Sciency Art at Bard College

The blog Out in Left Field asks, Artsy Science? What about Sciency Art?

Well, here is the sciency art we've been waiting for (after a fashion): Bard college, a small, artsy school, is getting serious about teaching its students science, according to this New York Times article. The college has instituted a required Bard president Leon Botstein states:

“The most terrifying problem in American university education is the profound lack of scientific literacy for the people we give diplomas to who are not scientists or engineers,” he said. “The hidden Achilles’ heel is that while we’ve found ways to educate scientists in the humanities, the reverse has never really happened. Everybody knows this, but nobody wants to do anything about it.”

Bard is instilling science literacy in its students by requiring them to take an intensive, two-and-a-half-week long session in which they get to do hands-on labwork under the tutelage of scientists.

This is actually a clever idea. Bard doesn't have many scientists on its faculty, so they're borrowing scientists from other universities to teach during the winter session. Students get exposure to people they wouldn't otherwise have a chance to meet.

This, on the other hand...

To promote learning for learning’s sake, students will receive neither course credits nor grades.  [...] While there is no final grade, there is a final project, and Ms. Batkin and six classmates came up with an idea that is pure Bard: a dance performance that illustrates how an influenza vaccine works. Students assumed the roles of the antigen, B cell, T cell and antibodies. 

A New Curriculum for AP Biology

The College Board is rethinking the advanced placement exams, according to this New York Times article. After decades of overly-broad exams that cover anything imaginable within the scope of college-level introductory biology, the new exam will focus on fewer concepts.

A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like. The goal is to clear students’ minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. 

The scope of the new exam will be specified in a detailed curriculum (!):  

“We really believe that the New A.P. needs to be anchored in a curriculum that focuses on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge,” [CB Vice Prez] Mr. Packer says.

An official curriculum for AP Bio is a very good thing. The point has been made in other places that, in the absence of a specified curriculum, the test dictates what will be taught. That seems to me to be what has happened with many of the AP subjects, as teachers try to fit a large slew of topics into a single course. An explicit curriculum circumvents that.

Other changes, I am not so sure will be for the better. The old labs are out--too boring and predictable! Now students do "a host of more creative, hands-on experiments [...] intended to help students think more like scientists." I'm not convinced that change simply for the sake of change is necessarily for the better. Take this example of a new lab:

The basic question: What factors affect the rate of photosynthesis in living plants? The new twist: Instead of being guided through the process, groups of two or three students had to dream up their own hypotheses and figure out how to test them.

All too often, the emphasis in teaching shifts to process over content, and while an exercise such as the above is a good way to get students to appreciate the thought involved in designing a good experiment, I worry that the balance will shift too far from the content side of the equation.

The new A.P. Biology exams will be given for the first time in spring of 2013.

What Skills for a Brave New World?

You've heard of the digital natives argument for technology in education, but Rick Hess gives a straight-up debunking to the recent trend of purchasing an iPad for every student.

This was all brought home to me again, just the other week, when I had a chance to spend a couple days visiting acclaimed "technology-infused" high schools. Yet, most of what I saw the technology being used for was either content-lite or amounted to students using Google-cum-Wikipedia as a latter day World Book Encyclopedia. Making powerpoints and video shorts is nice, but it's only us "digital tourists" who think it reflects impressive learning.

This had been my impression of technology use in public schools--students are seemingly addicted to it, yet can only use it in rudimentary ways. For example, they will copy and paste content from the internet into their Word document, and use the thesaurus feature to substitute individual words in the copied text. Voila! No plagiarizing here! (Or so they think.)

Diana Senechal's gem of a comment is a must-read:

In my first year of teaching, students kept asking me, "Why don't we do more projects?" I wasn't sure what they meant by "projects," until they started bringing in their projects for other classes. Typically, these were poster boards with a presentation on a topic. It would include pictures (taken from the Internet), a news article or essay (taken from the Internet), a few headings in fancy fonts and colors, and maybe a bit of writing (also copied from the Internet in many cases).

Teachers were under pressure to assign this sort of thing; it was considered "evidence of technology use in the classroom" and "hands-on learning." Also, it served as good classroom or bulletin board decoration.

For students to learn to use the Internet well, they have to learn to go without it. If they can puzzle their way through a text, taking time to make sense of it and think about it, then they will be in a better position to do the same online. If they need the graphics and quick answers, then something's wrong.

Exactly!

I subscribe to a number of listserves for science teachers, and there is often hand-wringing over the need to teach students how to navigate our New! Digital! world. The truth is, what they really need are the old skills: content knowledge; the ability to paraphrase, summarize, and cite text sources; an understanding of grammar and a solid vocabulary.

Adults over 30 are better able to use the technology available today because we developed those skills, sans fancy gadgets. Today's high school students? I worry about them.

Experts Agree: It's the Curriculum, Stupid!

This past week has seen an unusual (and welcome) focus on curriculum--specifically, the issue that we often don't have one.


Kitchen Table Math links to this essay by Barry Garelick arguing that It Isn't the Culture, Stupid.

Asian countries routinely trounce the US in international comparisons of mathematical ability. Cultural explanations are often given--the U.S. can't do any better than we are doing because we lack a culture that values education, or that is willing to send kids to afterschool cram sessions. Garelick debunks this argument.

This Robert Pondiscio's essay, featured on the Fordham Institute's Gadfly, points out the obvious:

What I cannot accept, however, is that to focus on instruction—on curriculum and teaching—is to play the “wrong game.”  To accept this argument is to believe that the educational outcome of Jose or Malik in the South Bronx or Detroit is more deeply affected by who wins a primary for a House race somewhere in California than what they learn in school all day.  It is to believe that electing the “right people” matters more than what teachers teach and what children learn.

John Whorter writes at NPR's The Root about the effectiveness of direct instruction in teaching reading in closing achievement gaps.

The tragedy is that the discussion about black kids in school — boys as well as girls — takes place as if there were some great mystery about how to teach children from disadvantaged homes how to read. An entire plangent and circular conversation drifts eternally over a problem that, at least in the case of reading, was solved way back during the Nixon administration.

Back then, in the early '70s, Siegfried Engelmann led a government-sponsored investigation called Project Follow Through. It compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results among 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade. It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading — based on sounding out words rather than learning them whole (phonics), and on a tightly scripted format emphasizing repetition and student participation — was vastly more effective than any of the others. And for poor kids. Including black ones.

And AFT's American Education devotes its entire winter issue to questions of curriculum. The blog Common Core covers AFT's article pointing out the dearth of solid research in support of "reform" math approached. They ask:

So why are so many American schools wasting resources and precious class time using reform curricula like Everyday Math that is based on an instruction-lite, discovery-driven approach to learning math?

So there you have it. Everybody and their sister, including the largest teacher's union, is coming out on the side of solid teaching and the importance of what is taught. Could this mean that an actual core curriculum lies on the horizon?

Want to Improve Content Retention? Make Your Fonts Harder to Read

The Research Digest Blog reports that Harder-to-Read Fonts Boost Student Learning. Researchers at Princeton first tested the effect in the lab and then replicated it in actual classrooms in a Ohio high school. Students who read worksheets, handouts, or PowerPoint slides with slightly harder-to-read fonts did better on tests of the material. Teacher's usual classroom materials were converted to the harder-to-read fonts "Comic Sans Italicised, Haettenschweiler or Monotype Corsiva, or, if the materials were hand-written, simply by shaking them about in a photo-copier to make them blurry."

Why does making something harder to read promote learning?

When people find something easy to read, they take that as a sign that they've mastered it. Conversely, the researchers believe harder-to-read fonts provoke a feeling of lack of mastery and encourage deeper processing. However, there's obviously a balance to be struck. If material becomes too difficult to read, some students may simply give up. 

The researchers think their finding could be the tip of the ice-berg as regards using cognitive findings to boost educational practice. 'If a simple change of font can significantly increase student performance, one can only imagine the number of beneficial cognitive interventions waiting to be discovered,' they said. 'Fluency demonstrates how small interventions have the potential to make big improvements in the performance of our students and education system as a whole.'

Students Can Spot Competent Teaching

Standardized test scores and value added teacher scores are much maligned.

But a recent New York Times article reports that teacher with high value-added scores were also recognized by their students as competent, caring teachers.

Thousands of students have filled out confidential questionnaires about the learning environment that their teachers create. After comparing the students’ ratings with teachers’ value-added scores, researchers have concluded that there is quite a bit of agreement.

Classrooms where a majority of students said they agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time,” tended to be led by teachers with high value-added scores, the report said.

The same was true for teachers whose students agreed with the statements, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” and, “My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class.”

The Harvard professor who designed the surveys say that “Kids know effective teaching when they experience it.” Agreed!

Is there a herring in my school lunch?

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon writes about the red herring of bad parenting in the move to restrict food advertising to kids, while Joanne Jacobs complains about the "nanny state" setting guidelines on what foods schools may serve.

Since it's actually federal guidelines that drive school lunch menus (and often drive them to unhealthy extremes), it's hard to criticize the government for setting limits on what schools can sell to children. (Well, unless you really really dislike the federal government...then, it's easy.)

Weekend Roundup, 04Dec2010

What we've been reading this week...

Ri-Shawn Biddle at Dropout Nation argues in favor of school choice

When defenders of the status quo say that families should not have a wide array of educational options available [...] they are essentially arguing that there should be no civil right to a high quality education. That argument is absolutely wrong on every moral and intellectual level. Poor and minority families should not have to wait for these dropout factories to either shut down or be overhauled. Neither should middle-class families or anyone else. What these families deserve is the option to escape. They deserve school choice.

Ed pundit Chester Finn argues against local control

The weak and generally stagnant academic performance of most American school kids, our scandalous achievement gaps, the country’s sagging performance vis-à-vis other countries, the skimpy preparation of many teachers and principals, the shoddy curricula, the fat and junky textbooks, the innovation-shackling union contracts, the large expenditures with meager returns—these are not the result of an overweening federal government. They are, in fact, almost entirely the product of state and local control of public education

North Caroline caves into pressure to delay teaching U.S. history

When the state department of education put forward its earlier plan for new social studies standards, officials said they had no intention of diminishing history instruction. State Superintendent June Atkinson said at the time that the revised standards would actually have increased the amount of time students spent studying U.S. history during their elementary and secondary schooling, and that they would learn plenty about the major developments throughout American history. But with all the negative feedback, state officials agreed to revisit the plan.

Teach For America Recruits get better results

Teach for America [...] racked up the highest student scores among new teachers in reading, science and social studies. Even compared to students of veteran teachers, students of TFA teachers had the highest test scores in reading.

Indystar article on teacher-blaming and reform

[M]any good teachers think those of us pushing for education reform blame them for their schools' failures. We're not. We're actually making the opposite case: Good and great teachers are responsible for their schools' successes.

Baltimore schools get a turn-around

In 2007, the school board hired Andres Alonso, a Cuban immigrant with a Harvard degree and strong views on how to change things. In three years, he pushed through a sweeping reorganization of the school system, closing failing schools, slashing the central office staff by a third and replacing three-quarters of all school principals.

Glen Miller at The Quick & the Ed looks at bachelors degree completion rates

Despite being our best indicator of institutional-level completion, the federal graduation rate has a number of limitations; problems that critics of the measure (or schools with low results) consistently bring up when asked to explain outcomes.[...] When these issues are combined, critics assert that federal graduation rates are much lower than reality.

When Asians Enroll! (and other tales from meritocracy's margins)

By the logic of meritocracy, the cream would rise naturally to the top, regardless of status or association, and yet generations passed wherein the "cream" remained almost consistently white and male... that is, until just recently, when the world woke up to the news that minorities were not just gratefully accepting the token slots assigned them, but slowly and surely invading campuses in force, dramatically shifting the demographic away from the white, male, middle-class face of higher education. Meritocracy was somehow, if unevenly, coming through on its promise of diversity. Calamity ensued.

When It Comes to Privilege, Gen Y Plays Dumb

Of all of the downsides associated with the can-do attitude Gen Y was ostensibly raised with (the inability to handle failure or criticism, a purported bafflement at not having the world handed to us on a silver platter, etc.), the most subtle and rarely acknowledged would have to be the fact that we weren’t educated to the fact that not all of our peers were being indoctrinated with the same overweening sense of self-esteem that we were. 

Bills Gates funds the development of a better system to evaluate teachers

[Gates] is investing $335 million through his foundation to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A big chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.[...] For teachers, the findings could mean more scrutiny. But they may also provide more specific guidance about what is expected of the teachers in the classroom if new experiments with other measures are adopted — including tests that gauge teachers’ mastery of their subjects, surveys that ask students about the learning environments in their classes and digital videos of teachers’ lessons, scored by experts.

If you've been reading this blog and haven't commented yet, please do! We'd love to hear from you!

A Case in Which Teaching Trumps Poverty

The blog Inside Schools Research reports on a study that finds that introducing advanced vocabulary to children in kindergarten results in an increased vocabulary in first grade. (I'm going to hold off on the snark for this one.)

It's been known for a while now that children from low-SES* households enter school with only a portion of the vocabulary of a high-SES child. This has been pointed to as one of the roots of the achievement gap. What's more, a certain faction of the education establishment likes to point to outside-of-school factors and conclude that schools cannot possibly do better than they are doing with the students they have.

So, a study showing that those outside-of-school factors can be mitigated is kind of a big deal.

The intervention used in the study was simple: Teachers were taught how to introduce vocabulary to small children.

Each teacher gets a list of thematically related and complex words; for example, "temperature," "exhaust," "steam," and "boil," or "pineapple," "banana," and "kiwi." The teacher reads stories that incorporate the words with the students and opens conversations with the students.

"One of the strategies is building bridges, having conversations with students whatever they want to talk about," [....] "The teacher learns how to have these conversations. Take 'apple,' 'banana' and 'Kiwi.' Students in the Delta may never have heard of a kiwi or seen the fruit. So the teacher shows them and they talk about it."

The study was robust, with classrooms randomly assigned to either the intervention condition or to the no-intervention (control) condition. Over 1300 students were tested, so we can be certain that the results seen are the effect of the intervention and not of other variables.

The effect was modest, with the students exposed to the richer vocabulary only one month ahead of students in the control group. Still, it's nothing to sniff at when you consider that vocabulary impacts so much of a student's academic achievement, and may be the driver behind the marshmallow-test effect (kids who can wait longer before eating a marshmallow are found to do better in school even into adolescence...read more about it here).

So maybe, bigger vocabulary -> better self-control -> higher achievement. If so, the effect may be pretty big after all.

*Socio-economic status

Knowledge-Based Grades (Who'da Thunk?!?)

Although Out in Left Field blogged first, I couldn't keep from mentioning it here, too. This recent New York Times article describes a new trend in grading--basing grades on what students have learned. New? Yes. Grades are almost always based on a mix of what students know and how they act--whether they complete homework, hand in assignments on time, raise their hand in class. In other words, grades reflect how well students please the teacher as well as how well they have mastered the material. This dual function of grading shows up when students take standardized exams, in which no amount of people-pleasing will help:

About 10 percent of the students who earned A’s and B’s in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C’s, D’s and even F’s — students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school — did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.

One district in New York State changed to knowledge-based grading, which didn't sit so well with some parents:

“Does the old system reward compliance? Yes,” she said. “Do those who fit in the box of school do better? Yes. But to revamp the policy in a way that could be of detriment to the kids who do well is not the answer.” In the real world, she points out, attitude counts. 

Of course, when the system was set up to work to detriment of bright nonconformists, no one complained quite as loudly.

Katharine Beals terms this favoritism toward the eager-sociable, grade reversal, and cites the larger culture's embrace of right-brain thinking as a (the?) cause. I'm not so sure; I see different mechanisms to point a finger at.

One is the selection process for public school educators and administrators. As a whole, education majors are not as academically inclined as graduates of other programs. They also seem (and I am speculating here) to have been more challenged by analytical, academic tasks than by things like motivation, organization, and "fitting in." It is natural that they would value what they excel at and redefine achievement to be more in line with their own strengths.

The second mechanism is what I call parentism, and it deserves a post all to itself.