From the Education Week article on Effort, Engagement, and Student Learning:

Schools that often emphasize fun, student-centered classroom activities in instruction, and evolutionary processes over many generations have helped shape humans’ interest in those engaging social activities.

Yet for students to tackle new and difficult, or “evolutionarily novel” material in reading, math, and other subjects, schools need to emphasize effort and persistence.

That’s the argument put forward by David C. Geary, a professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia, in a study. It was published in the October edition of the journal Educational Psychologist but publicized this month by the university’s press office. It focuses on the connection between evolution, culture, and the role of schools, which the author describes as “evolutionary educational psychology.”

The process of evolution, Mr. Geary says in the study, has resulted in students being able to acquire certain types of new knowledge and skills, such as language acquisition, in a relatively “effortless” manner through processes that are engaging. Schools have arranged lessons to suit those desires.

Yet evolution has not provided the necessary scaffolding to help students with challenging content, such as algebra and reading, Mr. Geary argues. Only determined effort in classrooms will help students meet that demand, he says.

This makes me wonder about the whole "Why are we learning this?" question from students. For "effortless" activities, perhaps students don't have a need to prompt teachers with this query. When it comes to Newtonian physics, then they do (except, perhaps, for those few students who are gunning to learn it).

I'm not entirely sure what to do with this information---I just find it interesting. For me, it leads to deeper questions about what should be included with a curriculum and the purpose of education. Do students need "evolutionary novel" material? Why? And, if so, what's the best way to teach it---because from what I'm gleaning, constructivist methods aren't going to cut it.

Labels: articles, instruction

The other day, I was shopping for some garden needs at Home Depot. An enthusiastic young man helped me pile bag after bag of mulch onto a cart---and even loaded them into my car. I chatted with him, asking if he was done with school for the year. "I don't go to school anymore." Hmmm...I thought. He seemed high school age. He went on to explain that he had dropped out because his mother had become very ill and he needed to support her. He wants to get his GED someday and perhaps an AA from the local community college...but in the meantime, it seems rather sad that this boy didn't feel like he had any options when he had to make the choice of family vs. finishing high school.

Usually, dropping out of school is not a single event, as this young man described. Typically speaking, students who leave school before graduation disengage over a long period of time. Not showing up to school one day is just the final act. It is estimated that one in four students in Washington state doesn't reach the finish line---and I would expect our rates are fairly average. This creates quite a burden on the rest of us, whether or not we realize it. From my dissertation:

Students who drop out of school not only affect their own lives, but also have a societal impact. As a group, dropouts earn lower incomes and experience higher rates of unemployment (McIntosh, Flannery, Sugai, Braun, & Cochrane, 2008). For the more than 1.2 million students who did not graduate in 2008, this represents a loss of over $300 billion in lifetime earnings (Deyé, 2008). In addition, dropouts have a higher rate of substance abuse issues and health problems, costing Americans over $17 billion during their lifetimes. There is also a greater than average cost for crime prevention and prosecution in those geographic areas which have a concentrated population of dropouts (McIntosh, et al., 2008). In looking at the benefits to society by increasing graduation rates, it is estimated that more than $300 billion could be added to the American economy if by 2020 students of color graduated at the same rate as their white peers and there is a potential $8 billion reduction in crime spending if the percentage of males graduating high school increased by a mere five percent (Deyé, 2008). Finally, Murray and Naranjo (2008) point out that there are societal costs to the dropout issue which are difficult to quantify: “negative effects to the knowledge base, creative contributions, scientific progress, and democratic processes” (p. 146). Although educators tend to frame the dropout issue in terms of high school, these problems begin much earlier. The act of dropping out is a culmination of many factors and it is important to begin the examination of these issues, including student motivation, during early adolescence (McIntosh, et al., 2008). The ability of society to solve the issue of dropouts is critical to effecting change on many fronts.

I was thinking about this again after reading an article from a recent edition of Education Week (reg. req'd) on Preventing High School Dropouts Can Start in 4th Grade:

Risk factors for dropping out include low academic achievement, mental health problems, truancy, poverty and teen pregnancy.

But here's a shocker from Lynne Strathman, director of Lydia Urban Academy in Rockford, Ill., a small faith-based alternative program for dropouts.

Strathman says the one thing that she consistently finds is that "the last time these students felt successful was the fourth grade."

That's right: Fourth grade. Which means parents and teachers may be ignoring years of red flags.

Here are a few of the issues related to teenage dropouts:

• Adult responsibilities, from work to child-rearing. Among girls who have babies at age 17 or younger, 60 percent drop out of high school, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Udell said boys who become fathers are at higher risk too.
• Truancy, learning disabilities and mental health problems. Strathman said kids who can't succeed academically often become truants because school is "so frustrating to them. They're labeled that they're lazy, but they don't know how to function in school because of a learning disability or a mental health issue." Low achievement leads to behavioral problems: "They felt like failures, and they made themselves get kicked out."John Stack, administrator of the Life Skills Center of Akron, Ohio, an alternative school for kids ages 16-22, said it's not unusual for dropouts to enroll in his school "at a fourth-grade reading level. We're trying to get people to understand that if these kids go from a fourth-grade level to a seventh-grade level, that's progress."Only 64 percent of Hispanic students graduate in four years, with lack of English fluency and inadequate early schooling in other countries among the factors.But kids from affluent, educated families drop out of school too. Reamer said that in those cases, truant or defiant teens may be academically capable, but often come from "a family where there's a lot of chaos, where parents may be divorcing, or where there may be alcoholism or mental illness. I don't suggest we have to tolerate or excuse the behavior. But it requires quick, constructive intervention and skilled professional help."
• Boredom. Nearly half the dropouts in a 2006 survey by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said they left school because it was boring and irrelevant.
• Lack of extracurricular activities. Stacy Hansen, drama director of Valley High School in West Des Moines, Iowa, says kids who aren't engaged outside of class risk becoming "disconnected to the high school community." A club or activity "creates an immediate family, a place where they belong and they can just be safe, a place where they're known by their first name and they can connect, whether it's arts or athletics or mock trial or dance, or outside of school, a church group or tae kwon do," she said.

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While I admit that this list is fairly reductionist, I have to think that the things listed here are a good start and do not represent insurmountable issues by schools. At the very least, the costs to implement them have to be far less than what taxpayers spend to deal with dropouts later.

Labels: articles, teens

A few days ago, I posted about the continuing saga of paying middle school students for "good" scores on standardized tests. Here's another take on the issue:

For as long as students have had to take state assessment tests, middle school students have been bombing on them.

Even students who scored well in elementary school and those who go on to ace the high school Regents exams tend to get caught in the middle school slump.

Locally, a growing number of school administrators think they have come up with a solution: bribery.

Some schools base final exam grades on students’ scores on the state assessments. Others exempt students who score a 3 or 4 on a state test—on a scale of 1 to 4—from having to take the final exam in a subject.

For students at Hamburg Middle School, that means not having to come to school on exam day.

“Telling an eighth-grader you get an extra day off is a pretty good motivator,” said Gregg J. Davis, assistant superintendent of information services in the Hamburg School District.

“I’ve seen the scores go up, so there’s a lot of positives in that. Three years ago, I think our eighth-grade scores were in the 60s. Now they’re in the 80s,” he said of the percentage of students scoring at proficiency. “That’s a pretty good leap.”

Other schools offer equally glowing reports about their students’ improvements.

But some experts say the results don’t justify using student scores in a way the state never intended.

“The state assessments were designed to gauge student progress toward the [state learning] standards, not as individual student achievement measures,” said Ann K. Lupo, an assessment consultant to the state Education Department who teaches at Buffalo State College.

“The assessments are being debased if used in this fashion, contrary to their intent. The English language arts test is given in January, and the math test is in March — not at the end of the year, on purpose, to discourage using them as finals."...

Local school officials acknowledge that they’re using the state tests in a way that was never intended.

But by the time students reach eighth grade, the educators say, they’ve realized that there’s not much of a consequence for them if they get a low score on the state assessments. Generally, the worst that happens is that students with low scores are assigned extra help in whatever subjects they’re struggling with.

For schools, teachers and administrators, though, low scores can mean much more. If enough students do poorly on a test, a school can find itself on one of the state’s warning lists, a designation that can haunt a school for years.

Educators complain that the media have contributed to the situation by publishing scores released by the state Education Department and comparing schools, based on the percentage of students who pass each test.

“A lot of the fiddling around with how to use scores, and creating incentives for students to do well, is pure politics,” Lupo said. “Districts are very, very concerned not only about student performance, but how they will be perceived when the scores hit the paper.”...

“While giving them a break from not taking a final is a feel-good thing, I don’t know that it gets to the crux of the issue — how do I help you improve your knowledge base and your skills?” he said. “As a district, we don’t believe grades motivate students. We have to find other ways to motivate students.”

I don't believe that standardized tests are evil; however, I do think that their results can be used in unreasonable ways. For me, the the "unreasonable" part here is that the adults are admitting that they are using the carrot of a day off/no final as a way to boost public perception of the school via test scores. It's not about student learning at all. And we can pass the buck up the food chain---perhaps it's really the government's fault via NCLB, etc...but at the end of the day, the school administrators are making a choice that they don't have to make. I'm not willing to absolve them of using children.

Standardized tests should not be looked at as being all that (and a bag of chips), but I also think that school administrators are diminishing the usefulness of information for students and parents. If a student doesn't do well on the state assessment...then they get another test---where is the built in support and interventions? How does "Because you failed it the first time, we're going to let you fail it again." help families understand what is happening in terms of learning?

This kind of testing is not going to go away. I will not be surprised if NCLB is renamed (and retooled), but standardized tests are here to stay. We just need to find a way to repurpose them.

Labels: articles, assessment

Recently, a friend was telling me about some cheating that occurred in her classroom on the final exam. The cheating was pervasive (she was out of the classroom that day) and left her with quite the conundrum. As you might imagine, some colleagues told her to just give everyone implicated a zero---end of discussion. My friend was not so sure about that course of action. Shouldn't she at least try to find out what happened first? And why?

Seems like "cheating" has been on the minds of many recently. Did you see the story in the Associated Press about the mom who changed her daughter's grades? (Mom worked as a school secretary and had access to passwords.) Or perhaps the one from Common Sense Media about the use of technology as a means to enable cheating by teens? My favourite recent piece has been one on Behavioral Economics based on some research by Dan Ariely "...about why people think it's okay to cheat a little bit."

He decided to conduct a series of experiments to understand cheating. He gave test subjects a math quiz with 20 problems and promised to give a dollar for each correct answer. The problems weren't hard to solve, but Ariely imposed a five-minute time limit, making it impossible for anyone to complete the test. After five minutes, Ariely collected the test from the volunteers, scored them, and paid them for their correct answers. On average, volunters solved four questions correctly.

Next, he tempted people to cheat. He told a new group of test takers to score their own tests and tell Ariely how many questions they got correct. These volunteers reported, on average, that they solved seven questions. The interesting thing about this, says Ariely, was that the higher average wasn't because a few people cheated a lot; rather, it was because a lot of people cheated a little. Equally interesting was the fact that the amount of cheating didn't change when the reward for a correct question increased or decreased; nor did it change when the chances of being caught cheating increased or decreased.

I'm skipping over some of the details here, but what Ariely concluded was that people have a kind of "personal fudge factor" that allows them to gain the benefits of low-level cheating without damaging their self-esteem. "On one hand, we all want to look in the mirror and feel good about ourselves, so we don't want to cheat," he said. "On the other hand, we can still cheat a little bit and feel good about ourselves. So maybe what is happening is that there is a level of cheating that we can't go over, but we can still benefit from cheating at a low degree as long as it doesn't change our impressions about ourselves."

Ariely goes on to describe other revealing experiments. For instance, paying people in tokens that they could exchange for cash doubled the amount of cheating compared to paying people directly in cash. And when people saw an outsider (like a college student wearing a sweatshirt from another university) cheating, cheating among the group went down, but when a colleague cheated, cheating among the group went up.

Does this, I wonder, have any relation to why several students in a class choose to cheat on a test when their teacher isn't there? Is this why my conscience doesn't bother me when I drive 65 mph in a 60 mph highway zone because other drivers are, too? Are we socially programmed to cheat---at least just a little bit?

Labels: grading

One of the things I'll be looking at in my dissertation is the motivational aspects of middle school students who qualify for the federal free/reduced lunch program. Within the research literature, there are some well-documented studies that examine ethnicity (spoiler: it doesn't have an impact), gender (see previous spoiler), and student age (spoiler: motivation to learn decreases with age).

What do I think I'll find when we look throw a measure of poverty into the mix? Honestly, I'm not sure. If ethnicity and gender are any indicators, then I should find nothing. Judging by some recent news, however, I think the public at large is under the assumption that students of poverty are oriented toward motivational behaviors at school based on rewards and punishments (as opposed to learning for the sake of learning). There is indication that paying for grades does lead to increased scores on high-stakes tests.

An overwhelming number of schools participating in a controversial program that pays kids for good grades saw huge boosts -- up to nearly 40 percentage points higher -- in reading and math scores this year, a Post analysis found.

About two-thirds of the 59 high-poverty schools in the Sparks program -- which pays seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for their performance on a total of 10 assessments -- improved their scores since last year's state tests by margins above the citywide average.

The gains at some schools approached 40 percentage points.

For example, at PS 188 on the Lower East Side, 76 percent of fourth-graders met or exceeded state benchmarks in English -- 39.6 percentage points higher than last year, when the kids were in third grade.

At MS 343 in The Bronx, 94 percent of seventh-graders met or surpassed state standards in math this year -- 37.3 points higher than last year, when the students were sixth-graders.

In all, of the 61 fourth and seventh grades involved in the pupil-pay program, only 16 improved less than the citywide average gain in math since last year, while 21 did so in reading.

Principals at the highest-scoring schools cautioned that the Sparks program was just one of many factors in the test-score jumps.

But many reported seeing indisputable academic benefits -- including more motivation, better focus and an increase in healthy competition for good grades among students.

"It's an ego booster in terms of self-worth," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven, where nearly 90 percent of students qualify for federal poverty aid.

"When they get the checks, there's that competitiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them."

More than 8,000 kids have collectively earned $1.25 million since September in the second year of the privately funded pilot program.

The higher the kids score on tests, the more they get paid: up to a maximum of $50 per test for seventh-graders and up to $25 for fourth-graders.

The initiative, created by Harvard University economist Roland Fryer, is run out of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Educational Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs), which is conducting similar cash-for-kids trials in Chicago and Washington, DC.

Critics argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.

But supporters of student incentives say immediate rewards are necessary to help some kids connect the dots between school and future income -- and the students agree.

Alize Cancel, a 13-year-old at IS 286, spent some of the $180 she has earned this year on school supplies and shoes.

"It's all we talk about. Every day we ask our teachers, 'Did we pass? When do we get paid?' " she said. "It made me study more because I was getting paid."

Ouch.

The students that I will be studying for my dissertation do not receive external rewards/punishments (at least not through the school system)...so I have to wonder if the personal motivational levels they bring to the school show that would engage more if money was dangled in front. I hope that isn't the case---Pollyanna here would like to think that learning is its own reward, no matter your background.

Labels: articles, grading

After being away for six weeks, I have enjoyed much of the last one at home. I am working some each day (no summer off anymore). July is shaping up to be another crush of busy-ness, so I am doing what I can to use my overtime and recharge myself.

One of the things I've enjoyed seeing around the edusphere is all of the energy of teachers on holiday: their plans for next year...their ideas for professional development over the summer...how their learning is continuing.

I have to admit that I haven't been very good about such things this year. I used to do far more professional reading and participating in learning circles. It is odd to me to work in a place devoted to education...and have no learning happening within its walls. It's all management. I don't think this is good. I can't change the workplace. I can change my own habits; or, rather, I can re-adopt my old ones and make a better effort to stay current with my reading.

As for learning circles? My in-person options are limited (at best), so I will probably look to more on-line conversations...or perhaps challenge myself to do more posting here. I think that my lack of posting this year hasn't been due to lack of experiences to share, but rather that my learning has been stunted in the workplace. I have allowed that to happen...but no more.

Labels: werk

I was reading Batman Villains and Cooperation: A Utility Analysis and this idea stuck out at me:

The theory is that as you add villains, working together will prove more difficult and planning more arduous. Therefore, the probability of getting Batman will increase, but by a marginally smaller amount with each villain added.

I had to stop at this point and wonder if this unusual application of economics might also apply to schools. Suppose we made a couple of substitutions:

The theory is that as you add [teachers], working together will prove more difficult and planning more arduous. Therefore, the probability of getting [student achievement] will increase, but by a marginally smaller amount with each [teacher] added.

or

The theory is that as you add [students], working together will prove more difficult and planning more arduous. Therefore, the probability of getting [group project completed] will increase, but by a marginally smaller amount with each [student] added.

Does the Law of Diminishing Returns have application to workplace dynamics? In this age where collaboration and shared decision-making are valued above individual work ethic---are we better off with a "divide and conquer" strategy for moving initiatives forward? One could argue that since education is not producing widgets, that the Law shouldn't apply where schools are concerned.

And yet, I can't help but think about whether the end product matters where diminishing returns are concerned. I remember a quote from the Seattle news coverage of schools that "Kumbaya consensus isn't leadership at all -- it's death by a gazillion selfish interests." Are those selfish interests any different (or more real) than expecting the Joker and Penguin to work in concert to off Batman?

For every cook we allow to stir the pot of student achievement, we gain communal support and buy-in to a common goal. These are worthwhile ends---but now, I am just wondering about what may be lost in the process.

Labels: werk