Bonnie on college student reading skills

from the Headsprouts thread:

Reading comprehension is a huge problem for my college students. The introductory CS textbooks are written using vocabulary and a sentence complexity that is way beyond them. I wish I had a better sense of their actual reading skills so I could do some vocabulary work with them. The gasstationwithoupumps blog has posted links to some excellent material on teaching students how to read technical material that I think I may use next semester.

"people love pizza"

Math lovers of the world unite

Envision or Math in Focus?

query from Peter Meyer

Any thoughts?

Newhart

Headsprouts reading comprehension program

abstract:
Teaching learners how to comprehend text remains a largely unsuccessful attempt in our school system. Drawing from the fields of learning sciences, education, instructional design, and performance improvement, we designed, tested, revised, and released to schools and homes an interactive online program that reliably teaches flexible, widely applicable reading comprehension strategies to children. This article describes the analysis and design processes involved in the development of such a program.
Comprehension by Design: Teaching Young Learners How to Comprehend What They Read (pdf file)
Marta Leon, PhD; Victoria Ford Hirofumi Shimizu, PhD; April Heimlich Stretz Jay Thompson Melinda Sota; Janet S. Twyman, PhD T. V. Joe Layng, PhD

Reading this tonight!

More Connected Math Woes, This Time in Pennsylvania

The Riverview School District enrolls about 1,100 k-12 students in Oakmont and Verona Boroughs, Pennsylvania.

From an online news blog, the Plum-Oakmont Patch

The Riverview School Board meeting on Monday had the largest attendance in years, according to school board members. Parents filled the high school library, and in a citizen comment session that lasted two hours, they discussed their concerns about the middle school Connected Mathematics 2 program.

The parents had a lot of familiar things to say:

Among the parents' concerns were the group work involved, the participation aspect of the class, the frequency of testing and the combination of students at different math levels in the same classroom.

Parent Joseph Knapp said his son struggled in the class because of the way it was structured.

"I, unfortunately, found the Connected Math program to be an unorthodox way of teaching students," he said. "It seemed like the students taught themselves, in theory.

"They have groups where they figure out problems and are encouraged to come up with the ideas on their own. I thought that was ridiculous. In sixth and seventh grades, you need instruction."

Parent Tim Lazor said his son usually did very well in math class until he took the class this year. Lazor said he doesn't think the program has the support of the students or the teachers who are teaching it.

"I don't think the teachers bought into this," he said. "That's a critical component.

Eight years to find a new curriculum?

Superintendent Charles Erdeljac said district officials had been looking for a way to improve the math curriculum for about eight years. He said to participate in the Math and Science Partnership of Southwest Pennsylvania, the district would have to implement Connected Math 2 or MathScape—the only two programs with the National Science Foundation's "stamp of approval."

Scores declined?

When asked by parents about Pennsylvania System of School Assessment Scores, principal Jay Moser said the scores of last school year's seventh graders dropped by 9 percent, according to primary figures from the state department of education.

Hmmn I guess math is different in small-town Pennsylvania.

Erdeljac said district officials are going to continue to monitor the program and data associated with it to ensure it is a good fit for students.

"On the one hand, we have to have fidelity to the program as it's intended to be taught, but on the other hand, we're Riverview," he said. "We need to find out how this program can be most successful here at Riverview…we're still in the process of making this program Riverview's Connected Math program."

gaps

From the reading and math, math and reading comments thread:

Erica writes:

You can tell C. that I beat him: 220 point gap between CR and math (800/580), and I actually knew a couple of people with even larger gaps (800/560, 800/490!).

Independent George wrote:

I scored a 420 on my Writing achievement test (waaaay back in 1994). I had a 720 on the SAT-Verbal, and a 5 on the AP English test, but I scored 420 on the writing test.

C. has a friend who got an 800 on reading and a 550 on math.

He's still only at 670 on writing, which is equally ridiculous! (Ridiculous because he's losing his points on the grammar section.) Erica's going to shape him up.

reading and math, math and reading

via Marginal Revolution:

To an economist, the most important fact to know about mental abilities is that across large populations, different mental abilities are positively correlated.1 In other words, people who are above average in arithmetic tend to perform above average in vocabulary tests, block puzzles, as well as in memorizing lists of numbers and then repeating them in reverse order. This positive correlation conflicts with the commonsense view that abilities are negatively correlated, that for instance while some people are good in math, others are good in verbal tasks.

This positive correlation is at the heart of the psychological concept of intelligence. Quantitatively, it is at the heart of psychometric methods that extract a principal component from a broad variety of mental ability subtests. This principal component is formally called g, or the g factor. Lay persons, and most routine psychological research, refer to IQ instead of g, but it is worth keeping the concept of g in mind. Across thousands of studies on the correlation across mental abilities across populations, no one has yet found a reliable negative correlation.

This fact should strengthen our priors when we come across new mental tasks and we ask ourselves, “Will high IQ groups be better than average at this new mental task?” For every mental task so far that involves any level of sophistication, the answer has been yes.
National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia
Garett Jones
January 2011
[Published in Asian Development Review, June 2011]

Serendipity!

Since last Thursday, I've been trying to explain to C. that a 190-point gap between your reading score & your math score is ridiculous. Ridiculous because a 190-point gap between a reading score & a math score is not consistent with the way a person's brain is built. On IQ tests, everything goes with everything; if you're good on one task, you're good on another.

C's math scores, I keep telling him, like my math scores when I was his age, are a measure of the math teaching and math curriculum he's had, not of his innate ability to do math. His math tutor told him the same thing this morning, but C. claimed later not to have heard. So I was in need of fresh ammunition, and now here it is.

I love the internet.

SAT grammar rules from Erica Meltzer

Complete SAT Grammar Rules

If we didn't have the SAT to prep for, C would never have learned what terms like pronoun case or pronoun antecedent meant. I'm convinced C. is going to develop more quickly as a writer because of it.

Hack the SAT on the writing section

Hack the SAT on tutoring the writing section:

The grammar portions [of the SAT writing test are far more important [than the essay]. And they're very easy to prepare for. In fact, there are only a handful of grammar rules that the SAT loves to test, and they repeat them over and over. So if you can just memorize the rules that we'll lay out in this section, you'll find that the actual test won't be that much of a challenge. During test prep, scores on the writing section tend to increase most reliably, and by the most number of points.
Hack the SAT by Eliot Schrefer
p. 159

I believe it.

Last week I skimmed an SAT roster for our high school from a couple of years back. I saw no 800s on math, one 800 on reading, and four 800s on writing. (Not sure how many students in that group -- perhaps 125?)

I think that's consistent with Schrefer's observation that the writing section is easiest to coach.

Parents pessimistic about their children's future

In the spirit of some comments here discussing the troubling trends of today's work environment, I posted on Cost of College about the concern parents are feeling for their children's economic future.

…only 41 percent of parents surveyed think that kids will have a better standard of living. It’s a major tectonic shift in our national belief system, but given the events of the past decade, it’s not that shocking.

sleep

Last summer I learned that heat and math don't mix.

Yesterday I learned that heat, humidity and no sleep are catastrophically incompatible with a timed 25-minute math section in the Blue Book.

Sitting outside in the heat and humidity, not consciously feeling the effects of a short night's sleep, I missed: 6 questions out of 20. Six. All of them rated E (for Easy) or M (for Medium).

I answered question 20 correctly. Question 20 is the one tutors tell you not to even attempt unless you're trying for an 800. That I could do.

Number 19, I got right, too.

But the question where all you had to do was read the y value on the y axis --- no. Got that one wrong.

Or the question where you were supposed to find the absolute value of the sum of two negative numbers. Wrong again.

For years I've been reading about all the bad things that happen to people who don't get enough sleep. Sleep loss causes inflammation; sleep loss causes weight gaint; sleep loss screws up your memory; etc., etc, etc.

After yesterday, I'm a believer:

When researchers put test subjects in environments without clocks or windows and ask them to sleep any time they feel tired, 95 percent sleep between seven and eight hours out of every 24. Another 2.5 percent sleep more than eight hours. That means just 2.5 percent of us require less than 7 hours of sleep a night to feel fully rested. That's 1 out of every 40 people.

When I ask people in my talks how many had fewer than 7 hours of sleep several nights during the past week, the vast majority raise their hands. That's true whether it's an audience of corporate executives, teachers, cops or government workers. We've literally lost touch with what it feels like to be fully awake.

Great performers are an exception. Typically, they sleep significantly more than the rest of us. In Anders Ericcson's famous study of violinists, the top performers slept an average of 8 ½ hours out of every 24, including a 20 to 30 minute midafternoon nap some 2 hours a day more than the average American.

The top violinists also reported that except for practice itself, sleep was second most important factor in improving as violinists.
Sleep is more important than food.
Tony Schwartz

Regents inverse function question

at JD2718

Cost of College - new blog

I have a new blog - Cost of College.

"A blog about the various costs that we face in the years BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER college. Focus is on the financial as well as the academic factors, with an eye for exploring the trends in higher education that may profoundly affect our lives in the coming years."

Today's post is about taking student loan obligations very seriously.

You can discharge your student loan obligation . . . if you die or become quadriplegic

help desk - Dr. Chung

I think the solution manual may be wrong on this one.

I'm a huge fan of John Chung's SAT Math, btw. This is the first time I've encountered an answer that struck me as wrong.

source: Dr. John Chung's SAT Math

SAT Compare Two Passages

They're the most excruciating for me.

There is a method, and apparently it works for me as I'm getting better, and they are becoming less painful by the day.

(cross posted on Perfect Score Project)

Katharine Beals on King James

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6, Verse 4

While the other translations are also confusing here and there, there are a number of things that make the KJB sentence especially so.

1. The placement of the semi-colon suggests that the biggest break is between the first clause and the rest of the sentence. But there really shouldn't be a break between it and "and also after that." Cf the oddity of: "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that."

2. What does the "when" clause modify: "those days", or "after that", or both? (The disruptive placement of the semi colon does not help in sorting this out)

3. Is "and they bare children to them" part of the when-clause? Semantically, this would make the most sense. But the immediately preceding comma, the overt subject ("they") and the change from present to past tense (from "came" to "bare"), make this interpretation more difficult. Cf:

"when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and bore children to them."

3. The tense change seems to serve no purpose other than to obfuscate.

4. What follows, as far as I can tell, is a comma splice. "the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown" should either be its own sentence, or should be conjoined to what precedes it by "and."

5. Why "the same" instead of "they"?

6. An additional comma could reduce the additional obfuscation at the end: "which were, of old, men of renown"

This seems to me to be a classic case of iconicity in language: using linguistic form iconically to express or alter content. (onomopeia is another example). Here, the obfuscating punctuation, syntax, and morpho-syntax may serve to lend an aura of mystery to what might otherwise seem (to the writers of old? or the translators of new?) to be too straightforward for a religious text.

It would be interesting to see the original Hebrew, which, according to what little I've read, involves less embedding and more simple parataxis (sentences connected with "and"). That still leaves plenty of room for obfuscation.

Many other religious texts and/or translations, from what I know of them, rely heavily on an obfuscation that is partially linguistic (Zen koans?)

I've suspected the same thing of certain philosophers (Kant, Hegel) and a number of postmodernists as well.

My preference is for maximum linguistic clarity: the best messages, however mysterious, should shine rather than fade away when viewed in the light of a well-written sentence.

Genesis 6 1-4 Jerusalem Bible

the King James version:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6, Verse 4

the Jerusalem Bible version:

Sons of God and daughters of men
When men had begun to be plentiful on the earth, and daughters had been born to them, the sons of God, looking at the daughters of men, saw they were pleasing, so they married as many as they chose. Yahweh said, 'My spirit must not for ever be disgraced in man, for he is but flesh; his life shall last no more than a hundred and twenty years'. The Nephilim were on the earth at that time (and even afterwards) when the sons of God resorted to the daughters of man, and had children by them. These are the heroes of days gone by, the famous men.
Genesis 6: 1-4

The Jerusalem Bible passage is just as mysterious as the King James, but I'm not straining to decipher the pronoun referents.

winner-take-all schools redux

more from the conversation re: public versus private school on College Confidential:

cpt of the house writes:

The fundamental reason for my sending my kids to a private school is that I could see that they got more opportunities for high level academics, sports, music and a lot of other things as compared to their highly regarded high school. Now some kids were able to get those same goodies at their public schools, and that is a wonderful thing. I did not enjoy those years of paying that tuition and if our public school, or any public school in the area could have provided the benefits that the privates could, I would have jumped on it. But they did not. I had kids who could not get into AP programs at our county school districts, but got into them in the private schools and got all 4s and 5s on the tests.

and:

Now in our case, we were taking chances since our kids were not the top grade academic kids in K-12 that are at these private schools and were in the bottom half and even quarter of their class in high school. They needed every bit of positive push we could give them....they would not have had those advantages and choices from our public school. They would not have gotten into the top classes there that are gate kept (I checked), they could not get the number of ECs in terms of performing arts, and they would not have gotten the athletic opportunities. Their peers would not have been the kids who were assuming they were going to go to college as our high school is very diverse in socio economic situations and since they would not be in the classes where college is the main goal.

This is what Paul Attewell documented in his study of elite public high schools. Kids who are capable of earning 4s and 5s on Advanced Placement exams are tracked out of the most advanced courses.

Paul Attewell's Winner-Take-All in bullet points
The Winner-Take-All High School: Organizational Adaptations to Educational Stratification. Paul Attewell. Sociology of Education, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), 267-295

public versus private high school

interesting discussion at College Confidential

I was struck by this observation:

One thing that I feel was so worth while at that private school where I sent my kids was the Composition course. Every Monday starting with freshman year until the end of first semester of senior year, they have to write an essay on what is usually an unannounced subject. THey have to handwrite the essay in those old blue books used for final exams at colleges. Those essays are scrutinized and corrected and graded. The student then has a chance to rewrite the essay--in class during the week to better the grade. So no out of school help is available for that part of the grade, and the kids really do learn to write. Sometimes a general topic is given and the kids have to research a subject and can bring a page of notes and cites to use for the essay, but still, the exact question is not known.

What makes this work are dedicated teachers who read and grade those essays. One thing I despised about our public school experience were teachers who did not follow up on corrected papers and tests. They would mark off the answers, sometimes not even reading the work carefully, and then just hand back the paper, If they bothered to look in their wastepaper basket, they would find those returned papers for the most part, thrown in there. The kids would learn nothing from the assignment. X School teachers read every single answer and would make the kids redo what they showed they did not know. But that is not always the case for even private schools. The top privates, the selective ones with the top reps tend to offer this as a matter of course.

And here's a parent talking about Rice:

I want to share with you the experience I had going to the last commencement for Rice, a Catholic all boys school in Harlem run by the Christian Brothers. The CB are a dying breed, their extinction accelerated by the priest scandals, and this school never did make any money. The school graduated a group of all African American young men from Harlem, none of them deemed smart enough to be accepted to any of the top magnet schools the NYC city offers to its brightest students. The graduation rate of this school is remarkable, given who goes there, and nearly every single one of those kids is going to college, even more remarkable when you look at the stats for inner city AA young men. Now this is not a school that most middle class folks would want for their kids, but when you look at the accomplishments for those young men, given what the alternatives are, the result are phenomonal. I do not support school vouchers, but this a case that really makes me pause, and would the type of exception that I would support.

I personally know a number of young men who graduated with my son. They did not do well in the NYC high school lottery, so their parents, came up with the money to send them to a Catholic high school. It was a difficult 4 years for these families, who even with discounts and transportation vouchers found it very difficult to go to this school that often required transportation transfers to attend. Some of the kids lived in far away boroughs. They were NOT the brightest or best by any public or private school standards. But every single one of them are going to college with enough merit/financial aid to make it work. I talked to the mom of one who told me that less than half her sons' peers who did not get into the great NYC magnet schools are going to college and if they are, are going to community colleges or at best the CUNYS maybe. What a difference in results.

King James

On the subject of reading and grammar (see here and here), I've been trying to read the Bible -- the whole Bible, start to finish -- for 3 years now.

When I asked C's freshman religion teacher which Bible to read, he said that while the King James edition was the one I should read, the Jerusalem Bible was the one I could read.

He was right.

Why is the King James version so difficult? I'm sure Katharine can tell us, and I hope she will.

For now, my sense is that the problems come down to unfamiliar grammar combined with unfamiliar idiom:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6, Verse 4

I don't know what this passage means.

First of all, I don't know what the word giants means in this context. Were the giants the sons of God?

I'm not sure. I don't know how the words and also after that connect the subject of the first independent clause to the subject of the second independent clause: how do the words and also after that relate giants to sons?

Next question: if the sons of God are the giants, are the giants half-God, half-man? (That can't be right, can it? This is the Bible, not The Odyssey.)

The expression came in unto the daughters is unfamiliar, but I can figure it out from context.

As to grammar, the pronouns are an obstacle and have been in virtually every passage I've read:

...when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown...

They refers to the daughters of men; them refers to the sons of God; the same refers to the children;  and which also refers to the children. I think. If this passage appeared on the SAT, it would be wrong on grounds that the pronoun antecedents are unclear.

In Abraham Lincoln's day, I gather, children were taught to read using the King James Bible, so presumably the pronoun antecedents were clear enough to readers back then. But the King James has different grammatical rules than the ones we're used to, and that's the problem.

If you don't know grammar, you can read the words, but you can't read the text.

PSAT Math

Since my son gets to take the PSAT test as a sophomore in October, I thought that it would be a good place to start. Taking into account the warnings of "imposter" questions, I decided to get some real tests. Unfortunately, they are not offered by the College Board anymore, so I had to get them through Amazon. I got them the other day, and I thought I would share my initial impressions.

First, the real questions are so enlightening compared to a 3rd party PSAT test book I bought. The questions on the test are simple, ... but speed and accuracy are very critical. In the first section, you have 20 questions to answer in 25 minutes. Even though some questions are trivial, it still takes you time to read the question, check to make sure you are not jumping to conclusions (that it really is that simple), and then fill in the bubble. It's one thing to do this informally, but if you try to simulate a real test situation, the seconds slip by very quickly, and the pressure to rush increases.

Second, some of the questions go out of their way to try and trick you into the wrong answer. In one question, you find x+y, but they ask for the average of the two numbers. One answer is x+y and another is (x+y)/2. Clearly, the test is not just about your knowledge of math. I think there were 3 out of 20 questions where they went out of their way to mislead you.

Third, there are certain things you need to know very quickly, like the ratios of the sides of a 45-45-90 triangle and a 30-60-90 triangle. It's not good enough to know the Pythagorean Formula or to find the answer with trig. The formula is too slow and trig gives you the result in decimal, when the answer is in radical form.

One test example was to find the height of a equilateral triangle with a side length of 8. Right now. Fast. With trig, you get 8*sin(60) = 6.928, but the answer is in radical form. With the formula, you get sqrt(64 - 16) = sqrt(48). Quick, what is the reduced radical form? Your brain might start to freeze before you find 4*sqrt(3).

You really need to be able to immediately write down any other side of these common triangles given any one of the sides. One would like to use simple concepts and mathematical understanding to solve many things, but that's not what the test is all about. The test is all about saving seconds. I only finished it with about 3 minutes to spare.

I know this is nothing new to SAT wonks, but I hope to share some of the math shortcuts I find.

The Miseducation of America

I STILL haven't had a chance to read her book, but found these videos very informative!

Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt served as the head of policy at the Department of Education during the first administration of Ronald Reagan. While working there she discovered a long term strategic plan by the tax exempt foundations to transform America from a nation of rugged individualists and problem solvers to a country of servile, brainwashed minions who simply regurgitate whatever they’re told.

SAT Critical Reading & Writing Tips

I've started keeping track the SAT lessons that might be helpful to others. The first posts are Critical Reading and Writing tips from my meeting with Erica Meltzer.

The list will be stored here: Solutions

UPDATED with clarification that this example is merely to point out what to look for when reading these sentences for errors.

(Cross posted on Perfect Score Project)

the problem

Even though the Singapore method has won acclaim from researchers, no large urban or suburban school system in the United States has fully embraced it.
D.C.’s Bruce-Monroe school faces challenges as it tries Singapore math method
By Bill Turque, Published: June 6
Washington Post

That is the problem.

When was the last time a large urban or suburban school system embraced methods that have won acclaim from researchers?

Speaking of acclaim from researchers, I opened up my latest issue of Direct Instruction News and spotted the name of the elementary school in my town: the very same elementary school two of our kids attended ... and there it was, inside the pages of a publication about Direct Instruction ----

I was gobsmacked.

Turns out the BOCES program housed inside the school is using SRA programs.

A person on the DI list says some of the BOCES programs have been using SRA programs for 5 years now!

Martha Kolln on new verbs and old

Most of our verbs -- all except 150 or so -- are regular, as are all the new verbs that we acquire. For example, here are two recent acquaisitions:

I faxed a letter to you yesrerday.
I have e-mailed the invitation to our reunion.

Understanding English Grammar 8th edition
Martha Kolln and Robert Funk
p. 68

I guess people can stop worrying about the weird new words being created by texting teenagers.

The new verbs are lots more regular than the old ones.

Excellent SAT Critical Reading and Writing blog

I've spent the last few days picking through every nook and cranny of The Ultimate SAT Verbal blog. I'd say it's the most extensive and accurate SAT Critical Reading and Writing advice I can find.

Any other SAT site suggestions?

(cross-posted on the Perfect Score Project)

men and women and spatial rotation

Abstract: The largest consistent sex difference in human cognition is found on mental rotation tests, which require participants to compare pictures of three-dimensional objects and decide whether they depict the same object or different objects. Across cultures, males score up to one standard deviation higher than females. We administered two standard rotation tests to 123 participants and found that these higher scores likely do not reflect superiority in the process of mental rotation per se, but rather in other aspects of task performance. Our results show that males decide more accurately when two objects are different, a situation in which women are more likely to claim incorrectly that they are the same, and that individual differences in confidence are responsible for part of the male advantage found on this test, whereas differences in spatial encoding ability are not. These results have implications for evolutionary theories of sex differences in spatial cognition.
Christopher F. Chabris: Selected Publications
Hooven, C.K., Chabris, C.F., Ellison, P.T., Kievit, R.A., & Kosslyn, S.M. (2008). The sex difference on mental rotation tests is not necessarily a difference in mental rotation ability. Submitted for publication. PDF file of manuscript

Years ago, I read an article that said Mozart had written 72 drafts of one composition.^*

That struck me as the difference between a genius and a near-genius: the genius can still hear the wrong note after 71 drafts.

I don't understand the difference between spatial encoding ability and deciding that two objects are different. I assume the article will clear that up.

^* 72 or thereabouts

SAT Gender Gap

The College Board Trend Report shows boys scoring higher in math than girls.

I have to believe this is cultural rather than wiring.

Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project

SAT Critical Reading -- What's the Most Effective Way to Improve?

I've just started to look deeply into the SAT Critical Reading section. I often find SAT reading passages to be arduous (putting it generously).

My informal poll left me with the impression that it's not easy to move a Critical Reading score.

Daniel Willingham says Critical Reading strategies can help, but are more of a trick than a skill.

That said, I had a game changing meeting with Erica Meltzer the other day and will be following this up with a post about the strategies she taught me, which I passed on to my son who was very appreciative and said it made that section much better.

In the meantime, you can read her post about How to Study for SAT Critical Reading.

(Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project)

No WUG is too DAX to be ZONGED

Another fabulous grammar puzzle from Language Log:

No WUG is too DAX to be ZONGED.

Does this sentence say that a WUG should be ZONGED?

Or that a WUG should not be ZONGED?

And why haven't I been reading Language Log for lo these many years?

6 in 10 people get this one right.

Dedicated Teacher on differentiated instruction

Dedicated Teacher writes:

I agree that differentiated instruction^* presents a tremendous challenge to the classroom teacher. I currently teach at a school that has time built in for differentiation in reading, but I've been trying to devise a plan to implement the same practices in math, but I just don't have enough instructional time in the day. When I do try to work with a small group of students, I find that the others do not engage in anything meaningful or that I can't teach the small group because I'm having to constantly intervene with the other groups. I find that my differentiation comes when I'm sitting with a couple of children at recess reteaching a concept or by keeping students in during Music or P.E. This not only keeps them from their much needed recess, but I'm often giving up my much needed planning time. If you come up with a way to make differentiated instruction work....let us all know.

^* the arithmetic of differentiated instruction

writing = sentences

In her book The Writing Life (1989) Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he liked sentences, he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabor it) is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.

But wouldn't the equivalent of paint be words, rather than sentences? Actually, no, because while you can brush or even drip paint on the canvas and make something interesting happen, just piling up words, one after the other, won't do much of anything until something else has been added. That something is named quite precisely by Anthony Burgess in this sentence from his novel Enderby Outside (1968):

And the words slide into slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere.


How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One
Stanley Fish
page 1 - 2

Until this year, I did not know that the sentence is the basic unit in writing.

Not the word.

That's 'cause I was educated by wolves.

help desk - grammar

Inspired by an SAT question C. and I answered yesterday --

All of the editors at the magazine agreed.
All the editors at the magazine agreed.

What happens grammatically when you omit the preposition ('of')?

In the first sentence, 'all' is the subject.

Is 'all' the subject of the second sentence, too? Is the preposition ('of') implied?

Or does 'all' become an adjective modifying 'editors,' making 'editors' the subject of the sentence?

teach the sentence

Close on the heels of Katharine's post about reform writing and Debbie's on the lost art of sentence diagramming, I came across this study mentioned on Language Log:

Research into grammar by academics at Northumbria University suggests that a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences.

[snip]

The project assumed that every adult native speaker of English would be able to understand the meaning of the sentence:

"The soldier was hit by the sailor."

Dr Dabrowska and research student James Street then tested a range of adults, some of whom were postgraduate students, and others who had left school at the age of 16. All participants were asked to identify the meaning of a number of simple active and passive sentences, as well as sentences which contained the universal qualifier "every."

As the test progressed, the two groups performed very differently. A high proportion of those who had left school at 16 began to make mistakes. Some speakers were not able to perform any better than chance, scoring no better than if they had been guessing.

Dr Dabrowska comments: "These findings are ground breaking, because for decades the theoretical and educational consensus has been solid. Regardless of educational attainment or dialect we are all supposed to be equally good at grammar, in the sense of being able to use grammatical cues to understand the meaning of sentences.

[snip]

The supposition that everyone in a linguistic community shares the same grammar is a central tenet of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. The theory assumes that all children learn language equally well and that there must therefore be an underlying common structure to all languages that is somehow "hard-wired" into the brain.

Dr Dabrowska has examined other explanations for her findings, such as limitations to working memory, and even so-called "test wiseness," but she concluded that these non-linguistic factors are irrelevant.

She also stressed that the findings have nothing to do with intelligence. Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly. She speculates that this could be because their attention was not drawn to sentence construction by parents or teachers when they were children.

Many English Speakers Cannot Understand Basic Grammar
ScienceDaily (July 6, 2010)

Turns out grammar needs to be taught.

pop quiz, part 5

How many people do you think answer this question from the Wason test correctly:

[Four] cards are placed on a table to show 3, 8, red and brown....The rule is: “If a card shows an even number on one side, then it is red on the other.” Which cards do you need to turn over to tell if the rule has been broken?

And how many people would you expect to get the answer right on this one:

“If you borrow the car, then you have to fill the tank with petrol.” Once again, you are shown four cards, one side of which says who did or did not borrow the car and the other whether or not that person filled the tank:

Dave did not borrow the car
Helen borrowed the car
Brianne filled up the tank with petrol
Kirk did not fill up the tank with petrol

Does learning math make you more likely to know the answer?

Or, alternatively, does being able to answer these questions make it easier for you to learn math?

I'll put the percent-correct in the comments.

Here is Language Log on the Wason test. (Haven't read yet.)

Impostor Questions

Any thoughts as to whether or not it's helpful (or harmful) to use non-College Board material when studying for the SAT?

I'm suspicious, and they feel like impostors (though there are notable exceptions, including PWNtheSAT and UltimateSATVerbal), but I'm open to the possibility that these impostors make the knowledge more flexible.

Thoughts? Experiences?

(Cross-posted on Perfect Score Project)

Best Wishes in Your Search for Truth

Truth in American Education

Americans rightly have voiced these concerns that we address:

■Operating outside of the system of checks and balances that Americans rely on is dangerous to our freedoms. They are an affront to parents’ rights, the 10th Amendment and our tradition of local control over education.
■The mixing of public, corporate and foundation money without proper accountability is troublesome, as taxpayers contribute a significant portion of education funding.
■A one-size-fits-all set of national standards, curriculum and testing controlled by a few will affect us all.
■Impacts to public school, private school and home school education will be felt, as mandates increase and curriculum choices will diminish.
■Students are not widgets and require individualized learning. More top-down control is not in the best interests of educating individual students.

Truth in American Education provides information to parents, taxpayers, school board members, educators and legislators who are concerned about these issues. At the heart of it, the disposition of these issues will determine whether the federal government and elite, special interest groups have the right to form the hearts and minds of children and whether we will reject, or affirm, the concepts laid down by our founding principles.

$39,000 for tuition - $35,000 for tutors

Siddharth Iyer spent eight Mays cramming for finals, first at Stuyvesant High School and then at Columbia University.

Nine years later, it is still crunch time for Mr. Iyer, a top tutor at Ivy Consulting Group, as his clients face a deluge of end-of-year exams. “He’s been prepping my son all week,” said the mother of one, a senior at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, speaking on the condition that she not be named because Riverdale discourages both tutoring and talking to reporters.

“Prepping” — in this case for an oral exam in Riverdale’s notorious Integrated Liberal Studies, an interdisciplinary class laden with primary sources instead of standard textbooks — did not start the week before the exams, the mother pointed out. She said she had paid Mr. Iyer’s company $750 to $1,500 each week this school year for 100-minute sessions on Liberal Studies, a total of about $35,000 — just shy of Riverdale’s $38,800 tuition.

Last year, she said, her tutoring bills hit six figures, including year-round SAT preparation from Advantage Testing at $425 per 50 minutes; Spanish and math help from current and former private school teachers at $150 an hour; and sessions with Mr. Iyer for Riverdale’s equally notorious interdisciplinary course Constructing America, at $375 per 50 minutes.

Push for A’s at Private Schools Is Keeping Costly Tutors Busy
By JENNY ANDERSON
Published: June 7, 2011

Elite New York schools like Riverdale and Dalton hire teachers with Ph.Ds -- not Ed.Ds^*-- in the fields they teach. Very likely, what has happened here is that these teachers have created advanced college-level courses high school students can't handle.

We need micro-schools.

^* When we looked at private schools 3 years ago, we found that the math teachers in nearly every private school had Masters degrees in education, not math.

diagramming the Preamble

redkudu left a link to this diagram of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, and I had to post it:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Lost Art of Sentence Diagramming

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. --Gertrude Stein

After reading this amusing article in the American Educator, I think sentence diagramming has a bad rap. It sounds like fun.

(Cross Posted at Perfect Score Project)

a bad economy depresses math scores

Given the magnitude of the recent recession, and the high-stakes testing the U.S. has implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it is important to understand the effects of large-scale job losses on student achievement. We examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state’s working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state’s eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB.

Children Left Behind: The Effects of Statewide Job Loss on Student Achievement
Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat, Anna Gassman-Pines, Dania V. Francis, Christina M. Gibson-Davis
NBER Working Paper No. 17104
Issued in June 2011
NBER Program(s): CH

Here's the Curious Capitalist: Is the Economy Hurting Your Kid's Report Card?.

Perceptual Learning

There was a story in the New York Times yesterday about perceptual learning, and it brought up two things for me:

a) I was surprised (relieved?) to hear that I wasn't the only one who has trouble with fractions.

b) I had a breakthrough moment a few weeks ago when Catherine told me to break out the number line.

(Cross posted on Perfect Score Project)

Remind me not to travel in space

Lieberman’s joint research with medical school faculty, other colleagues, and Brown University graduate and undergraduate students have revealed a “syndrome” – a pattern of speech motor and cognitive deficits occurs [sic] that derive from impaired subcortical basal ganglia structures. Ongoing studies of Parkinson’s disease, childhood developmental verbal apraxia, Rolandic epilepsy, autism, hypoxic insult to the brain arising from exposure to extreme altitude as climbers ascend Mount Everest, and focal brain lesions provide an opportunity for both graduate and undergraduate students to participate in research. Other studies on speech production have synthesized the vowels that Neanderthals could have uttered. The findings of these studies have been applied to the diagnosis and treatment of these conditions as well as monitoring systems for exposure to high-intensity radiation in space travel, which produces damage to neural circuits involving the basal ganglia.

Philip Lieberman at Brown

I've spent the past year trying to figure out the basal ganglia. (pdf file)

In case you were wondering.

Bonus factoid: Here's what it sounds like when a Neanderthal tries to pronounce a long 'e.'

The Pleasure of Problem Solving

Willingham's article, Why Don't Students Like School, describes perfectly why I love working on SAT problems:

There is a sense of satisfaction, of fulfillment, in successful thinking......It's notable too that the pleasure is in the solving of the problem. Working on a problem with no sense that you are making progress is not pleasurable. In fact, it's frustrating. And there's not great pleasure in simply knowing the answer either.

And why I find them so challenging:

There's a final necessity for thinking: sufficient space in working memory. Thinking becomes increasingly difficult as memory gets crowded.

(Cross-posted on Perfect Score Project)

at Google

re: crowds vs herds, jtidwell writes:

I worked at Google. I was based in the Cambridge (Mass.) office, but its architecture is comparable to the NYC office. I spent my share of time working as a visitor in the NYC office, too, and also in Mountain View.

What they are doing at Google is TOTALLY different from guess-the-number problems. :-)

But, first, the architecture. There are large rooms with an open layout, but these aren't generally huge. Most that I visited only held about 20-30 people, and the people working in them were respectful about a quiet environment. There are countless meeting rooms, both large and tiny, that one can retreat to when necessary. And truth be told, I never spent much time at my desk! I was frequently working in one of these meeting rooms, either in F2F meetings, or on videoconferences, or some hybrid thereof, or by myself when I needed serious quiet.

Plus, everyone is issued laptops instead of (or in addition to) one's desktop computer. Googlers are encouraged to take their work anywhere they please, as long as it's secure. Working from home is fine, too.

The nature of the work there is quite collaborative, as all good software product teams are. But once decisions are made, or questions formulated, everyone scurries off and does individual work. Very intense individual work. (In my case, it was UX design, with occasional programming or online research to figure something out.) And let me tell you, if you weren't extremely competent at self-directed work and individual achievement, you didn't last long in that environment. :-)

Following the crowd's opinion, just because you don't have the nerve to state your own differing opinion, isn't looked well upon either.

Red Horse Tutoring

Stacy Howe Lott has a website!

the arithematic of differentiated instruction

Concerned Teacher on differentiated instruction:

Differentiated instruction is a total scam. You MUST teach in order for students to learn, and you must offer practice time during which you are available to lend assistance. No superteacher can do both at multiple levels and through multiple modalities daily in the course of a single 55 minute period class, and do it well.

Teachers are not the folks who have perpetrated this myth. Teachers have had this myth forced upon them by administrators, and as far as I know, colleges have promoted this nonsense.

Concerned Teacher responding to Protecting Students from Learning

The arithmetic of differentiated instruction doesn't add up.

Put 20 kids at all levels of abilities and interests in the same classroom for 55 minutes.

Seat them in pods.

Have the teacher deliver a 10 minute mini lesson, after which she moves around the class working one-on-one with 20 different children.

While the teacher is making her way around the room, the other 24 children do whatever they've been told to do without being able to ask a question or get feedback. If they've been told to work together, then a lot of them are going to be copying whatever the quickest child in the pod is doing.

The total number of productive minutes an individual child can experience is 12 to 15 out of the 55, max, and that's assuming that the mini lesson was pitched to the child's level.

If the lesson was over a child's head, he or she has just two or three minutes of comprehensible direct instruction from the teacher.

If the lesson was below a child's level, he or she also has just two or three minutes of useful direct instruction from the teacher. If that.

Hunter Writing System

looks interesting:

Is this a whole-language approach to teaching grammar?

Yes and no. Yes, to the extent that whole-language instruction requires involvement of all the senses in learning. It is my recommendation that teachers have students say their rearranged sentences out loud (or, at least, subvocally) not only to test whether they are meeting the criteria for some grammatical element but also to hear what correctly spoken English sounds like. Of course, they do write and read the sentences as they carry out the exercise material.

No, because this system for immersing students in structure does not--and cannot--teach grammar through literature or through the students' own writing. Students must learn the structure of the sentence systematically, building from the known to the unknown in an experience-based and carefully sequenced way. This ownership of structure cannot be learned in random order nor without "interactive" types of exercises.

How does this way of teaching grammar relate to the process approach to teaching writing?

Nancie Atwell, a chief proponent of the process approach to teaching writing for middle school students, recommends occasional 10-minute mini-lessons in grammar primarily for the purpose of fixing some usage error. (Her reasoning is that the indispensable, if not sole, means to becoming a better writer is to do personally meaningful writing--as opposed to learning grammar as a means.)

Although my program would provide ideal subject matter for 10-minute mini-lessons, the primary instruction would have to be in the fundamentals of grammar (not in rules of usage); it would have to be virtually daily, not occasional, in occurrence; and it would have to be accompanied by extensive practice. It would have to include incrementally developed lessons on how sentences and their parts work and interact and would address usage errors only as sufficient background to understand and consistently apply them have been absorbed.

The philosophy of the proponents of the process approach to writing is that improvement in the mechanics of writing will take place with students' heightened desire to make sure that their message is read and acted upon and without formal instruction in grammar. (There remains the troubling question as to whether such experiences can lead to the remedying of most, let alone all or the most serious, mistakes. Then there is the question of permanency of the error-free writing.) Is it not reasonable to believe, too, that any lasting improvement in the mechanics of writing might occur just for the brightest of students or for those immersed in correct usage of English in their homes?

My philosophy regarding mastery of writing on the part of middle school students--in fact, all students--is entirely different. My philosophy is that immersion in grammar--that is, an experiencing of the roles of the key parts of the sentence by means of hands-on strategies, strategies that initially involve the rearrangement of sentence parts--is a prior and, for many (if not most) students, an indispensable means to self-confidence and competence in writing....

It is in light of this that I recommend that my grammar program--in accompaniment with on-going composition work--be the initial component of any foundational writing program (and, therefore, of any middle school program). My teaching suggestions in the next section offer some insights.

Competing Philosophies

help desk - absolute value

Problem 85 in Perfect 800: SAT Math:

In an amusement park, regulations require that a child be between 30" and 50" tall to ride a specific attraction. Which of the following inequalities can be used to determine whether or not a child's height h satisfies the regulation for this ride.

(A) | h -10 | < 50
(B) | h - 20 | < 40
(C) | h - 30 | < 20
(D) | h - 40 | < 10
(E) | h - 45 | < 5

update: The book's answer is C, which is wrong.

Should We Be Worried? (YES)

Core Standards Are Very Different
The new standards are supposed to be internationally benchmarked. Yet Common Core’s eighth-grade math standards don’t match Finland (0.21), Japan (0.17) or Singapore (0.13), primarily because these countries stress performing procedures. On language arts and reading, alignment ranges from 0.09 with Finland to 0.37 with New Zealand.

Should we be worried? Common Core Standards represent “a change for the better” when it comes to “higher order cognitive demand,” Porter concludes, but the “answer is less clear” when it comes to the topics that are covered.

Personally, I would say the "answer" is perfectly clear!

How Big a Change are the Common Core Standards?

SAT #4 Impressions

I just got back from taking the SAT for the 4th time in 2011.

Spent the month of May working with a tutor named Stacey Howe-Lott who taught me so much about math and grammar I hardly know where to begin; and she has excellent test taking advice (which may seem obvious to a lot of people, but it was new to me).

I'm hoping my score reflects the progress.

(Cross posted on Perfect Score Project)

Crowds vs. herds

In my book I draw a distinction between "cooperation" and "collaboration," defining the former as people working while interacting, and the latter as people working on joint projects, but not necessarily in one another's presence or with much productive interaction. In collaborations, after the work is divvied up, participants might spend the majority of their time working independently. 

I argue, furthermore, that this is what typifies most successful real-world collaborations. Except for those of us working on construction sites or film sets, we tend to get most of our work done at desks in private offices or cubicles; not at conference tables.

It turns out that there is a good reason for this. In an article in last weekend's Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer reports that:

The good news is that the wisdom of crowds exists. When groups of people are asked a difficult question—say, to estimate the number of marbles in a jar, or the murder rate of New York City—their mistakes tend to cancel each other out. As a result, the average answer is often surprisingly accurate.

But here's the bad news: The wisdom of crowds turns out to be an incredibly fragile phenomenon. It doesn't take much for the smart group to become a dumb herd. Worse, a new study by Swiss scientists suggests that the interconnectedness of modern life might be making it even harder to benefit from our collective intelligence.

The experiment was straightforward. The researchers gathered 144 Swiss college students, sat them in isolated cubicles, and then asked them to answer various questions, such as the number of new immigrants living in Zurich. In many instances, the crowd proved correct. When asked about those immigrants, for instance, the median guess of the students was 10,000. The answer was 10,067.

The scientists then gave their subjects access to the guesses of the other members of the group. As a result, they were able to adjust their subsequent estimates based on the feedback of the crowd. The results were depressing. All of a sudden, the range of guesses dramatically narrowed; people were mindlessly imitating each other. Instead of canceling out their errors, they ended up magnifying their biases, which is why each round led to worse guesses. Although these subjects were far more confident that they were right—it's reassuring to know what other people think—this confidence was misplaced.

The scientists refer to this as the "social influence effect." In their paper, they argue that the effect has grown more pervasive in recent years. We live, after all, in an age of opinion polls and Facebook, cable news and Twitter. We are constantly being confronted with the beliefs of others, as the crowd tells itself what to think.

...

This research reveals the downside of our hyperconnected lives. So many essential institutions depend on the ability of citizens to think for themselves, to resist the latest trend or bubble. That's why it is important, as the Founding Fathers realized, to cultivate a raucous free press, full of divergent viewpoints.

The ideal, then, isn't group think, but independent thinking followed by a compilation of people's thoughts. 

Jonah Lehrer, however, neglects to mention one reason why the social influence effect has grown in recent years:  all the time that today's students are forced to work in groups in K12 classrooms, and, increasingly, in college classrooms as well.  In this case it's not the hyperconnectedness of our wired and wireless lives that's responsible, but the group think of the education world, with its systematic confusion of "cooperation" with "collaboration."

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

KIPP & special ed

Defending KIPP, again

Wonderlic test

5 minutes is not a very long time.

SAT Love

dangling modifiers at PWN

brand new!

Now I have to get Mr. PWN to write some SAT geometry questions.

Top 10 List of What I Learned in May

I spent the month of May doing SAT Test Prep with Stacey Howe-Lott. She's the person with the largest score improvement that I was able to find.

I *feel* like I learned a lot. Let's hope the feels are more reality based this time around.

Next SAT in 4 days.

Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project.

dangling modifiers at the Fed

Despite having cut interest rates by 100 basis points in January, layoffs were increasing, inventories were up, and consumer confidence had fallen to its lowest level in more than four years.

A Term at the Fed: An Insider's View
Laurence H. Meyer

lgm on back to the future

re: Diane Ravitch writing in today's Times--

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: May 31, 2011

lgm writes:

Our nation and NY have many students who can be described as ideal. They have been placed in fully included classrooms with students who have severe issues and [they have been] denied access to an appropriate education. Remove that barrier, place by instructional need with competent teachers, and we as a nation will see education succeed. Continue to mainstream, and pretend to teach at an instructional level several years below the grade level over the door if it all, and we'll continue headbanging.

Yesterday's home and careers assignment for my 8th grader was similar to his 1st grade assignments before full inclusion: Take the alphabet. Under each letter, list two careers that start with that letter.

The majority of this school meets Ravitch's definition of ready to learn. But the idealists won't let the majority of children learn at their instructional level.

back to the future with Diane Ravitch

Molly on back to the future

re: Diane Ravitch writing in today's Times--

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: May 31, 2011

Molly writes:

My children meet all those lovely criteria, but somehow our educational problems remain. My child's good health and nutrition didn't help her when her algebra class spent an entire week singing karaoke followed up by 12 minutes graphing the results. Her stable family with a steady income was of no use when her English class spent 4 weeks studying poetry but never read a single poem that wasn't written by one of her 8th grade classmates. My child's good fortune doesn't do a damn thing to protect her from a crappy curriculum indifferently taught.

back to the future with Diane Ravitch

back to the future with Diane Ravitch

Diane Ravitch writing in today's Times:

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: May 31, 2011

I can tell you definitively that a child arriving at school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn from a family with a stable home and a steady income does not solve the educational problem of a high school junior needing to learn precalculus inside his actual school.

how much does a B on a precalculus final cost?

Approximately $500 for private tutoring at $100/hour.

Now we'll see how much it costs to pay said tutor to re-teach precalculus over the summer.

help desk - precalculus
lsquared on what you must know to take calculus
Crimson Wife's online tutoring recommendation

Agressive Distraction

I'm days away from starting an Online SAT course and am more than a bit nervous. Not sure if I have the self-control to push through "Compare the Two Passages" with the internet at my fingertips.

We shall see.

(Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project)