Archive for the 'Research and Reports' Category

Einstein on the Fritz

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 2, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Interacting with Baby Einstein DVDs may not make your baby smarter. But interacting with Dan Willingham will make you smarter about the claims marketers make on behalf of educational products.  Dan’s take on the Baby Einstein flap is up at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  ”Many parents already believe that visual stimulation and classical music (which the DVDs offer in spades) have been shown to help brain development,” Willingham writes.  “Both beliefs are based on solid research that has been twisted out of shape,” he concludes

Meanwhile, if Dan or someone else is looking to do a little more brain-based debunking, this looks pretty ripe.

I Am Shocked, SHOCKED, To Find Gambling Going On Here

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 29, 2009 in Research and Reports and accountability. 5 Comments

Researchers at the National Center for Education Statistics have found evidence that “a majority of states may have lowered student-proficiency standards on state tests in recent years.”

Hold On, Mr. President

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 22, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 2 Comments

“From the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents. It’s the person standing at the front of the classroom,” said President Obama in a recent speech.  Linda Perlstein, off to a strong start on her new ed blog, talks to researchers who explain why the President is wrong.

Curriculum: More Reform for Less Money

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 15, 2009 in Curriculum and Research and Reports. 22 Comments

From Day One, among this blog’s raisons d’être has been to say to ed reformers of  every stripe “don’t forget curriculum.”  So it’s great to hear Brookings’ Russ Whitehurst say the same thing–and with cold, hard data to back it up.   In his latest Letter on Education, Whitehurst lays out an argument that should catch the eye of everyone who is focused on charter schools, teacher quality, early childhood ed and standards as the means of boosting student achievement.  He looks at the effect sizes of those reforms and reports curriculum effects have a much greater impact than all of them:

Further, in many cases they are a free good. That is, there are minimal differences between the costs of purchase and implementation of more vs. less effective curricula. In contrast, the other policy levers reviewed here range from very to extremely expensive and often carry with them significant political challenges, e.g., union opposition to merit pay for teachers. This is not to say that curriculum reforms should be pursued instead of efforts to create more choice and competition through charters, or to reconstitute the teacher workforce towards higher levels of effectiveness, or to establish high quality, intensive, and targeted preschool programs, all of which have evidence of effectiveness. It is to say that leaving curriculum reform off the table or giving it a very small place makes no sense. Let’s do what works for the kids, and let’s give particular attention to efficient and practical ways of doing so.

“We conclude that the effect sizes for curriculum are larger, more certain, and less expensive than for the Obama-favored policy levers,” writes Whitehurst, the former director of the Institute of Education Sciences.  He recommends the Administration “integrate curriculum innovation and reform into its policy framework.”

The Department of Education, through the Institute of Education Sciences, should fund many more comparative effectiveness trials of curricula and other interventions, both through its National Center for Education Evaluation and through competitive grants to university-based researchers. The Obama administration has clearly recognized the importance of comparative effectiveness research in health care reform. It is no less important in education reform.”

Can I get an amen?

Pinocchio Parents (and Teachers)

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 1, 2009 in Parents, Research and Reports and Teaching. 7 Comments

Most mothers and fathers practice “Pinocchio parenting” — teaching their kids that lying is bad while regularly fibbing to them, according to a pair of new studies in the Journal of Moral Education.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of California found that parents who stress the importance of truth-telling to their little ones quite often tell lies to influence the children’s behaviour or emotions, whether it’s an idle threat to make them eat their peas or boost their confidence by praising their ear-splitting saxophone solo.

“Because it’s easy, we just do it,” Dr. Kang Lee of the University of Toronto tells the Globe and Mail. “Some parents may have been doing it for years and they really have no idea they are actually telling lies.”  Lee’s study doesn’t look at the impact of Pinocchio Parenting on kids, but he confesses he’s guilty of it himself.

To quell his son’s habit of fidgeting in his car-seat, the savvy dad renamed the hazard button on his dashboard the “eject” button. If dad presses the button, six-year-old Nathan thinks he’ll be catapulted from the vehicle. “I just put my hand over it” and Nathan behaves, Dr. Lee says.

Teachers in particular are guilty of what the researchers describe as the “confidence boosting lie” — telling students they are excellent writers, for example, when in fact they are average or worse.   Teachers in my elementary school trained in the Teacher’s College Writer’s Workshop were expected to give a compliment to every student at the start of each “conference” and required to record it in our conference notes.   The intended effect obviously was to boost confidence and inspire additional effort.   The danger (equally obvious) was that students might overestimate their ability, slack off, and be set up for disappointment later on.

Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 28, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy, Research and Reports and Teaching. 29 Comments

Dan Willingham reviews the draft voluntary national standards in reading and sees a problem:  ”Teachers and administrators are likely to read those 18 standards and to try to teach to them,” he notes.  “But reading comprehension is not a ’skill’ that can be taught directly.”

His latest blog post at the Washington Post’s education page observes that teachers tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. “Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way,” he writes. “The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.”

Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read “He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.” You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)

Policymakers need to pay attention here because this is what those of us who complain about curriculum narrowing are complaining about: the natural impulse to focus on pure reading instruction in an attempt to boost reading scores is self-defeating.  When you see, as Dan does, how “bad readers” look like good readers when they have background knowledge to bring to bear on a topic, the reasonable goal of education becomes increasing the number of topics children know something about.  It may sound smart, even heroic, to focus like a laser on reading instruction, but ultimately the law of diminishing returns kicks in.  You build comprehension by building background knowledge in the reader–not by endless practice in determining the author’s purpose, finding the main idea and making inferences. 

The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things–and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it….Can’t you teach kids how to reason about texts, and thereby wring the meaning out of it even if they don’t have the right prior knowledge?  To some extent, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as you might expect. For one thing, this sort of reasoning is difficult mental work. For another, it’s slow, and so it breaks up the flow of the story you’re reading, and the fun of the story is lost.

And Dan has a line in his post that I wish could be on the wall of every classroom in the country:  “Hoping that students without relevant prior knowledge will reason their way through a story is a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”

Ultimately the draft national standards do not serve us well by reinforcing the idea that reading a a skill.  It’s not, Willingham notes:

The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country. Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.

A request–no a plea, really:  Forward Dan’s post to every teacher you know.  Tweet it.  Blog it. Put it on your Facebook page.  Do it now.   We’re not going to solve this problem until or unless we see this for what it is.  Here’s the link: Reading Is Not a Skill.  Pass the word.  And while you’re at it, here’s Dan’s video, Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading. 

 

A Promising Start for Core Knowledge Early Literacy Program

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 23, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Education News and Research and Reports. 22 Comments

One year after announcing a pilot program to test a new Core Knowledge Early Literacy program in ten New York City Schools, Joel Klein Tuesday announced very strong early results.  As a news release from the New York City Department of Ed puts it: 

The progress of students in the ten participating schools was more than five times greater than the also-significant performance of students at ten peer schools with comparable student populations, and was reflected among students at all levels of literacy.  Additionally, teachers surveyed as part of the pilot rated the program highly, and nine of the ten participating schools have selected to use the Core Knowledge program with their new kindergarten classes in addition to continuing the program with their first graders, who remain in the pilot.

Speaking at a press conference at a South Bronx elementary school — one of the pilot schools – E.D. Hirsch noted thatwhile the initial results were gratifying, the bigger payoff could come later, since the program is designed to build broad background knowledge across the curriculum, which pays off in improved reading comprehension in the years ahead:

Kindergarten is just a start.  There is always the danger of fade out in later years, as we know from Headstart research.  Elsewhere in the nation, and right here in New York, schools have made noticeable progress in raising reading scores in the early grades according to NAEP, the Nations Report Card.   These improvements reflect better teaching of decoding.   But the improvements in scores are still confined to the early grades.   Verbal scores in the later grades of NAEP have stayed unacceptably low.   Yet these later verbal scores are the ones that predict a student’s ultimate success in life.     

The program consists of two strands: a phonics-heavy decoding strand, and a “listening and learning” strand to build content knowledge.  “Assuming that we will get funding to develop materials for the later grades,” Hirsch noted, “I am predicting that even more dramatic results will show up further on. Instead of the current flat or even declining verbal scores among middle and high school students we will see in students who follow a program like this significantly higher scores, and we will see a narrowing of the language gap between races and ethnic groups. ”

More coverage of the pilot program results can be found here and here.

Parents Read More, Praise More, But Keep Kids on a Short Leash

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 19, 2009 in Parents and Research and Reports. 3 Comments

Children today have fewer chores around the house and greater autonomy than previous generations, but they’re kept on a shorter leash outside the home.  That’s the takeaway from a novel study that analyzed 300 advice columns and editorials from randomly chosen issues of Parents magazine from 1929 to 2006.  Dr. Markella Rutherford of Wellesley College was studying changes in the portrayals of parental authority and children’s autonomy over time, Science Daily reports:  

The articles in Parents showed that children were increasingly autonomous when it came to their self-expression, particularly in relation to daily activity chores, personal appearance and defiance of parents. In contrast to this increased autonomy that child-centered parenting has given children, the 20th century has seen, in other ways, children’s autonomy curtailed, through increasingly restricted freedom of movement and substantially delayed acceptance of responsibilities. Children now have fewer opportunities to conduct themselves in public spaces free from adult supervision than they did in the early and mid-twentieth century.

“Today’s parents face demands that require near-constant surveillance of their children,” says Rutherford.  “Allowing children more autonomy to express themselves and their disagreements at home may well be a response to the loss of more substantial forms of children’s autonomy to move through and participate in their communities on their own.”

Meanwhile an Ohio State study tracked parenting patterns over two generations and found ”great increases” in the amount of reading and affection shown to children today–and reductions in the amount of spanking.

In general, the amount of affection parents show their children increased significantly over the generations. Sixty percent of fathers and 73 percent of mothers in the second generation reported showing their children physical affection and praising them within the last week. But only about 40 percent of their parents showed open affection on a weekly basis.  Reading to children also showed a generational shift. Nearly three times more mothers in the second generation reported reading to their children daily compared to their own parents.

The “Curse of Knowledge”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Literacy and Research and Reports. 8 Comments

Try this experiment: Find a friend and tell him you’re going to tap out the rhythm of a famous song that everyone knows.  Without telling him what the song is, tap out the notes for “God Bless America,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” or “Happy Birthday to You.”  No singing or humming along; just taps.  Before you begin make a prediction: Do you think he’ll guess the song correctly based on your ability to tap it out?

Nearly 20 years ago, a Stanford graduate student named Elizabeth Newton did her dissertation in psychology on this simple game and discovered something remarkable.  Given a list of 25 well-known songs to tap out, the listeners’ success rate was only 2.5 percent—one out of 40 attempts.  However the tappers were so sure the listener would know the song, they predicted a 50% success rate. 

Why the disconnect? In the experiment, the tapper hears the song in his or her mind and thinks it’s so obvious that the listener can’t possibly fail to understand it.  The tapper mentally sings the words and hears the melody to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” while the listener merely hears “tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.”   The tapper can’t understand why the listener doesn’t get it; the listener gets frustrated that the tapper thinks he should.  Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe the phenomenon in their book Made to Stick: 

The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us.  And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

As a listener, the task is hard because even though you are getting valid information, it’s incomplete.  You’re not getting the whole song.  Newton’s experiment offers as good a model as you’re likely to find as to why background knowledge is the key to reading comprehension— for struggling readers, what’s on the page is useful, but it’s not enough. 

This is also one of the most difficult concepts to wrap your mind around.  When you read, your background knowledge is the melody playing in your head.  Like the tapper in the experiment, it’s impossible to forget what you know and force your mind NOT to make the connections that create understanding.    Proficient readers hear the music, the lyrics, even a full orchestra.  Students, especially those from low-income families or households lacking in enrichment, hear only tap, tap, tap, tap, tap tap.  

The tapping experiment also shows why reading strategies don’t help.  Try to determine the author’s (tapper’s) purpose.  Tap, tap, tap.  Can you find the main idea (melody)?  Tap, tap, tap.   When meaning breaks down, reread (relisten) for clarity.  No matter what “strategy” you employ, if you don’t know the song, it still sounds like tap, tap, tap.  Seen through this lens, reading strategies are worse than useless, only compounding the listener’s frustration.  You might as well instruct students “don’t just listen to the tapping, try to hear the song in your head!”  They can’t.

We all know background knowledge matters.  As teachers, even devotees of strategy instruction tell students to “activate your prior knowledge” to aid in comprehension.  However, we are assuming that there is background knowledge to activate.  If we don’t teach the explicit content needed to guarantee comprehension, we are hearing the melody in our heads and refusing to share it. 

Our students, on the other hand, hear only “tap tap tap tap tap tap.”

Study: Child’s Neighborhood Is “Biggest Factor” On Future Income

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 27, 2009 in Research and Reports. 2 Comments

Being raised in a poor neighborhood plays a major role in explaining why middle class African American children are far more likely than white children to slip down the income ladder as adults, according to new findings from the Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project reported in this morning’s Washington Post.

Using a study that has tracked more than 5,000 families since 1968, the Pew research found that no other factor, including parents’ education, employment or marital status, was as important as neighborhood poverty in explaining why black children were so much more likely than whites to lose income as adults.

The study points out that middle-class blacks are “far more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, which has a negative effect on even the better-off children raised there.”  The Post reports two out of three black children are raised in neighborhoods with at least a 20 percent poverty rate, compared with just 6 percent of white children.

Even middle-class black children have been more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods: Half of black children born between 1955 and 1970 in families with incomes of $62,000 or higher in today’s dollars grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods. But virtually no white middle-income children grew up in poor areas.