Palisadesk says discovery learning has disappeared from low-SES schools

palisadesk writes:

I haven't seen much if any "discovery learning" emphasis outside of Kindergarten for 15 years or so, and the primary approach is definitely teacher-centric. Not so much "lecture" -- attention spans of young children are limited, so an interactive direct teaching model is more effective -- but definitely not "guide on the side." I've been in 4 low-SES schools in that time, one of them high-performing, but have seen similar instructional emphases in all of them. The quality of the instruction certainly varies (my current colleagues are almost all very effective but in other schools there was a wider spread of teaching ability).

However, I've never seen the attitude that seems to prevail in upper-SES schools, even in my district, where responsibility for kids' learning the basics is offloaded to the home. It was hammered into me from the get-go that it was MY responsibility to teach kids the things they needed to learn, not the parents' responsibility (which in many cases they did not have the resources to do anyway). It helps that the families in general support a more instructivist stance and expect us to be hammering the foundation skills. We allocate 20 minutes daily across the grades to structured practice of math skills. Counting, math facts, metric conversions, fractions, formulae -- depending on the grade. Our math results are better than those in some of the middle-class schools, which I find interesting. We are doing something right.

Even so it is an uphill struggle because many kids need far more instructional time than we can provide, and issues like absenteeism, frequent moves, family crises and hunger do affect kids' learning no matter how well we can teach them. But I haven't seen the following in any of my schools for over a decade:

1) movies shown during instructional time

2) "art" projects in reading or math.No dioramas, foldables, posters etc.

3) "discovery" learning."Guided discovery" is a bit different -- in a science activity, students might be led through a series of steps to "discover" something (really, to observe it) and detail their observations, but they aren't turned loose with stuff and expected to "discover" something.

4)"group" work with the exception of leveled groups for reading and math; when not directly taught by the teacher the groups will have individualized seatwork or follow-up assignments.

I think it may be a very different ethos in the low-SES schools. Three of my four were schools (large, with around 600-700 kids) with NO middle-income families among them. The curriculum is, supposedly, the same, but how it is delivered is very, very different.

It's a matter of where the locus of responsibility is believed to be. I and many of my colleagues believe the kids' academic progress is OUR responsibility. Perhaps in better-off neighborhoods this "locus of responsibility" is not the same. Certainly many parents here (and on some of my listservs) have shared stories that suggest it is not.

Down the rabbit hole

The opt-out movement may become a force to be reckoned with, if and when it organizes effectively. What has to happen, it seems to me, is that the movement must also be FOR something. I suggest a straight trade: two weeks of project-based learning for every day of testing AND test-prep! In other words, don’t just stay home; fight for positive changes.

The Common Core Brouhaha by JOHN MERROW on 24. APR, 2014 in 2014 BLOGS

I was sitting here mulling what a terrible fate this would be when it came to me: "two weeks of project-based learning for every day of testing AND test-prep" probably isn't a bad  description of what's happening in my district now.

That along with insane homework loads in the run-up to the tests. Parents here were complaining a couple of months ago about having to drive their kids through hours of HW every night because the middle-school teachers were worried about their evaluations.

I've seen the same thing in a neighboring district, where middle-school kids seem to spend their time either doing group projects and group discussions OR test-prep.

At least some of the time, teachers who've been trained only in constructivism equate direct instruction with cramming.

Common Core is doomed: dreaming sophomore edition

Just got off the phone with Chris, who is in Venice with his best friend D. They are hunkered inside a youth hostel tent or some such with a thunderstorm raging outside. The thunderclaps were loud even across FaceTime.

Chris says D. dreamed last night that he was taking a Common Core test. The test had math and English, and D. couldn't understand any of it -- nothing at all. The teacher giving the exam told him he had to feel the exam, "like carbon dioxide."

Here's my take: when you've got sophomores in college having nightmares about Common Core, you're in trouble.

Plus which, Hillary Clinton has never allowed the words "Common Core" to pass her lips (as far as I can tell), which tells me that if H.C. is elected Common Core is going away.

Jeb Bush is another story, of course.

Speaking of J.B., he was the subject of a glowing profile in the New York Times last week -- glowing. (The title was "Jeb Bush Gives His Party Something to Think About," but stripped of the paragraphs contrasting Bush favorably with the Republican Party, the article was still glowing.)

Back to Chris and his friend hunkered down in their youth hostel tent. D. is a proponent of the view that charter schools are bad because they take resources away from public schools. He and Chris had a one-hour argument about charter schools the other night.

I told Chris, this morning, to tell D. that if all public schools were charter schools, we wouldn't have Common Core.

D., who is not enjoying the experience of living through a violent thunderstorm INSIDE A TENT, replied that he's in a death trap and in no mood to argue about charter schools.

Chris said 'I believe in charter schools, so I'm not going to get struck by lightening.'

Famous last words

"If we end up starting the higher standards process all over again," he recommends, "let's agree that teachers must be well-represented at the table."

John Thompson: Can the Gates Foundation Learn?

So next go-round it'll be Bill Gates, Chester Finn, the White House, the N.E.A., the A.F.T., . . . . and the membership of the N.E.A. and the A.F.T.

Good deal!

Here's a thought.

If we're going to be small-d democratic and all, next time let's have parents at the table.

Parents, taxpayers, and disciplinary specialists.

Lots of disciplinary specialists.

Bloom

I need a good critique of Bloom's Taxonomy -- and, oddly, I'm not finding one. Neither Daniel Willingham nor E.D. Hirsch so much as mentions Bloom.

I find people like Tom Loveless pointing out that knowledge is the essential prerequisite of "deeper learning," but I'm pretty sure Loveless is fighting the last war.

In the new war, nobody's denying that students must acquire knowledge.

Instead, acquisition of knowledge is the taken-for-granted. Has to happen, but it's nothing to get excited about. 

In my district, administrators are now using Bloom's Taxonomy to justify flipped classrooms. Because "Knowledge" and "Understanding" are the lowest intellectual skills, they can be acquired at home (or on the bus) via 7-minute lectures on YouTube. Precious class time is thus preserved for  Application, Analysis, and Evaluation.

For anyone who thinks knowledge and understanding are the highest skills, not the lowest, Salman Khan's rationale for the flipped classroom is the problem now.

More fun with passive voice, part 2

Just discovered Pullum's paper buried in my Great Unread:

Abstract Writing advisers have been condemning the English passive since the early 20th century. I provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives. Some seem to confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility, but not all examples are thus explained. The specific stylistic charges leveled against the passive are entirely baseless. The evidence demonstrates an extraordinary level of grammatical ignorance among educated English language critics.

Fear and Loathing of the English Passive | Geoffrey K. Pullum

More fun with passive voice

Katie and I have just finished 5 chapters of exercises for Ed's European history textbook!

FIVE!

A great weight has lifted from our shoulders, soon to be replaced by Great Weight Number 2: finish another 5 chapters before Katie leaves in July.

I've just this moment revised the section on passive voice after our editor cut the line saying all good writers use it. We'll get pushback on that, she says.

(We handled the possibility of pushback by dropping the claim about good writers & doubling down on the assertion that passive voice is essential to cohesion.)

While I was Googling p.v., I found this:

All good writers use the passive voice. Orwell actually uses it while criticizing it: In bad prose, "the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active," he writes. He could have recast that sentence, but his focus was on the (alleged) stylistic sin; that was the logical subject, even if that required a passive verb.

The authors of usage guides shamelessly doctor the evidence on passive by offering examples that range from unlikely to fantastic: Strunk and White's is, "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." But there's more to vividness than active verbs. "Someone killed my parakeet" has an active verb. "My parakeet was hacked to bits with a machete" doesn't.

What we get wrong about passive voice by Jan Freeman

And, my favorites (which I'm sure I've posted before):

• 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
• Passive aggression

Defense of the Sage on the Stage

The joy of lecturing--With a critique of the romantic tradition of education writing (Appendix to How to Teach Mathematics by S.G. Krantz, 2nd edition, Amer. Math. Soc. 1999, pp. 261-271) (Appendix to How to Teach Mathematics by S.G. Krantz, 2nd edition, Amer. Math. Soc. 1999, pp. 261-271) by H. Wu.

Excerpt:

"It appears to me that this rejection of the sage-on-the-stage method of instruction is unjustified. There are situations where lectures are very effective, and in fact there are even circumstances which make this method of instruction mandatory..."

Hainish suggests a 'negg' (and how to write a 4 that doesn't look like a 9)

After I mentioned how impossible I'm finding the project of creating a thesis statement 'algorithm,' Hainish suggested using my mistake as an example of how not to create a thesis statement.

That is essentially the solution Ed came up with today.

Which brings me to something I never got around to mentioning after my time at Morningside Academy's Summer School Institute.

Every day of the two weeks I spent at Morningside brought new revelations, but the two that completely upended my perception of reality were Morningside's focus on anaphora as the critical component of reading comprehension and Kent's explanation of what to do when a student writes 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s.

So, pop quiz: if you had a student writing 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s, what would you do?

What I would do -- what I would have done before attending the Institute -- would be to have my student practice writing 4s and 9s.

But no!

That's that wrong answer.

The right answer is to have your student practice seeing 9s and 4s.

More specifically, have the kids practice telling 4s and 9s apart. Give them a worksheet filled with 4s and 9s, and have them "discriminate" 4s and 9s until they can do so fluently.

After that, the kids can write 4s and 9s.

I was gobsmacked.

So Kent explained.

All performance, he said, requires internal inspection. You don't just perform a skill, you watch yourself performing a skill. You inspect your performance as you perform.

And the inspector has to be trained.

The reason students write 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s isn't that they can't physically write 4s and 9s  They can. They can write other numbers; they can write letters. A child who can write other numbers and letters can write 4s and 9s.

The reason students write 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s is that they aren't seeing the difference. They aren't discriminating.

Kent said you could make a case all learning is discrimination.

More on this later, but for now: at Morningside, people use Tiemann and Markle's work on curriculum design. To teach a concept, they teach "EGGS" and "NEGGS."

EGGS are examples (thesis statements, in this case), NEGGS are non-examples (non-thesis statements).

More importantly, they give students close-in non-examples.

Make It Stick says pretty much the same thing.

More in a bit.

David Daniel & Daniel Willingham on electronic textbooks

I missed this when it came out: Electronic Textbooks: Why the Rush?

Terrific.

Needless to say, my district, which intends to make technology "as ubiquitous in the classroom as paper and pencil" (paper and pencil are not technology, apparently) is on the fast track to all things electronic.

Thesis statements are really, really, really hard & you're-not-special (& Facebook)

oh, man!

Finally finished my semester (grading still to do, but classes & exit exams are done...) and am immersed, with Katie B, in a now-nearly-desperate attempt to finish the exercises for Chapter 3 of Ed's European history textbook.

Subject: the thesis statement.

We've been trying to create a thesis-statement algorithm. And not just an algorithm, but a foolproof algorithm. I'm the guinea pig.

I thought we had it nailed -- finally! -- and......

We don't.

So: starting over.

....................

It's a good thing I went to school in the days before commencement speakers telling students they're not special and classroom teachers creating opportunities for students to fail against an exemplar of excellence (an actual comment I saw an actual teacher actually make on a Facebook thread concerning the you're-not-special commencement speaker, who is also a teacher.)

I would be in big trouble if my high school teachers had spent a lot of time creating opportunities for me to fail against exemplars of excellence.

That would be way too much failure for one person to surmount.

Take this afternoon. (Please.)

Ed and Katie and I were dealing with the failure of our algorithm (actually, the failure of my algorithm, which I'd come up with while dealing with the failure of the previous algorithm the 3 of us had hammered out just a couple of days ago).

Today's algorithm involved telling the student to start by picking a sentence in the textbook and turning it into a who-, which-, why-, or how- question.

Sounds simple, right?

So, the sentence we tested (on me) was:

It is difficult to determine which country was most responsible for WWI.

Which I instantly turned into the following question, while exclaiming 'This is easy!:

Which country was most responsible for WWI?

Wrong.

The question I was supposed to turn it into:

Why is it difficult to determine which country was most responsible for WWI?

So then Ed and I got into a whole long argument about whether a college student would or would not make the same boneheaded mistake I had just made, since any fool (we're foolproofing, remember?) could plainly see that "which country was most responsible for WWI" was not the whole sentence.

The whole sentence was "Why is it difficult to determine which country was most responsible for WWI?"

So there I was, the progenitor of an algorithm I myself could not use, having to argue, at length, that 18-year olds who are taking their first college-level history course are as dumb as I am.

Which I successfully did.

....................

Change of topic: I've become a Facebook person, heaven help me. Mostly because Debbie S. said I should: that's where the moms are, she said.

Facebook is pretty fun -- and it's different from a blog, somehow. Different in a good way.

I'm thinking of putting up a ktm Facebook page, but I want to keep it relatively separate from my Irvington life & have to figure out exactly how that works.

I think ktm readers would actually have to join the FB page (which is fine with me but possibly annoying for you --- ?)

Back to work.

Frederick Hess on the stealth approach

Terrific op-ed by Fred Hess (just saw Barry post it to Facebook).

In 2013, Gallup reported that 62% of Americans had never heard of the Common Core. The anti-Common Core documentary “Building the Machine,” released a few weeks ago, begins with a narrator intoning, “Before the fall of 2012, very little was known about the Common Core. The media wasn’t covering it. It wasn’t part of the national discourse. It wasn’t even on parents’ radar.”

If true, that’s a significant claim. The Common Core state standards are no small change. Forty-five states and D.C. adopted the K-12 reading and math standards, and promised to modify their tests, textbooks and teaching accordingly. In hot pursuit of federal Race to the Top funds, states hurriedly agreed to what proponents celebrated as a landmark change. The New York Times termed the Common Core “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” and Duncan said it “may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown vs. Board of Education.”

Change of this magnitude are typically hashed out in robust public debate. The Common Core was not.

In a recent study, we used the news search engine Lexis-Nexis to track media coverage of the Common Core during its five-year history. The results show just how little attention the Common Core received when it was being unveiled and adopted. In 2009, the year the draft standards were first released, there were 453 mentions of the “Common Core.” For comparison’s sake, that year, there were 2,185 mentions of Disney actor Zac Efron. Not a single reference to the Common Core mentioned “controversy,” “critic,” “opponent,” “supporter” or “defender.”

[snip]

By 2013, the issue exploded into the national consciousness, with 26,401 mentions. Of course, by that point, most states had been implementing the standards for years. Some criticism of the Common Core has been hyperbolic and rife with dubious claims. But today’s seemingly “misinformed” pushback may be mostly a case of frustrated citizens waking up to a fait accompli.
What does this all mean?

First, it’s hard to look at these numbers and not conclude that the mainstream media dropped the ball. The standards were rarely covered even as states planned to alter instruction for tens of millions of students.

Second, these results reflect a strategy of supporters seeking to stay below the radar in 2009, 2010, and 2011, while relying on the helping hand of the federal Race to the Top program. The thing is, stealth is a dubious strategy for pursuing fundamental change in 100,000 schools educating 50 million children.

Third, the democratic process relies on information. A lack of familiarity has proven to be fertile ground for all manner of rumor and uncertainty. Ultimately, informed consent is the key to policy durability.

The Common Core was foisted on students, parents and teachers with precious little open debate
BY FREDERICK M. HESS , MICHAEL Q. MCSHANE

Democracy deficit.

The profound indifference to parents and taxpayers on the part of the people who run public schools has always amazed me. Their indifference amazes me so much so that in the last couple of years I've taken to saying I'm amazed by my capacity to still be amazed.

This go-round our policy elites here in New York state decided -- consciously decided -- to give kids hard tests most of them would fail. Intentionally giving kids tests you know they will fail is an appalling idea, but our policy elites were free to make and execute that decision on their own recognizance. They didn't have to check in with John Q. Public first.

And when John Q. Public checked in with them, they didn't have to say they were sorry.

My favorite moment here in my own district -- this was pretty funny, actually -- was the standing-room-only Common Core confab at which the curriculum director told us that parents "watch TV" and "read the internet" so they don't understand Common Core.

Then she showed us a TV show about Common Core. A TV show that's on the internet.

After we watched the TV show, one of the building principals stood up and told us that her sister doesn't understand Common Core because her sister watches TV and reads the internet.

I was amazed.

Where's Waldo?

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

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

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

Good News in Minnesota

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

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

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

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

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

Illinois Teacher of the Year

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

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

Here's my question.

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

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

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

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

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

I updated "Failure of future learning"

Update here.

Retrieval practice, the bad news

I was thinking the incredible results people find with retrieval practice sounded too good to be true, and now I'm worried they are:

Failure of further learning: the limits of repeated study and retrieval practice

Wish to heck I could pull the study. All I've got for the moment is the abstract:

Abstract

Previous research has shown that little benefit is achieved through spaced study and recall of text passages after the first recall attempt, an effect that we term the failure‐of‐further‐learning. We hypothesized that the effect occurs because a situation model of the text's gist is formed when the text is first comprehended and is consolidated when recalled; it dominates later recall after verbatim memories of more recent study episodes have been lost. Experiments 1 and 2 attempted to circumvent the effect by varying the activities of participants and requiring interactive exploration. In both experiments, recall after four, weekly sessions showed little benefit beyond performance on the first recall. Experiment 3 interfered with the formation of an immediate situation model by introducing passages that were hard to comprehend without a title. Performance improved substantially across four sessions when titles were not supplied, but the standard effect was replicated when titles were given. Experiment 4 made verbatim memories available by incorporating all re‐presentations and tests into one session; as predicted, recall improved over successive tests.

Failure of further learning: Activities, structure, and meaning
Catherine O. Fritz,
Peter E. Morris,
Barbara Reid,
Roya Aghdassi,
Claire E. Naven

Unfortunately, I don't understand the final sentence in the abstract.

I see that "interactive exploration" didn't help students remember anything beyond what they recalled during their first retrieval practice. (Another nail in the coffin of hands-on, guide-on-the-side activities as the cure for limited remembering and understanding.)

I see that difficult reading passages without titles (!) helped. That finding is especially striking in light of the SQ3R approach to reading comprehension, which involves paying attention to titles. (SQ3R isn't necessarily incompatible with this finding, but still...)

It sounds like the last sentence refers to a complete, or near-complete, re-creation of the original learning-and-quizzing episode.

Did students re-read and quiz themselves, both in the same "session"?

I should go read the summary at Jung's Biology Blog.

I'm probably going to enjoy it:

In other experiments, Fritz et al. show that FOFL occurs even when ideas are presented as itemized lists on Powerpoint slides (why am I not surprised).

Update: OK, I should have read first, posted later.

The last sentence has to do with word-for-word memorization, which does improve with repeated retrieval practice.

As for the rest of it, in fact, recall does improve over time, but not by nearly as much as one would hope.

"Elaborative" study techniques -- underlining, annotating, diagramming (Make It Stick highly recommends elaboration) -- had no effect at all.

Difficult texts without titles offer no advantage I can see from the summary: students recalled less during their first retrieval practice and then, over time, continued to recall more until they reached the level of students who had read a clearly-written text with a title. Lots more pain, no gain.

At this point, I don't think this study tells me too much. The authors' theory - which I do find quite interesting - is that a student's mental model blocks further learning. Specifically, the student's mental model blocks learning of content that didn't make it into the model.

That strikes me as highly likely; I've experience a "gist" effect myself, and I think "gist effects" are a major problem in any kind of reform effort.

However, fields of study are different from a book you are trying to remember, which is what the students in this study were trying to do.

When you study a field, one of the things you are learning is the field's organization and categories.

New content gets slotted into pre-existing categories. That's why the more you know about a subject, the easier it is to learn new aspects of that subject. You have a mental 'gist' of the subject that is 'hungry' for new content, or at least wide-open to it.

Make It Stick - is 3 the magic number?

I'm reading Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel's Make It Stick in a mixed state of trepidation and fascination.

Trepidation because the wording is so incautious and, often, so imprecise that I think it's entirely possible we'll see Make It Stick touted as justification for bad teaching of every stripe.

e.g.: the preface spends a great deal of time denigrating "drill and kill," which the writers take to mean massed practice. Also, "easy" lessons are slammed on grounds that learning should be hard. (So drill and kill is too easy?) And at one point the text baldy avers, sans footnote, that "people do have multiple intelligences" while in the same breath asserting that there's no evidence learning styles have anything to do with anything. So instead of worrying about our learning styles we should all use all of our multiple intelligences all the time because you learn better when you "go wide," drawing on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or experience to the style you find most amenable.

What can any of this possibly mean?

Hard is good but hard drill-and-kill is bad .... learning styles are meaningless but we should deploy all of our "intelligences" all of the time (dancing in math? math-ing in dance?) ...

And does the exhortation to "go wide" mean multisensory programs are always to be preferred? I'm completely open to that possibility myself, but there's no listing for "multisensory" in the index, so who knows?

But that's the preface.

The first chapter, on retrieval practice, is riveting.

Retrieval practice, or the testing effect, refers to the finding that taking a test -- any kind of test, in-class or a quiz you give yourself -- increases your memory of the material you are trying to learn. In other words, taking a test or a quiz is a form of practice in which you practice remembering.

What's more, simple retrieval practice is probably superior to the kind of "active," "higher-order" learning students are purported to do via concept mapping. It also appears likely that retrieval practice produces knowledge that is readily transferred to new contexts and to problem solving.

In short, memorization makes you smart. (That's not how Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel put it.)

What is shocking to me is the tiny amount of retrieval practice the middle-school students in Roediger's studies needed in order to recall the material they had covered in class: just 3 "low-stakes" (ungraded) clicker quizzes in all. One quiz at the beginning of the class (on material they were supposed to have read the night before), one quiz at the end of the class (after the teacher's lecture on the same material) and one before the unit test a few weeks later. Students scored a full letter-grade higher on quizzed than on un-quizzed material.

When Roediger expanded the study to 8th-grade science, students scored an average of 92% on quizzed material, 79% on un-quizzed material. They still remembered the quizzed material eight  months later, for the final.

After 3 ungraded quizzes no one had to study for.

Is 3 the magic number?

Here are Rawson & Dunlosky on "How Much Is Enough?"

The literature on testing effects is vast but supports surprisingly few prescriptive conclusions for how to schedule practice to achieve both durable and efficient learning. Key limitations are that few studies have examined the effects of initial learning criterion or the effects of relearning, and no prior research has examined the combined effects of these 2 factors. Across 3 experiments, 533 students learned conceptual material via retrieval practice with restudy. Items were practiced until they were correctly recalled from 1 to 4 times during an initial learning session and were then practiced again to 1 correct recall in 1–5 subsequent relearning sessions (across experiments, more than 100,000 short-answer recall responses were collected and hand-scored). Durability was measured by cued recall and rate of relearning 1–4 months after practice, and efficiency was measured by total practice trials across sessions. A consistent qualitative pattern emerged: The effects of initial learning criterion and relearning were subadditive, such that the effects of initial learning criterion were strong prior to relearning but then diminished as relearning increased. Relearning had pronounced effects on long-term retention with a relatively minimal cost in terms of additional practice trials. On the basis of the overall patterns of durability and efficiency, our prescriptive conclusion for students is to practice recalling concepts to an initial criterion of 3 correct recalls and then to relearn them 3 times at widely spaced intervals.

The chapter also says that short answer and essay tests are probably superior to flash cards and multiple choice, but flash cards and multiple choice produce superior retention, too.

Clicker quizzes work.

I need a clicker.

Just imagine

Utopia can't wait



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

College Board takes leave of its senses

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

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

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

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

His classmates and teacher Jerry Neufeld-Kaiser cracked up.

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

[snip]

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

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

Sit and get.

That's a new one on me.

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

We are a long way from debate club.

Cliff Mass has a good comment in the comments thread.