high school, but no option for that shows up in the example spreadsheet.
The problem with rank is that you can't correct for it based on whether it uses weighted or unweighted GPA. Recalculating the GPA is good because it isolates the variable of grades. Some colleges are calculating unweighted GPAs using just the core academic courses. Then they can provide a factor for how much you challenged yourself given what your high school has to offer. Then they can correct again if they know something about the difficulty of your high school. At our meeting, they repeated the nugget that "it's best to get A's in AP classes." My nuanced view is that it's best to have the highest unweighted GPA while still looking like you are challenging yourself. Colleges want 'A' students. It's better to have them think you could have challenged yourself more rather than to do so, but slip.
The US economy in 2000 had really, really full employment — it was an era when labor was so scarce that McDonald’s was actively trying to recruit senior citizens, when the joke was that you could get a job as long as your breath would fog a mirror, that is, as long as you were actually alive.
Slackers at the Fed
Like so many young Americans, Derek Wetherell is stuck.
At 23 years old, he has a job, but not a career, and little prospect for advancement. He has tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, but no college degree. He says he is more likely to move back in with his parents than to buy a home, and he doesn't know what he will do if his car—a 2001 Chrysler Sebring with well over 100,000 miles—breaks down.
"I'm kind of spinning my wheels," Mr. Wetherell says. "We can wishfully think that eventually it's going to get better, but we don't really know, and that doesn't really help us now."
Mr. Wetherell is a member of a lost generation, a group that is only now beginning to gain attention of many economists and employment experts. From Oakland to Orlando—and across the ocean in Birmingham and Barcelona—young people have come of age amid the most prolonged period of economic distress since the Great Depression.
Most, like Mr. Wetherell, have little memory of the financial crisis itself, which struck while they were still in high school. But they are all too familiar with its aftermath: the crippling recession, which made it all but impossible for many young people to get a first foothold in the job market, and the achingly slow recovery that has left the prosperity of their parents' generation out of reach—perhaps.
"This has been for quite a while now a hostile environment for young people," said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, which has studied the impact of the recession on young people. "This is all they've really known."
The financial crisis that struck five years ago this month opened up a sinkhole in the U.S. economy that swallowed Americans of all ages and backgrounds. Retirees lost life savings. Families lost homes. Millions of Americans lost their jobs.
Wanted: Jobs for the New 'Lost' Generation By BEN CASSELMAN and MARCUS WALKER
Five years after the 2008 crisis, younger adults still struggle to find work | Updated September 14, 2013, 4:26 p.m. ET
Surf the Net:[pause]
To explore various websites on the Internet.
Clicking
Pressing and releasing a button on a mouse to select or activate the area on the screen where the cursor is pointing. Usually, you click on the left side of the mouse (called a left click). For more advanced functions, you click on the right side of the mouse (called a right click).
Premack gave a group of rats free access to drinking water and a running wheel (Premack, 1959). He recorded their behavior across several minutes. Initially (at baseline), each rat spent some time drinking and some time running, but on average rats spent more time running than drinking: about 250 seconds running and only about 50 seconds drinking. Then, Premack restricted the rats’ access to the wheel: they were allowed to run only after they had drunk a certain amount of water. The rats soon learned the contingency and started drinking water in order to gain access to the running wheel. Unsurprisingly, the total amount of running decreased, because the rats now had to work to obtain access to the wheel. But the total amount of drinking increased to more than 100 seconds, as the rats now performed this behavior more often in order to gain access to the wheel. In effect, the activity of running was acting as a reinforce, and it was increasing the probability of an otherwise infrequent behavior, drinking:
S (running restricted) → R (drinking) → C (access to wheel)
Premack went on to show a similar pattern in human children (Premack, 1959). He put the children in a room that contained a pinball machine and a bowl of candy, and he recorded how much time each child spent playing pinball and eating candy. Some of the children spent more time playing pinball. Premack then restricted access to the pinball machine, allowing these children to play only after they had eaten some candy. Candy eating increased, showing that access to the preferred activity (pinball) could reinforce the less-preferred activity (candy eating). Conversely, children who preferred eating candy in the first place could be trained to play more pinball, by making access to the candy contingent on playing pinball.
Thus, in both rats and children, the opportunity to perform a highly frequent behavior can reinforce a less-frequent behavior. This idea came to be known as the Premack principle. Examples of the Premack principle abound in human life. For example, left to their own devices, most children will spend more time watching television than doing their homework. Thus, watching television is a preferred activity, and it can be used to reinforce the less-preferred activity of homework. The parent restricts television time, making it contingent on homework. As a consequence, the child spends more time doing homework than he would have done if television had not been restricted. A later extension of the Premack principle, the response deprivation hypothesis, suggests that the critical variable is not which response is normally more frequent but merely which response has been restricted: by restricting the ability to execute almost any response, you can make the opportunity to perform that response reinforcing (Allison, 1993; Timberlake & Allison, 1974). For example, perhaps you have a chore, like cleaning your room or doing laundry, that you normally detest. But if access to this activity is restricted, it can become reinforcing. If you have been studying for several hours straight, the idea of “taking a break” to clean your room or do the laundry could begin to look downright attractive. If so, you’ve experienced the Premack principle at work.
Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior New York: Worth Publishers, 2007
Mark Gluck
Eduardo Mercado
Catherine Myers
p316-317
Emotional intelligence plays a part in a variety of human interactions.and:
“Emotions are fundamental to who we are as humans. If we don’t have emotions, we can’t do our work, we can’t make decisions, we can’t have relationships.”The person quoted here is Susan Rivers, deputy director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University. As the article's lede explains: "Emotional intelligence is in the ascendancy at Yale University."
The center, already operational, recently held its biggest training session to date, with educators from more than 50 schools across the country. They join 75,000 school leaders from more than 500 schools worldwide who also have had the training.What exactly does the training consist of? It's hard to tell. In the words of director Marc Brackett:
“It isn’t a kit you can buy. It’s an approach. We are teaching the teachers and the kids. Some people call these 21st-century skills."As the Register explains:
The training is known specifically as the RULER approach. It stands for: recognizing emotions, understanding the causes and consequences of emotions, labeling the full range of feelings, expressing them appropriately and regulating them.Despite the gigantic number of school leaders who have already "had the training," much of it has yet to be developed. Purportedly in the works are instructional videos, games, and online simulations that will, in the Register's words, "illustrate emotional intelligence."
We look for evidence of social maturity from all our applicants and especially from home-schooled students. Your personal statement, interests and activities, and letters of recommendation should speak to your ability to integrate well with other students and tell us about your non-academic interests.As a side note, when it comes to impositions on home schooled children, we find another Yale-connected educational power broker. This would be Yale alumnus David Coleman, former lead architect of the Common Core and current president of the College Board. Coleman has been working had to align the SATs with the Common Core--in ways that, as Paula Bolyard writes in a recent post on Pajamas Media, may pressure home schools to conform to what's going on everywhere else.
Chief Joseph [a school in Montana] - they had no aims, no celeration aims, no peer coaching...they just had the kids practice computation (& some other things) - last 30 minutes of the day (worst time to ask kids to do anything) - real simple - use daily chart - timer on, timer off - use practice sheets & chart - by June the kids at the Chief Joseph school were now scoring at the 80th percentile while district kids were in low 60s - ITBS Chief Joseph School (Precision Teaching) Great Falls, Montana school district (comparison) THAT IMPROVEMENT was just from drill and kill at end of dayIn other words, doing nothing but introducing timed worksheets works. Achievement goes up.
My son just got a mailing from MIT that said:
"You shouldn't stress out too much about your scores, because we admit people, not numbers. Seriously. That said, tests are important, and you should prepare for them as best you can. If you take the same test (SAT, ACT, or an SAT Subject Test) multiple times, we will consider the highest score achieved in each section."
"too much"
"Seriously."
Then they say this on their web site:
Score Choice
"If you take the same test (SAT, ACT, or an SAT Subject Test) multiple times, we will consider the highest score achieved in each section. We do this in order to consider all applicants in their best light."
"For example, if you take the SAT Reasoning Test in 11th grade and score 750 math, 700 critical reading and 650 writing, and then take the SAT again in 12th grade and score 700 math, 650 critical reading and 700 writing, only your best scores from each sitting (i.e. 750 math, 700 critical reading and 700 writing) are used in our admissions calculations."
"Students are free to use the College Board's Score Choice option and the ACT's option to submit the scores of your choice."
Score Choice only allows one to send in the best scores from one sitting, but it sounds like MIT will supersize individual test scores. Also, the new Common App does not allow you to select Score Choice only for some schools, and many schools want to see all of your numbers. That's moot for MIT because they don't use the Common App.
In any case, I'm getting a mixed signal. My son did very well on his first and only SAT test. He should not bother to take the test again. "Seriously." Will he get kudos for that or should he take it again? He could get 60-90 more points (especially if the scores are supersized) and that would show him in his "best light" when all others are taking the test multiple times.
When admissions officers sit around talking about applications and holistic ideas come out of their mouths, are SAT scores floating around in their heads?
Vocabulary is the biggest part of the Critical Reading. The entire reading section (passages included) is a vocabulary based reasoning test; vocab is MORE than just those fill in those blank questions. The more vocab she knows (as in the "I can use it in a sentence and define it for you and tell you the 2nd and third def's" sort of way), the better.My other favorite part, from the P.S.:
The New York Times is a GREAT way to learn vocab IN CONTEXT. I've been reading the newspaper every morning with Daisy and we get at least 10 words per day that she can't define. We started with a half hour every morning and her mission was to find ONE article that she wanted to read in it's entirety and tell me about it and pick out a few vocab words.
She is now up to an hour and often reads 3-4 full articles and LOVES it.
She asks me vocabulary as we go along and I define the words and she writes them down with a little memory jogger. And as I read the paper next to her and I find words, I ask her the def's and she adds them to her list if she doesn't know them.
I'd say she's up to about 100 words now just from the NY times for the last 5 months.
Then, whenever doing anything (e.g. cleaning the kitchen, driving, etc.), I have her break out "the list" (it's handwritten plus on our phones), and she uses them in sentences and I tweak them for her.
This exercise will help with the speed of the reading passages too. A large part of the challenge in that section is the sophisticated vocabulary. They are college level reading passages (i.e. not what high schoolers are used to reading).
That's why the "as long as they read it doesn't matter WHAT they read" line of thought doesn't stand up in this context.
3) Don't ask her, "Are there any words you don't know?" because she will say "No. I know them all." They all do. After she tells you the 1-2 words she thinks doesn't know, look through the article yourself and ask her words. You'll add another 3-4.Beautiful!
People don't know what they don't know -- especially teenagers.
4) If she rejects this whole idea at fist, ignore. They ALL say they don't want to do "SAT Work" -- especially with a parent. That will change very very quickly.
Tip number one is don't get lost in the dreaded Revolutionary War fact bubble, which I have to say it makes me think of the first time that I taught this course. I was actually a brand new professor and I had just come to Yale and it was my first course and it was my first lecture in my first course and I'm [sound cuts out] It actually was in Connecticut Hall, which, for those of you who don't know, dates back to the period when this course is talking about and was Nathan Hale's -- essentially his dorm. So there I am. I'm a brand new professor to Yale and I'm teaching a course about the Revolution and it's in a building that dates to the Revolution, so I'm having sort of a "wow" Yale moment as it is, and I'm off, I'm giving my lectures, and I'm really excited. I give about three of them and someone raises their hand after about three lectures and they have a kind of a puzzled expression on their face. I said, "Yes?" And he says, "Excuse me, Professor Freeman. What are we supposed to be memorizing? Where are the facts and dates?" [laughs] So as a new professor my first impulse was: Darn! I forgot the facts and dates. [laughter] I got it wrong. [laughs] But actually, the fact of the matter is, they're not the star of the show. Certainly, dates are not the star of the show. There are dates you're going to have to remember so don't think Easy Street; there's not a date I have to know. There will be some dates, but this isn't a story about dates. It's obviously something a lot more interesting and a lot broader than that. Okay. Avoid fact bubble.Obviously, excessive memorization didn't keep these students out of Yale.
Joanne Freeman "American Revolution" | Lecture 1 Introduction: Freeman's Top Five Tips for Studying the Revolution
So that's what I mainly address for the rest of the lecture, and I'm going to talk about it by focusing on three different points. Point number one: I'm going to talk a little bit about the distinctive character of the people who migrated to the colonies. [here she reacts to her student audience & starts laughing] It gives you such a sense of power when you're lecturing and you say, "There are three reasons" and the entire rooms goes: "Oh." [laughter] "Three. There are three." So there are three. So number one is the distinctive character of the people who migrated to the colonies. Number two is the distinctive conditions of life in British America, -- and that point I'll talk about for the longest. And then number three is the nature of British colonial administration. And I'll repeat that: the distinctive character of the people who migrated to the colonies, the distinctive conditions of life in British North America, and the nature of British colonial administration."Freeman makes a number of references to eager-beaver student behavior throughout her lectures.
Lecture 3 The American Revolution: Being a British American | January 19, 2010
[snip] I am a journalist and editor, and I found the writing on my third grader’s sample language arts test so dense (and dull!) that even I sometimes had trouble reaching correct answers. Likewise, sample questions for the third-grade math test, which are intended to measure greater complexity in thinking, looked to me like basic word problems with lots of superfluous words.Naturally that second observation forced me to drop everything (or, more accurately, further delay beginning everything) and check the 3rd-grade math questions.
Two groups of students from Douglas Elementary School were walking to the library when it began to rain. The 7 students in Mr. Stem’s group shared the 3 large umbrellas they had with Ms. Thorn’s group of 11 students. If the same number of students were under each umbrella, how many students were under each umbrella?Mom's got a point.
You may use the space below to draw a picture of the problem.
....Another reader thinks the student is “good” but we have so many of “these kids.” She doesn’t see any leadership beyond the student’s own projects.Remind me to tell you my story about the time the Dartmouth admissions officer came to Irvington.
Listening to these conversations, I had to wonder exactly how elite institutions define leadership.
Confessions of an Application Reader
Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley
By RUTH STARKMAN
Published: August 1, 2013
Dan Meyer, 31, is in the process of becoming a celebrity math teacher (hey, it’s a small group). Much of his rapid trajectory upward can be explained by his message, which involves a digital curriculum that will (he says) instantly engage and perplex kids and thus resolve all classroom management issues (more on this later), a message tailor-made to appeal to both techies, since it implicitly attacks all teachers, and progressive educators, since it is inherently constructivist.He had me at "instantly engage and perplex kids and thus resolve all classroom management issues."
Dan Meyer and the Gatekeepers
educationrealist
"Houses the idea safely in the ‘this will never be agreed to’ cabin."We need that cabin in my district.
"Never. It’s now a moth in amber–preserved in perpetuity. They ought to send it to the national archives and put it under glass."On PARCC and SBAC: right track or wrong track?
"At this point, there is zero leadership on this at ED, and zero interest on the Hill."
"As many predicted, this is turning out to be one of the greatest boondoggles of all time."On Randi Weingarten's proposed moratorium on high-stakes testing:
"It is the beginning of the end for both. States are going to start running for the door. To many reasons to get out. The Administration ultimately spends ~$350 million for something states didn’t want and the market took care of."
"Smarter Balanced is headed in the wrong direction educationally; PARCC is headed in the right direction but is afflicted with grievous problems of organization, management and delivery."
“The Common Core is having a PR problem, very generally.”
“They were artificial constructs that didn’t have any actual support behind them other than a way to spend money. It would have made more sense to give the money to states and encourage them to build their own consortia so that they actually wanted to participate and be part of it.”
“Over the last 60 days, the entire CCSS architecture has gotten wobbly. Anything is possible now. Opponents smell blood in the water.”And Arne Duncan, unbeloved:
“The centrist, compromise position will become ‘delayed.’ Those who support it will go out of their way to show they are not ditching accountability.”
“Arne Duncan has blinders on and thinks that he is the nation’s superintendent, chief school board, and principal for every school. He doesn’t understand or accept criticism, and doesn’t see how poorly this is going. States will freak out when they see the assessments and their cut scores and will do everything and anything to back away from this land mine as quickly as possible.”I wonder what nuggets I'll find in the report from April 2013.
Abstract
Two studies tested the effect of humor, embedded in learning materials, on task interest. College student participants (NStudy 1 = 359, NStudy 2 = 172) learned a new math technique with the presence or absence of humor in the learning program and/or test instructions. Individual interest in math was measured initially and also tested as a factor. The results showed that the effect of humor in the learning program depended on individual interest in math. Humor raised task interest for those with low individual interest in math but slightly lowered task interest for those with high individual interest in math....
The effect of humorous instructional materials on interest in a math task
Kristina L. Matarazzo • Amanda M. Durik • Molly L. Delaney | Motiv Emot (2010) 34:293–305
Yesterday, PARCC released the cost of its tests—and right on cue, another state, Georgia, dropped out of the testing consortia. This is a disaster.Here is Truth in American Education on Whiteboard Advisors Insider Results on Common Core.
At this point, I won’t be surprised if we end up with 20 or more different testing systems in 2014–15. So much for commonness, so much for comparability. Rigor and alignment with tough standards are likely the next to fall.
That's how the consortia crumble
Andy Smarick / July 23, 2013
AbstractI've been reading many abstracts of late.
Understanding the determinants of socioeconomic status (SES) is an important economic and social goal. Several major influences on SES are known, yet much of the variance in SES remains unexplained. In a large, population-representative sample from the United Kingdom, we tested the effects of mathematics and reading achievement at age 7 on attained SES by age 42. Mathematics and reading ability both had substantial positive associations with adult SES, above and beyond the effects of SES at birth, and with other important factors, such as intelligence. Achievement in mathematics and reading was also significantly associated with intelligence scores, academic motivation, and duration of education. These findings suggest effects of improved early mathematics and reading on SES attainment across the life span.
Enduring Links From Childhood Mathematics and Reading Achievement to Adult Socioeconomic Status
Stuart J. Ritchie and Timothy C. Bates | Psychological Science 24(7) 1301–1308 2013
I go to Staybridge on August 16th.I have no idea how to handle this.
I go on the airplane.
First I go to camp.
Then I go to Staybridge.
I will see grandma in Staybridge.
Grandma's house is in Staybridge.
Staybridge is in Chicago.
I love Grandma.
Mommy and Daddy are going with me.
I have to pack my bags.
In sum, we propose that adults never fully outgrow the cognitive and perceptual biases that are so striking in infants and preschoolers. That is a humbling thought, much as it was humbling to discover that humans are not the center of the universe or as rational and ‘‘in control’’ as once thought. However, if clarity can come from investigating extreme cases, then perhaps studying children, who show these biases more blatantly than adults, might be a rich source of insight and future hypotheses about adult cognition.I'm just waiting for the day they find out crows are smarter than people.
Not Quite as Grown-Up as We Like to Think: Parallels Between Cognition in Childhood and Adulthood
Adele Diamond and Natasha Kirkham | Psychological Science Volume 16—Number 4 | p 291-297.
I wonder why this is?
To understand how talent and achievement are perceived, three experiments compared the assessments of “naturals” and “strivers." Professional musicians learned about two pianists, equal in achievement but who varied in the source of achievement: the “natural” with early evidence of high innate ability, versus the “striver” with early evidence of high motivation and perseverance (Experiment 1). Although musicians reported the strong belief that strivers will achieve over naturals, their preferences and beliefs showed the reverse pattern: they judged the natural performer to be more talented, more likely to succeed, and more hirable than the striver. In Experiment 2, this “naturalness bias” was observed again in experts but not in nonexperts, and replicated in a between-subjects design in Experiment 3. Together, these experiments show a bias favoring naturals over strivers even when the achievement is equal, and a dissociation between stated beliefs about achievement and actual choices in expert decision-makers.
Naturals and strivers: Preferences and beliefs about sources of achievement
Chia-Jung Tsay, Mahzarin R. Banaji Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011) 460–465
ABSTRACTI'm trying to decide whether Galak and Nelson's prose is opaque enough to make me believe them...
Instructors tell their students to write clearly. This prescription meshes with our intuition, wins confirmation in scores of books on writing, and finds empirical confirmation in research on perceptual fluency: People like content that is easy to process. Nevertheless, in some circumstances people expect content to be difficult, and ease might be interpreted as a lack of quality. We investigate this possibility by asking people to judge the quality of written text which varies in fluency (through the manipulation of font and facial feedback). Across three studies, disfluent content was judged to be of higher quality when it was thought to come from a source focused on conveying information than one designed to maximize enjoyment.
The virtues of opaque prose: How lay beliefs about fluency influence perceptions of quality Jeff Galak, Leif D. Nelson Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011) 250–253
