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K9Sasha reports:

As a student in an occupational therapy assistant program I have to take a class called Interprofessional Education. The class is taught in a constructivist manner and is by far my most frustrating class. Before a class meeting we are told to get on the internet and research stroke, or obesity, or diabetes and be ready to discuss it. Then, during class, we're presented with a vignette (and I wish the "facilitators" would learn how to say that word properly) to discuss. We're supposed to talk about things like how the various medical professionals involved in a case can communicate and coordinate the patient's care. The answer is - I don't know. I'm not in medical care yet and I don't know how information is or could be shared. As a group of students we can come up with various blue sky ideas, but in the real world time and money constraints exist whereas in our class they don't. I would find the class more valuable, and less frustrating, if they would just tell us the best way to coordinate a patient's care among a handful of professionals in the real world.

OK, now you're scaring me.

Zig

from Michael Maloney's book Teach Your Children Well:

Direct Instruction was originally created by Zig Engelmann and his colleagues including Elaine Bruner, Jean Osborne and Carl Bereiter at the University of Illinois in the 1960s. It began as a series of programs for culturally disadvantaged children in a preschool at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In 1973, Wes Becker convinced Engelmann to relocate to the University of Oregon and become a member of its faculty. They were soon joined by Doug Carnine, who quickly became Engelmann's close associate, co-author and research partner. Direct Instruction became the preferred educational technology of the Department of Special Education at the University of Oregon It was expanded into a set of programs that became the dominant model in the Follow Through project in the seventies.

Zig Engelmann has a bachelor's degree. He never got a Ph.D., nor has he ever attempted to do so; yet he is a full professor at the University of Oregon who continually refuses tenure.

It seems that Engelmann was working for a marketing company in Illinois, doing a project to promote some publisher's reading materials. When he visited a classroom and saw how poorly them materials taught the children, he decided to write a reading program himself. He literally sat down and wrote his first teaching sequences, outlined a program and took it to Carl Bereiter at the University of Illinois.

Kent Johnson's new book is out!

Response to Intervention and Precision Teaching: Creating Synergy in the Classroom by Kent Johnson, Ph.D. and Elizabeth Street, Ed.D.

Very exciting!

Speaking of precision teaching, my friend Robyne and I are visiting Ben Bronz Academy next Thursday.

stop the multiverse, part XVII

Beverlee Jobrack (Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reforms) quotes Collins and Halverson on the subject of technology enthusiasts:

In the enthusiast's view, computer-based environments promise a revolution in schooling of the same magnitude as the revolution in our culture set in motion of the Industrial Revolution. Technology enthusiasts favor a constructivist approach to learning, where students, rather than teachers, do most of the work. . . . Technology enthusiasts envision schools where students are working on realistic tasks and adults play a supportive role to guide them to new activities and help them when they encounter problems. (Collins and Halverson 2009, 27-28)

Wake me when it's over.

help desk: scientific notation

I'm looking at the Common Core math standards, and I see the first mention of scientific notation in Grade 8.

Does that sound right to you all?

Is there any reason to teach scientific notation earlier (or later)?

(I don't have an opinion -- I'm asking.)

Perform operations with numbers expressed in scientific notation,including problems where both decimal and scientific notation are used. Use scientific notation and choose units of appropriate size for measurements of very large or very small quantities (e.g., use millimeters per year for seafloor spreading). Interpret scientific notation that has been generated by technology.
Common Core State Standards for Mathematics

Vicky S on the quota system

Speaking of quotas for reading and writing, Vicky writes:

My kids had the requirement of 25 books a year all through elementary school. Reading became a chore, and we all became tangled up in the white lies required to comply--not the kind of thing I wanted my kids to learn! The writing, too--ugh, excessive. My poor kids were totally turned off both reading and writing by this quota and quantity approach. Does it actually work for any kids?

school employment factoid

From the White House blog:

The local government education sector has now lost 339,400 jobs since its recent peak in November 2009.
The Employment situation in January

Sticky wages = job loss. (see: Why Wages Don't Fall in a Recession by Truman F. Bewley)

Meanwhile Catherine Rampell, at the Times, reports that "Getting the economy to 5 percent unemployment within two years — a return to the rate that prevailed when the recession began — would require job growth of closer to 284,984 a month."

Jobs added this month: 157k

BLS puts job growth in 2012 at 181,000 per month. At that rate, the country will return to full employment 10 years from now.

Why So Much Listening?

E.D. Hirsch has an interesting new post up at the Core Knowledge blog addressing why there is so much listening in the Core Knowledge reading curriculum.  For instance:

Many years ago, the researcher Thomas Sticht discovered the important fact that reading does not catch up with listening until late middle school or early high school.

news to me

from Michael Maloney's Teach Your Children Well, published in 1998:

Various states and provinces are now requiring more practice as part of the outcomes for reforming their schools. New York State, for example, now demands that students in elementary schools practice their reading by completing twenty-five books per year. They are expected to write 1000 words of prose per month and do an assigned amount of math.

We moved here 14 years ago, here being New York state. Never heard tell of a 1000-word-a-month writing requirement. As to books, I remember C. reading 1 or at most 2 books a year in middle school. The kids were assigned The Outsiders -- reading level 5.1 -- in 7th grade. C. had read it two years earlier.

These days middle school kids are all supposed to read 25 books a year.

The news

sigh

Watching ABC World News. The big story tonight: "surging" home prices!

So is it time to sell your house!!??! Diane asks her colleague, beaming.

The colleague speaks with authority. If your house has regained its value, then yes. Time to sell.

I despair.

The increase year-over-year is 5.5%. Given that house prices dropped at least 27% from peak (was it closer to 33%?) and then flatlined for 6 years, a 5.5% gain cannot properly be called a "surge," and it doesn't put anybody back where they were. (With the possible exceptions of Denver, Dallas, Charlotte, and maybe Cleveland, if I'm reading the chart right.)

If you're Diane Sawyer and you're determined to call a 5.5% gain after 6 years a "surge," then you need to include the 6-year figure for context, along with the 27% figure. Also for context.

Why is this not happening?

Why am I hearing "surging home prices"?

Can our national news programs not hire someone who can read a graph?

Meanwhile Debbie S tells me everyone says "housing is back" except two people: me, and her realtor.

I remember Diane, a couple of years ago, joyously announcing jobs were back. That wasn't true, either.

Housing’s Rise and Fall in 20 Cities Last updated 9/25/2012
Case-Shiller: House Prices increased 5.5% year-over-year in November
December Employment Report: 155,000 Jobs, 7.8% Unemployment Rate

1 down

I have eliminated one of my desk piles! (At least my desk has piles...)

Only 5 more to go! (Distributed across one desk, one table, and one printer stand....)

Then on to the wire mesh hanging file folder bins.

[pause]

Yikes.

I don't think they even make those bins any more. (This is one. Most of mine are bigger.)

the college tour done right

K9sasha on her son's college tour:

When we went looking at colleges, we had the option to arrange ahead of time to spend time with a professor at University of the Pacific. Once on campus, Dr. Saviz spent a couple hours with us telling us about the engineering program, showing us her lab, and answering all our questions. We left there with a good feeling about the school, and it is where my son decided to go. He's been happy with his decision.

All colleges should do this. All colleges, bar none.

buy this book!

For a year and a half now, I have been sending people who ask me whether I think the economy is "getting better" to Marcus Nunes' What does a downloaded economy look like?

Now Marcus and Benjamin Cole have written the first book on "market monetarism." I've read it, I've highlighted it, and I've blurbed it --- it's terrific!

Market Monetarism: Roadmap to Economic Prosperity

10 days between AP exams versus 1 day

ABSTRACT
In many education and work environments, economic agents must perform several mental tasks in a short period of time. As with physical fatigue, it is likely that cognitive fatigue can occur and affect performance if a series of mental tasks are scheduled close together. In this paper, we identify the impact of time between cognitive tasks on performance in a particular context: the taking of Advanced Placement (AP) exams by high-school students. We exploit the fact that AP exam dates change from year to year, so that students who take two subject exams in one year may have a different number of days between the exams than students who take the same two exams in a different year. We find strong evidence that a shorter amount of time between exams is associated with lower scores, particularly on the second exam. Our estimates suggest that students who take exams with 10 days of separation are 8% more likely to pass both exams than students who take the same two exams with only 1 day of separation.

The Impact of Time Between Cognitive Tasks on Performance: Evidence from Advanced Placement Exams
Ian Fillmore and Devin G. Pope
NBER Working Paper No. 18436
October 2012 JEL No. D03,I20

"College as Country Club"

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates whether demand-side market pressure explains colleges’ decisions to provide consumption amenities to their students. We estimate a discrete choice model of college demand using micro data from the high school classes of 1992 and 2004, matched to extensive information on all four-year colleges in the U.S. We find that most students do appear to value college consumption amenities, including spending on student activities, sports, and dormitories. While this taste for amenities is broad-based, the taste for academic quality is confined to high-achieving students.....

In line with the human capital framework developed by Becker (1964), economists typically model education as an investment wherein individuals forgo current labor market earnings and incur direct costs in return for higher future wages. While this framework does not rule out that education may also provide immediate consumption, such consumption aspects have received little attention in the literature.1 Recently, however, there has been increasing attention devoted to the recreation that accompanies investment in higher education, as illustrated by the newspaper headlines above.2 The media attention coincides with an accumulation of evidence on limited student learning (Arum and Roksa, 2011), diminished study effort (Babcock and Marks, 2011), and declining graduation rates (Bound, Lovenhiem, and Turner, 2010).

While the evidence on whether colleges today devote a greater share of resources to consumption and recreational amenities than they have in the past is inconclusive, it is clear that there is substantial heterogeneity in the emphasis that institutions place on amenities (Jacob, McCall and Stange 2013a).3 In 2007, for example, the average ratio of amenity to academic spending was 0.51 across the roughly 1,300 four-year public and private non-profit postsecondary institutions in the United States. The ratio varied tremendously, from .26 at the 10th percentile to .80 at the 90th percentile. Thus different institutions make very different choices about the optimal level of consumption amenities to offer their students. While there are several systematic patterns to this heterogeneity – for instance, public institutions spend relatively less on consumption amenities– the sources of these patterns have not been previously explored.
COLLEGE AS COUNTRY CLUB: DO COLLEGES CATER TO STUDENTS’ PREFERENCES FOR CONSUMPTION?
Brian Jacob
Brian McCall
Kevin M. Stange
Working Paper 18745

I got soooooo tired of looking at amenities.

I don't think we saw a single professor on any of the campuses we visited.

We did see some books.

pop quiz: fill in the blank

from Tom Friedman's column today:

LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in ____________. Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty....Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. 

No peeking.

1966 Film of Zig Talking and Demonstating DI Math

Barry G sends this link to this film of Siegfried Engelmann working with children at the Engelmann-Bereiter Preschool.

Open SUNY at Cost of College

‘SUNY to boost online offerings, push early graduation’

Grace's post reminds me of something a student in one of my classes told me. It was very sweet.

I teach in a small, non-selective college that has no campus life whatsoever and is short on dorm space to boot. So a lot of the kids live in a large chain hotel and are bused back and forth.

My student was from Staten Island and had chosen to live in the hotel instead of commuting to school because, he said, "I wanted to have the college experience."

Meanwhile C. tells me he's not getting the "college experience" because he attends a university with neither a campus nor a football team.

He has a point.

Wisconsin introduces competency exams!

From College Degree, No Class Time Required:

David Lando plans to start working toward a diploma from the University of Wisconsin this fall, but he doesn't intend to set foot on campus or even take a single online course offered by the school's well-regarded faculty.

Instead, he will sit through hours of testing at his home computer in Milwaukee under a new program that promises to award a bachelor's degree based on knowledge—not just class time or credits.

"I have all kinds of credits all over God's green earth, but I'm using this to finish it all off," said the 41-year-old computer consultant, who has an associate degree in information technology but never finished his bachelor's in psychology.

Colleges and universities are rushing to offer free online classes known as "massive open online courses," or MOOCs. But so far, no one has figured out a way to stitch these classes together into a bachelor's degree.

Now, educators in Wisconsin are offering a possible solution by decoupling the learning part of education from student assessment and degree-granting.

Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor's degrees from a public university system.

By CAROLINE PORTER
January 24, 2013, 6:32 p.m. ET
Wall Street Journal

Wow.

I'm thinking....all those disruptive technology people may turn out to be right for the wrong reason.

The coming Disruption won't be courses going online.

The coming Disruption will be courses going away altogether. (Some of them, anyway.)

The tests go online, not the courses.

I don't believe in making predictions, but even so I have simply never been able to see how MOOCs save the day. I can't stand online courses myself, my students don't like them, and I don't know any grownups who like them, either. The people touting them (and investing in them) don't seem to have taken any coursework via MOOCs themselves, as far as I can tell.

So while the logic of the MOOC -- put the best professors online so thousands can learn! -- often seems unassailable, I just don't see it. Put it this way: I don't believe in making predictions, and I continue to wonder what I'm missing, but I will not be investing my pennies in Udacity, Coursera, or edX.

I have always thought, though, that there is a major use for the internet when it comes to assessment.

Maybe college competency exams are the missing piece?

Such a scenario -- MOOCs fail as a means of making college affordable, but competency exams succeed -- strikes me as possible.

First, according to the Bain/Sterling Partners report, one-third of U.S. colleges and universities are in financial trouble.

Second, the economy continues to be depressed and, absent "regime change" at the Federal Reserve,  will remain depressed.^*

Given a depressed economy, I assume some colleges will close.

College closings will put pressure on state universities to expand, but state colleges are also in financial stress and have been raising tuition. They are in no position to grow.

At some point, it seems to me, political pressure will build on state legislatures to find another way to provide college diplomas.

In short, I can imagine Wisconsin's move attracting a lot of imitators, and sooner rather than later. I can also imagine a circular effect, with college closings leading to the introduction of competency exams,  and the introduction of competency exams then leading to more college closings.

That's disruption.

We'll see.

If competency exams begin to take hold, I can imagine a number of other developments that might be very interesting.

^* The economy is growing but is not going back to trend as it always has done in the past, including the Great Depression. I know people hold out hope that a housing recovery will lead to a real recovery, but since I am persuaded by Scott Sumner's analysis, I don't see housing as the white horse.

chart from: historinhas
and see:
Lawyers without Law School
proposal for a national baccalaureate
why college costs so much
US News: 2-year law degrees

on the other hand

follow on to Why you don't want your child to be popular

Last October, the National Bureau of Economic Research distributed a study showing a compelling correlation between high-school popularity—measured by how many “friendship nominations” each kid received from their peers—and future earnings in boys. Thirty-five years later, the authors estimated, boys who ranked in the 80th percentile of popularity earned, on average, 10 percent more than those in the 20th. There are obvious chicken-and-egg questions in all studies like this; maybe these kids were already destined for dominance, which is why they were popular. But Gabriella Conti, an economist and first author of the paper, notes that she and her colleagues took into consideration the personality traits of their subjects, measuring their levels of openness, agreeableness, extroversion, and so forth. “And adolescent popularity is predictive beyond them,” she says, “which tells me this is about more than just personality. It’s about interpersonal relations. High school is when you learn how to master social relationships—and to understand how, basically, to ‘play the game.’ ” Or don’t.

So...you want your child to be well-liked but not popular?

Is that it?

Maybe so. Another study found that 10th grade girls who self-identified as brainy fared well compared to "princesses":

At 24, the princesses had lower self-esteem than the brainy girls, which certainly wasn’t true when they were 16.

Why You Never Truly Leave High School
By Jennifer Senior Published Jan 20, 2013 | New York Magazine