The tragedy of histogeomegraph continues

In the news today: another botched attempt at interdisciplinarity in our public schools:

ALBANY — High school is full of hypotheticals, like “How does one solve for x?” and “What happens if I skip class?” But this week, students at Albany High School were given an alarming thought puzzle: How do I convince my teacher that I think Jews are evil?

[snip]

“Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

[snip]

Dr. Vanden Wyngaard, who met with Jewish leaders in Albany and made a public apology on Friday, said the assignment was apparently an attempt to link the English class with a history lesson on the Holocaust. The assignment itself seems to back up that theory, telling students to use “what you’ve learned in history class.” It also suggests using “any experiences you have.”

It echoed another recent, controversial assignment in Manhattan, where an elementary school class was given math problems featuring the whipping and killing of slaves, according to The Associated Press. That assignment was an effort to combine math and social studies lessons.

Students Told to Take Viewpoint of the Nazis
By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: April 12, 2013

I always thought the problem with teaching all subjects as one was that the results would be superficial and pointless. Like histogeomegraph.

It's always worse than you think.

checking in--and decline and fall

I'm doing a very rushed polish of Debbie S's SAT book -- which is wonderful -- and we're around-the-clock, so no blogging!

But I'm amassing beaucoup SAT factoids, so I'll put some up as I go.

For starters, here are the basics on the 16-year decline in SAT scores:

• SAT scores declined from 1963 to 1980
• Verbal mean: dropped from 475 to 425
• Math mean: dropped from 500 to 470
• By 1990, the Math mean has gone back up to 475, but Verbal mean has not budged
• By 1980 College Board perceives a “definite need” to “realign the verbal and math scales”
• SAT V and SAT M averages are 50 points apart
• “there was a clear need to repopulate the top end of the score scale, especially for SAT V”

The Recentering of SAT® Scales and Its Effects on Score Distributions and Score Interpretations

And get your SAT I Score Equivalents right here:
CONVERT INDIVIDUAL AND MEAN SCORES FROM THE ORIGINAL SCALE TO THE RECENTERED SCALE

automated essay grading

In the Times today:

Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: April 4, 2013 | New York Times

I'm actually in favor of essay grading software, in theory. I've been interested in automated essay scoring ever since reading Richard Hudson's paper Measuring Maturity in Writing (which I need to re-read, so nothing more on that at the moment):

Abstract
The chapter reviews the anglophone research literature on the 'formal' differences (identifiable in terms of grammatical or lexical patterns) between relatively mature and relatively immature writing (where maturity can be defined in terms of independent characteristics including the writer's age and examiners' gradings of quality). The measures involve aspects of vocabulary as well as both broad and detailed patterns of syntax. In vocabulary, maturity correlates not only with familiar measures of lexical diversity, sophistication and density, but also with 'nouniness' (not to be confused with 'nominality'), the proportion of word tokens that are nouns. In syntax, it correlates not only with broad measures such as T-unit length and subordination (versus coordination), but also with the use of more specific patterns such as apposition. At present these measures are empirically grounded but have no satisfactory theoretical explanation, but we can be sure that the eventual explanation will involve mental growth in at least two areas: working memory capacity and knowledge of language.

Maturity of writing, in this sense, can be measured by software, and I would be using automated scoring software myself if I could buy essay-scoring software on Amazon. EdX says it's giving software away free to 'institutions' (does that leave out individuals?) so I'll have to see if my department might throw its hat in the ring.

That said, a lot of this is nonsense:

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.

[snip]

“It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

[snip]

“One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said Victor Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests. The challenge is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and they take a lot more time.”

None of these things is going to happen. Students aren't going to write essay responses "over and over again;" if they do write essay responses over and over again it's not going to feel like a fun game; and nobody's going to learn to think critically from automated essay scoring software.

Oy.

words page

In honor of the latest bulletin from palisadesk, I've started a new Blogger page.

uh oh

A note from palisadesk:

Unfortunately, it is true that using Lucy Calkins' methods can raise test scores, due to the design of the current generation of "authentic assessments" (aka holistic assessment, standards-based assessment, performance assessment). I know several schools (including my own) where test scores rose substantially when they STOPPED doing systematic synthetic phonics and moved to a workshop model instead.

So to prove the instructivist stuff works you also need to have in place testing that assesses actual skills -- phonemic decoding, vocabulary, grammar, spelling, arithmetic, etc.

It's really not all that unbelievable, if you consider how the testing has 
changed. Schools used to use norm-referenced measures (like the IOWA, the
 CTBS, Metropolitan Achievement Test, etc.) which also have definite 
limitations, but different ones.

Once they replaced those (as many states
 have done) with "constructed-response" item tests, variously known as 
performance assessments, holistic assessments, standards-based assessments 
and so on, a more fuzzy teaching approach also yielded benefits. These 
open-response items are usually scored on a rubric basis, based on anchor 
papers or exemplars, according to certain criteria for reasoning,
 conventions of print, organization, and so forth. These are variously 
weighted, but specifics like sentence structure, spelling, grammar,
 paragraph structure etc. generally carry less weight than such things as
 "providing two details from the selection to support your argument."

The 
open responses often mimic journal writing -- it is personal in tone, 
calls for the student to express an opinion, and many elements of what we
 would call good writing (or correct reading) count for little or even 
nothing.



The same is true in math. A local very exclusive private school which is 
famous for its high academic achievement recently switched from 
traditional math to Everyday Math and saw its test scores soar on these assessments (probably not on norm-referenced measures, but they aren't
 saying).



Another school where I worked implemented good early reading instruction 
with a strong decoding base (and not minimizing good literature, either),
 but saw its scores on the tests go down almost 25%. I think the reason
 for that is that teaching children to write all this rubbish for the "holistic assessments" is very time consuming, and if you spent your 
instructional time teaching the basic skills -- which aren't of much value 
on these tests -- your kids will do poorly.



So yes, you can post [my email], not referring to me of course. You can say -- 
because I don't think I've mentioned it publicly anywhere -- that I have 
been involved in the past in field-testing these assessments so have a 
more complete picture of how they are put together and evaluated, and what 
they do and do not measure.

Different states have made up their own but 
they share many similarities.

I was surprised when I read this ..... somehow I had assumed that, basics being basic, absence of basics would make any test hard to pass.

Apparently not.

seeking Tiger Mom

At the WSJ (not sure whether it's behind a pay wall): "To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me" by Suzy Lee Weiss.

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.

What could I have done differently over the past years?

[snip]

Having a tiger mom helps, too. As the youngest of four daughters, I noticed long ago that my parents gave up on parenting me. It has been great in certain ways: Instead of "Be home by 11," it's "Don't wake us up when you come through the door, we're trying to sleep." But my parents also left me with a dearth of hobbies that make admissions committees salivate. I've never sat down at a piano, never plucked a violin. Karate lasted about a week and the swim team didn't last past the first lap. Why couldn't Amy Chua have adopted me as one of her cubs?

This girl is a fabulous writer!

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that competition for space--the number of students who wish to attend college growing faster than the number of spaces available--does not explain changing selectivity. The explanation is, instead, that the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers. In other words, students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges. I show that the integration of the market for college education has had profound implications on the peers whom college students experience, the resources invested in their education, the tuition they pay, and the subsidies they enjoy. An important finding is that, even though tuition has been rising rapidly at the most selective schools, the deal students get there has arguably improved greatly. The result is that the "stakes" associated with admission to these colleges are much higher now than in the past.

The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges Caroline M. Hoxby
NBER Working Paper No. 15446
October 2009
JEL No. H75,I2,J24

Not sure what she means by the 'deal' students get at a selective college.

Will let you know once I've skimmed the study....

What are standards for? What do they have to do with curriculum?

Q: Why do schools need standards? What are standards for? What do they have to do with curriculum?

A: A set of standards is a *minimum set of requirements* that a product must meet. Let's imagine a house; the building codes are standards. An individual standard says something like "a wall must withstand straight line winds of up to 75 mph" or "studs must be places at least every 24 inches." Standards tell *what* you need to do, but don't tell you how to do it. They are used so that in the event of a serious risk, the whole structure stays standing. The building code for homes applies whether building a tiny townhouse or a 5 bedroom multi-story rambler. They are meant to force people not to cut too many corners. Standards here in math education are similar: they tell you what must be taught to a student, when, year over year. They are still *minimum set of requirements*, the ones that need to apply to every classroom, every school, every student.

A set of building codes aren't plans for a building. They are not a complete design.

A design tells you what *this building* going to look like. It answers the question of what purpose this house serves. It shows you how the floors and rooms fit together, how space is utilized. Architectural plans are a design for a home. They explain what the floor plan is, what the foundation is shaped like, where the plumbing goes, where the electricity goes, how the building will maintain even temperatures, etc. It's a map for everything that needs to be built.  A solid design takes into account the what the end result should be like and plans the structure accordingly. A good design is also relatively easy to build, because it anticipates what elements of the design depend on the other elements.



In math education, this design is the curriculum. The curriculum is the plan for each year of math education, starting with a foundation, then the walls, the plumbing, the electrical, the floors, the roof, the interior. Like a good design for a building, a good curriculum is easy to implement, anticipating not just the end product, but how to ease the building of the elements as they are put in place.

A design is necessary for a home, but we don't live in an architectural drawing. The home must still be built So there are builders. Clearly the builders need to know the standards, and build according to them, so the structure is safe. But they build according to the standards while the build up the plan, starting with the foundation, and then moving on through the structure. They complete the plan.

Teachers are the builders. They are building the house of mathematics that students will live in. Some teachers are like builders who just doing the efficient thing, putting the pieces up in order. Others are like exquisite craftsmen. The most experienced teachers are like the most experienced builders who are able to look at the plans and figure out what won't quite work in this context, and where changes should be made. They know how long the job will take, and where the hard parts are before they start. They make very few mistakes, and correct them before they cause more problems. A great math teacher is building above and beyond the minimum standards where and when she can; she is on the lookout for the pitfalls in the curriculum, ready to point them out and rework them; she is improving her own skills, employing new innovations, and producing beautiful results.

Bad standards mean the structure is unsafe. Unfortunately, this isn't always visible to the eye. The owner may not find this out until a minor tremor comes and the whole house collapses. Likewise, a bad plan means the house is not a comfortable or useful place to live, or worse, could be dangerous. If the house was designed incorrectly, then the second story may not be able to hold up the third story, and it could collapse. A truly terrible design usually can't be rebuilt, but needs to be torn down. And a bad builder means things go wrong and break in your home, and again, if bad enough, the errors could mean that the house collapses. 

Likewise, in math education, bad standards means the whole structure of math that a student is building up is faulty, and sooner or later, it is going to collapse. But good standards aren't the same as a good design. Students themselves don't need to learn the standards, any more than a homeowner needs to know the building code. Schools need to have a design, a curriculum, for their teachers, the builders to work from. A bad design won't support another story being built on top, year after year after year. And a bad builder on a floor means nothing can be built on top of it until a great builder comes in and rips out the bad work and rebuilds.

Every part of the process matters. Good standards, good curriculum, good teachers.

Cross-posted at www.msmi-mn.org/home/mathqanda

MOOCs, the doomsday scenario

More from the Times on MOOCs:

That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with “nukes” seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs — led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors — are a new disruptive force in education.

[snip]

The MOOC skeptics have a variety of qualms, but especially about what is lost in the retreat of face-to-face teaching — a point eloquently made by Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University, in an article in the current New Republic, “MOOCs of Hazard.”

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., raises a different issue in an essay published this week: the economics of MOOCs and the implications.

His article appears in Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, and he had circulated a version of it earlier to his M.I.T. colleagues. After reading it, L. Rafael Rief, M.I.T.’s president, asked Mr. Cusumano to serve on a task force on the “residential university” of the future, including online initiatives.

“My fear is that we’re plunging forward with these massively free online education resources and we’re not thinking much about the economics,” Mr. Cusumano said in an interview.

The MOOC champions, Mr. Cusumano said, are well-intentioned people who “think it’s a social good to distribute education for free.”

But Mr. Cusumano questions that assumption. “Free is actually very elitist,” he said. The long-term future of university education along the MOOC path, he said, could be a “few large, well-off survivors” and a wasteland of casualties.

Mr. Cusumano’s concerns grow out of his study of the software and media industries in the face of price pressure from free, open-source software and digital distribution over the Internet. Two-thirds of the public companies in the software industry disappeared between 1998 and 2006, as companies failed or were acquired. In the media world, Mr. Cusumano contends that newspaper and magazine companies — including The New York Times Company — made a strategic mistake by giving away their publications free on the Web....

Give-away pricing in education, Mr. Cusumano warns, may well be a comparable misstep. The damage would occur, he writes in the article, “if increasing numbers of universities and colleges joined the free online education movement and set a new threshold price for the industry — zero — which becomes commonly accepted and difficult to undo.”

Beware of the High Cost of ‘Free’ Online Courses
New York Times | MARCH 25, 2013, 5:04 PM

1.
"Massive open online courses, or MOOCs — led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors — are a new disruptive force in education."

Really?

We have disruption now?

As far as I can tell, "creative disruption" is occurring when a new business is actually winning. MOOCs aren't a business, and they aren't winning, not at the moment.

And I don't recall distance learning being a disrupter back in the 1990s.

As far as I can tell, the only reason we're even talking about MOOCs is that we are 5 years into a depressed economy, and "free" is sounding like an awfully good idea right about now.

But as for disruption....I fear that the kind of disruption people seem to have in mind when they use the word already happened in the 1990s, and MOOCs are the least of it. Lots more administrators, lots fewer full-time professors, and now MOOCs. Swap in videos of Harvard professors, swap out the adjuncts. More for me!

I suppose you could characterize the bureaucratization of colleges and universities as creative disruption that benefits the administrators, but that's not what Clayton Christensen had in mind when he developed the concept.

2.
"Mr. Cusumano’s concerns grow out of his study of the software and media industries in the face of price pressure from free, open-source software and digital distribution over the Internet....Give-away pricing in education, Mr. Cusumano warns, may well be a comparable misstep."

Right, but.

People like music and news; people listen to music and read news instead of getting down to work.

College courses, on the other hand, are work. A college course is the activity you listen to music and read news to avoid. MOOCs are going to be hard to give away, not easy.

For most of the MOOC discussions I come across, executive function is the Great Unsaid. That, and the fact that Free is not a business model.

80 mph

My brother showed me this video --- can't remember if we've ever posted it here.

What I love about it is that the girlfriend actually comes up with a guesstimate that's pretty close to correct, which reminded me of something I once read about the difference between really good math students versus the "works hard" variety.

To wit: the really good students devise elegant and efficient solutions and proofs. The 'works hard' students go on wild goose chases.

Works-hard students do get to the answer or the proof eventually, but the process isn't pretty. (Speaking as a person who has spent a lot of time teaching herself math, I relate.)

The process may not be pretty, but it can be funny.



Another thing: this exchange is a brilliant example of "inflexible knowledge" in action. The young woman isn't transferring the meaning of "per hour" to a different phrasing of the same situation.

Speaking of inflexible knowledge, in Atlantic City this weekend we had a semi-galling episode of Failure to Transfer. My father-in-law has been deaf for years, and Ed and I -- and Andrew -- have had iPads for at least two. We use Andrew's iPad to communicate with him via typing (Andrew types, too). Yet it had never occurred to us that we could do the same for Ed's dad.

Two years to make the connection!

Immediately after I'd had the blinding revelation that iPads work for old people with hearing loss as well as young people with autism, we began plotting and scheming how to get an iPad for Ed's dad (would he use it?? Which one should we get?? The big one?? The little one that would take up less space on a dinner table?? Etc.)

It took me a good 5 minutes to figure out that Ed's dad does not need an iPad. He can talk.

We had a chuckle over that & then an hour or so later Ed raised the subject again.

We have spent a LOT of years living with people who can't talk.

"How I Used Math to Beat a Traffic Ticket"

At RealClearScience

Very fun.

Gone fishing, plague edition

Sorry to be AWOL - we flew to Chicago, where I contracted an epic case of stomach flu (still recovering), then drove down to Atlantic City this weekend for bar mitzvah -----

Today I'm trying to figure out if I'm on Spring Break. You'd think I'd know these things. (I'm tutoring in the Bronx this semester & don't know whether the Learning Center stays open during break.)

Back in a bit.

SAT Essay

My son is in the middle of preparing for his first (and hopefully only) official SAT test. He took the PSAT in the fall and did very well, so we do have some ideas of what to work on. However, the PSAT does not have an essay portion, so he is starting from scratch for that. I had him do the Blue Book essay for test 10, but I don't know how the scores are calibrated. Was it a 6, a 9, or a 12? How does one improve? Also, I was told that even professional writers might get 10's and not 12's. The problem is that there is way too much advice if you just search online.

Since I have used and liked Mike McClenathan's PWN the SAT book for math, I thought I would download his new Kindle "Essay Guide". Like his math book, it gets right to the point. (It's also so inexpensive that buying it is a no-brainer.) It uses a five-point star diagram to explain how there are five areas that one has to improve upon to get a better score:

1. Development and support of point of view

2. Organization and focus

3. Grammar, usage, and mechanics

4. Variety of sentence structure

5. Use of vocabulary

The document explains each of these and then talks about a general approach to writing the essay, starting with the body. OK. we are on the same wavelength. I've always thought that your examples will define your position. Of course, Mike goes into much greater detail, but he still keeps the document short.

One issue that I talked with Mike about was how, even with this information, some students might go backwards before they go forwards. He agreed that that can happen. I don't want to shove his document in front of my son and say: "Read this!" My goal is to see the big picture and focus on the things that will most likely improve my son's score. I'm more apt to show him parts of the document that will help him.

Mike's book does put this into perspective. Since it's so hard to improve from a score of 10 to 12, you will be better off improving on the multiple choice section. If you get all of those questions correct, you can perhaps get a '9' on the essay and still get an 800 score. If you get one wrong, then you need to get an '11' on the essay to get an 800. If you get two wrong and a '10', you could drop down to 760! This analysis can be extended to those not up at that lofty height, but you come up with a different answer. On BB test 1, if you get a raw score of 41 (about 7 wrong), the difference between an essay score of 8 and 9 changes your writing score from 630 to 660! At that level, it would be better to work on your writing rather than the multiple choice questions. And, as Mike points out: "Colleges you apply to might read your SAT essay."

So, my question was where is my son located on this map. I had to have some calibration for the multiple choice questions and the essay. His PSAT score told me about the multiple choice questions, but I needed to have some real feedback on his essay. I was told that robo-readers tend to give high scores. Some talk about getting 12's from them, but 10's from real people. Mike offered to give me real feedback for my son so that we would know where in the ballpark he was. I think this is a good process. Don't just dive in and work without knowing what to work on. It turns out that my son is in the '10' ballpark with no studying, so I will probably just pick and choose parts of Mike's document to show him. I think I will start with having him organize his experiences and references in terms of larger ideas, like morality, technology, and creativity. Then I will have him practice reading questions and determining his examples and position. The biggest risk for him is to read a question that stops him cold. Apparently, a "reality TV" question once did that for a lot of people. It would be tough to fit The Great Gatsby into that.

From all of this, I found out that my son does not need to spend as much time as I thought on the essay, and we know specifically what to work on. Now, where did we put Erica's grammar book? We are also waiting for pages 26+ in her new "The Critical Reader" book.

budget season

Sorry to be missing in action -- budget season is upon us, and I've been writing posts for the Irvington Parents Forum.

The Forum has also had an interesting discussion of kids learning Mandarin Chinese, including an email from a mother who is living in China so her daughter can learn the language. I'll get links posted as soon as I've read everything.

For New Yorkers and anyone else who is interested in school funding:

Per pupil spending $28,517

and

Why the tax cap passed in New York state
Pension contribution rises 37% for 2013-2014
New York State School Board Association opposes Triborough Amendment

and

English Language Arts scores 

The insanity in my state is that a school district can have nearly $30K per pupil funding and still be laying off teachers, cutting programs, laying off more teachers, threatening to cut French, Latin, and Greek, threatening to cut French, Latin, and Greek again, etc., etc., on and on.

Each and every year since the crash, we have a budget crisis: the same crisis, over and over again. It's like Groundhog Day, only not fun.

The reason we have a budget crisis each year without fail is that the budget is capped, but the contracts are not. The cap is 2%, but our contract calls for roughly 4% annual increase in compensation, and 4 is not 2. Plus pension payments will rise by 37% next year, and tax certs are through the roof (nearly $2 million this year, assuming I'm reading the Powerpoint correctly). Apparently tax certs always will be through the roof, forever. So we have a crisis.

Surreally, the solution is simple, but impossible.

All of our problems would be over if the union simply agreed to index raises to inflation. But that option is unthinkable.

The 4-is-not-2 dilemma is unthinkable even as a description of the problem. Instead of "labor costs are too high," the problem is understood to be Cost Escalation Beyond Board's Control.

Pension contributions! Health insurance! Special ed! Mandates!

True enough, all these things are expensive, but "mandates" obscures the fact that the only mandate that matters, and the source of our woe, is the Triborough Amendment. And that is here to stay.

So we are living in the land of zero-sum, where 4% raises for some mean lay-offs for others.

Sometimes kids know *less* than adults realize

A few nights ago, I was having dinner with a friend and her very smart fourteen year-old son.

My friend told me the story of how her son, who is in *eighth grade*, had come home from school with an assignment to write an 8-10 page paper. 

The exceedingly nebulous instructions included brainstorming a "guiding question" and due dates for various drafts, but other than that, there was not one iota of specific information about how these thirteen and fourteen year-olds were supposed to go about writing this paper. 

Never mind high school, it looked like the assignment sheet for a college term paper.  

My friend, a teacher herself, was a bit concerned that the assignment was unclear and emailed his teacher. She couldn't figure out whether the paper was supposed to be thesis-driven or whether it was just a research project, but the teacher wouldn't give her a straightforward answer.

She asked her son whether he'd been given clearer instructions in class.

He shook his head.

"Do you know whether you need to have a thesis, or is it just research?" she asked.

He shrugged. 

"Wait," I said. "M., do you know how to write a thesis?" 

He hesitated and looked confused. "What exactly do you mean by thesis...?"

Even if boys score higher than girls on standardized tests, they get lower grades

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college....

The sometimes controversial Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about this problem of "Boys at the back" in our public schools, illustrated in this chart posted by Mark Perry.

A reason is differences in 'noncognitive skills'

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.

The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.

That last sentence, which I've highlighted, may hold a key to the gender gap in school performance.  Boys lag girls in developing both noncognitive and literacy skills. Over time schools have pushed down more rigorous academic and organizational requirements to younger grades, making it more likely for boys to develop early gaps that often persist into the college years.

A related reason for the gender gap may be what David Brooks called the lack of cultural diversity.

… The education system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of person: one who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious. People who don’t fit this cultural ideal respond by disengaging and rebelling.

Far from all, but many of the people who don’t fit in are boys....

I wrote about this last year.

Brooks is describing what is often called the “feminization” of public schools.  This term is distasteful to some, probably because it reinforces gender stereotypes.  Whatever the label, it does appear that schools have become “culturally homogeneous” in a way that hurts boys more than girls.  It starts in elementary school when an early reader is told that he got the wrong answer because he picked “mad” instead of “sad” to describe how the boy in the story feels after he doesn’t get the bike he wanted for his birthday.  It continues through high school where group discussions in history class only allow expressions of compassion for victims of war but no praise for brilliant military maneuvers.  The message is clear – only certain types of behaviors and thoughts are welcome in the classroom.

There’s no doubt that students do need to be ”studious and industrious” to perform well academically.  It just seems that public schools are misguided in the methods they use in trying to develop those qualities in all students, particularly in boys.

Suggested reforms

Sommers points out that this gender gap should motivate schools to find ways to promote boys' academic achievement, as they have done for girls in recent cases when the gender gap has been reversed.  She suggests some changes that the British, the Canadians and the Australians have implemented.

... These include more boy-friendly reading assignments (science fiction, fantasy, sports, espionage, battles); more recess (where boys can engage in rough-and-tumble as a respite from classroom routine); campaigns to encourage male literacy; more single-sex classes; and more male teachers (and female teachers interested in the pedagogical challenges boys pose).

One example of how poor noncognitive skills can create a misalignment between grades and test scores

I know of a case where a middle school boy consistently earned almost perfect test scores in his social studies class and who reached the finals in his state's geography bee contest.  However, his overall grade was significantly lowered by his poor class notes, likely due to a deficit in "noncognitive skills".  Because of his grades, and because "behavior and work habits" counted so heavily in the admissions process, he was shut out of his high school's honors history track.  If not for his parents' intervention to override the school's policies, allowing him to enroll in the honors course, he might have languished in courses that were too easy and boring for him.  As it happened, he went on to graduate with honors and enroll in an elite university.

(A version of this post previously appeared on Cost of College.)

Are Grading Trends Hurting Socially Awkward Kids?

There's a rather spirited discussion going on at the TheAtlantic.com regarding various questions raised by my article there. Some people are claiming that the demands of the 21st require students to work in groups and be graded on their presentation skills. Please weigh in if you have an opinion on this!

South of the border

In the Times today:

A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” I explained the difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between deciphering street signs and accessing the literary canon. He wondered what the point of the students’ reading “Don Quixote” was. He said we needed to teach them to read the newspaper.

When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology textbooks,” she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the same time.” In our schools, children are being taught what is easy to teach rather than what they need to learn. It is for this reason that in Mexico — and many other countries — the humanities have been pushed aside.

The Country That Stopped Reading
By DAVID TOSCANA
March 5, 2013

I'm having a queasy feeling about Common Core's requirement that English teachers devote 60% to 80% of their time to shepherding students through "informational text."

Informational text.

Yeesh.

I write informational text (see here). I read informational text. But I never, ever, call what I write and read informational text.

If I did, I wouldn't be a writer.



source:
The Common Core Standards: What You Need to Know | June 4, 2012
Orange Public Schools

Not to belabor the point, part 3

Is there a person on the planet who thinks "Change Password" is the tab to click if you want to Lock Myself Out of the System?

AND SEE:
Not to belabor the point, part 1
Not to belabor the point, part 2

Not to belabor the point, part 2

Also, is there a person on the planet whom honks ^* who thinks "Change Password" is the tab to click to Not Change Password"?

^* Damn you, Autocorrect!
AND SEE:
not to belabor the point, part 1
not to belabor the point, part 3