Math Anxiety: Catch It!

by Robert Pondiscio
January 26th, 2010

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Posted in Curriculum, Research and Reports | 17 Comments »

Teachers who lack confidence in their own mathematical abilities seem to pass that anxiety on to their female students, according to a provocative new study. 

“The more anxious a teacher was, the more likely a girl was to believe boys are good at math and girls are good at reading, and the more likely she was to perform worse at math relative to boys and to girls who don’t endorse the stereotype,” says Sian Beilock, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, who led the study.   

Seventeen first and second-grade teachers’ anxiety about math was assessed by the researchers at the beginning of the school year. “At the beginning of the year, there was no relationship between teacher anxiety and the students’ math abilities. In fact, there was no difference in math abilities between boys and girls,” BusinessWeek notes.  “But toward the end of the school year, the higher a teacher’s math anxiety, the lower the girls’ math achievement. Teacher anxieties did not affect boys similarly.”

The Los Angeles Times says Beilock and her colleagues ”aren’t sure exactly how the angst was transmitted from teachers to students.”

Perhaps math-anxious teachers call on girls to solve math problems less frequently; praise boys more effusively; or simply imply that it’s not important for girls to be good at math. The teachers could also telegraph their own discomfort with math by hesitating when answering questions or speaking in a different tone of voice, and some girls internalize that attitude, Beilock said.

“This is a concern, because if these girls keep getting math-anxious female teachers in later grades, it may create a snowball effect on their math achievement,” says University of Chicago psychologist and study coauthor Susan Levine.  The study was published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

OMG! Texting Doesn’t Harm Spelling

by Robert Pondiscio
January 22nd, 2010

Posted in Research and Reports | 8 Comments »

u wld thnk txting might encourage poor spelling.  according to a study in the uk u wld b wrong.

A study of 8 to 12 year olds suggests that children who regularly use texting shorthand actually improve their ability to spell.  Researchers surmise texting requires the same “phonological awareness” needed to learn correct spellings. “So when pupils replace or remove sounds, letters or syllables – such as “l8r” for “later” or “hmwrk” for “homework” – it requires an understanding of what the original word should be,” the BBC reports.

“If we are seeing a decline in literacy standards among young children, it is in spite of text messaging, not because of it,” said Clare Wood, of the University of Coventry, where the research was conducted.

clr me skptcl.  Id lk 2 c mre dta.  u2?

Is the Achievement Gap a Media Gap?

by Robert Pondiscio
January 21st, 2010

Posted in Parents, Research and Reports | 2 Comments »

The most interesting piece of data to emerge from a sobering new Kaiser Family Foundation study of children’s media consumption habits is the extraordinary disparity between Hispanic and Black youth and Whites.  As the New York Times notes, the study shows kids 8 to 18 now spend practically every waking minute using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device.  Much of the news coverage noted the apparent correlation between heavy media use and poor grades.  But the data also showed an enormous difference in the amount of time different demographic groups spend in front of a screen.

Hispanic and Black youth average about 13 hours of media exposure daily (13:00 for Hispanics and 12:59 for Blacks), compared to just over 8½ hours (8:36) among Whites. Some of the biggest race-related differences emerge for television time: Black youth spend nearly six hours daily watching TV and Hispanics spend 5:21, compared to 3:36 for Whites.

Another big takeaway in the report:  only 30% of young people report having any limits set by parents on the amount of time they can spend watching TV or playing video games, while 36% say the same about using the computer.  ”But when parents do set limits, children spend less time with media: those with any media rules consume nearly 3 hours less media per day (2:52) than those with no rules,” the report finds. 

 

E.D Hirsch on Standards: “First, Do No Harm”

by Robert Pondiscio
January 15th, 2010

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Posted in Curriculum, Education News, Educational Policy, Research and Reports, Teaching | 3 Comments »

EdWeek’s Quality Counts special report offers a comprehensive catch-up on the issues surrounding the soon-to-be-released work of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  Lots of great reads:  Sean Cavanagh’s overview looks at the history of academic standards, unresolved issues, and (thank you!) the perpetual confusion between standards and curriculum.  Stephen Sawchuk’s piece looks at the issues for teachers.  We’ve always had national standards, writes Diane Ravitch in a commentary, citing the de facto standards created by textbooks and college entrance exams in the early part of the 20th century.  Comparing the current intiative to those predecessors, Ravitch observes,

The two greatest risks of the current effort to set common standards are that they will be so prescriptive they will be resisted, or they will be so vague that they can easily be ignored. Either course would be likely to end in failure, and neither would promote the rich, full education that our students need.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. provides the lead commentary in EdWeek’s package and both praises and buries the initiative.  He compliments the draft document’s insistence that students must command a “base of knowledge across a wide range of subject matter by engaging with works of quality and substance.”  Less commendable is the continued insistence on viewing reading as a transferable, how-to skill

…thus repeating the error of current state standards of encouraging main-idea hunting and “inferencing.” There is no good scientific basis for believing that exercises in logical inference from texts or main-idea finding can significantly raise language abilities. Inference in language is not chiefly a formal skill. Untrained people are able to make very good inferences from texts when they already know something about the subject. But they cannot reliably draw correct inferences from texts about unfamiliar subjects.

“At the very least, then, language standards need to say clearly and forcefully that standards in reading, writing, speaking, and listening are not intended to be explicitly taught as skills. Rather, even these preliminary standards need to stress that academic content—in literature, history, science, and the arts—must be taught coherently and cumulatively in order to impart the requisite language competencies,” Hirsch writes. “There is no other way to verbal competence. The formalistic approach has failed for many years and will continue to do so,” he concludes.

We Americans have had an allergy to tackling the content problem at any level—ignoring the fact that somebody (mainly textbook makers) must always be dictating content in the schools, even if it is trivial, fragmented, skills-based content. If the crafters of our standards don’t encourage or require content coherence and cumulativeness (just to name two necessary elements), they will have failed the most basic requirement of this task: First, do no harm. And they will have done little to improve the unacceptable stasis in American education.

Reading Research: Looking Where the Light is Better

by Robert Pondiscio
January 12th, 2010

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Posted in Curriculum, Research and Reports | No Comments »

There’s an old joke about a drunk looking his wallet under a streetlight instead of in the dark alley where he dropped it?  Why?  “Because the light’s better here.”  

I thought of that joke when reading Dan Willingham’s latest over at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  Willingham has written extensively about the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension and the limited benefit of reading strategies instruction.  Dan’s observation, “teaching content IS teaching reading” has become my personal mantra.  But if it’s true, then why the continued focus on reading strategy instruction in teacher training and professional development?

Anti-intellectualism?  No.  Dan’s thesis is both simple and surprising: it’s a function of how academic research is carried out.  For starters, educational research is “a more conservative enterprise than you might think” and there are structural incentives rewarding short-term research in which measurable effects are easy to isolate.”

Consider what it takes to do research on strategy instruction versus knowledge instruction. Teaching children reading strategies is quick. A research project might call for 10 or 20 lessons in total, each lasting 30 minutes or less. One can imagine getting a school administrator’s permission to do such a study in his or her district.  But the hypothesis for knowledge instruction is that it takes years to make a broad impact on students’ knowledge.

Measuring the effects of background knowledge would require a whole new curriculum across grades  for validity.  “A researcher will not (and should not) persuade a school administrator to change curricula just for the sake of a research project,” Dan writes.

The comparative ease of doing reading strategies research combined with the inherent conservatism of the research process means that most reading research is strategy research, and that there is a dearth of research on the impact of a knowledge-rich curriculum on reading. Researchers usually find that strategy instruction leads to big effects, but they are not looking at it long-term.”

In short, researchers are looking where the light is better, not where the answers are.

Literacy Creep

by Robert Pondiscio
January 11th, 2010

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Posted in Literacy, Research and Reports, Teaching | 18 Comments »

An article in last week’s Education Week looks at the increasingly common practice of reading aloud to middle and high school students.  In discussing the practice with Mary Ann Zehr (I’m quoted briefly in the piece) I made the point that while there is certainly nothing wrong with reading out loud to teenagers, it is symptomatic of what I call “literacy creep” — the tendency of elementary school-style instructional techniques to find their way deeper into K-12 education across all content areas.  

Reading aloud can be engaging for students of any age.  Poetry and drama, for example, are written to be heard, not read.   The danger comes when we use read-alouds as a crutch, to make up for students’ inability to read independently ignoring the root causes.   Zehr quotes one middle school teacher who reads The Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar Fraction Book to her 7th and 8th grade math students.  That particular book is one that Scholastic markets for children from PreK to 3rd grade.  It’s hard to imagine such a basic picture book engaging middle schoolers.  The clear implication is that the students’ reading and math ability is nowhere near where it ought to be, thus a read aloud is making a virtue of necessity.

It’s unfair to pick on an isolated example, no matter how egregious.  But there is a clear move afoot to make explicit literacy instruction something that doesn’t end in elementary school, or ever.   The recent Carnegie Foundation Report, Time to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Success calls quite clearly for “explicit instruction in reading and writing all the way through grade 12.”  The report bases its recommendation for continued literacy instruction on the observation that “promising early performance and gains in reading achievement seem to dissipate as students move into and through the middle grades.”  Is that due to discontinued reading instruction?  A more likely culprit is the failure to impart a broad body of content knowledge to students in the elementary grades, a point E.D. Hirsch has written and lectured about repeatedly for decades. 

Calls for reading instruction to continue all the way through high school tend to ignore the fact that reading fluency increases with “domain knowledge.”  When you read about a familiar subject you make rapid connections between your prior knowledge and the new information the author wants to communicate.  It is not hard to imagine how metacognition, the “thinking about your thinking” that is encouraged in reading strategy instruction in beginning readers, may work against comprehension of complicated texts.  You can’t think about the content of an advanced text while monitoring your comprehension.  By comparison when you read with background knowledge, all of your mental resources are focused on making connections between the new material and what you already know.  You’re free to to draw inferences, and consider the implications of the new information.  Hirsch has used the metaphor of a snowball to describe how knowledge builds on knowledge:

The words that children hear in school are like so many snowflakes falling on the school ground. Disadvantaged children may hear the words, but they do not pick up the meanings, whereas children who have already accumulated a covering of knowledge and vocabulary will be picking up knowledge rapidly. As their academic snowball grows, so does their ability to accumulate still more knowledge — in strong contrast to disadvantaged students whose initially meager learning abilities get smaller and smaller by comparison, humiliating them still further and destroying their motivation. This continual widening of the learning gap cannot be halted unless schools make a systematic effort to build up the specific background knowledge that disadvantaged children need.

Rather than make the connection between prior knowledge and comprehension, the Carnegie report instead focuses on the physical attributes of print: texts become longer, word and sentence complexity increases, graphic representations become more important, the report notes.  

Not only do textual demands increase as young people move through the grades, but the types of text used begins to vary widely across content areas. Each content area in middle and high school demands a different approach to reading, writing, and thinking. Texts read in history class are different from those read in biology, which in turn are substantially different from novels, poems, or essays read in English language arts (ELA). As a result, reading comprehension and writing demands differ across the content areas including ELA.

Surely this is an overstatement. Yes, reading a science text is fundamentally different than reading a history text or a novel.  One is about science, the other history and the third a work of fiction.  Once you have the ability to decode and understand most of the words, the difference maker is background knowledge. If we have shortchanged children’s foundational knowledge in the content areas as elementary school students, we should not be surprised that they struggle to make sense of more advanced content readings in high school.  The answer surely cannot be to treat science, history, math and literature texts and strange beasts that require different sets of muscles to wrestle with. 

It seems obvious that a commitment to building background knowledge, and a national commitment to a shared body of knowledge across academic disciplines would be far more efficacious than insisting that the act of reading a science text is somehow fundamentally different act than reading a history text.  It is like suggesting that driving to the grocery store is fundamentally different than driving to school, or that a different kind of vehicle is required.

“Content area teachers must be prepared to support the literacy skills of students who have mastered basic reading skills but who struggle with the more sophisticated demands of reading within the content areas,” the Carnegie report argues.   To a hammer everything is a nail. And to advocates of skills-driven instruction, there are only skills.  In short, we are all literacy teachers now.  No more reading to learn.  There is only learning to read.   Instead of bringing literacy instruction to the content areas, it makes far more sense to bring content into literacy instruction from the very start of schooling.

Failure to acknowledge the critical role of background knowledge in comprehension can only lead – is only leading – to an endless process of scaffolding and backfilling, including reading aloud to high school students.  The best that can be said of enshrining such basic techniques of emerging literacy instruction at all points from K to 12 is that it’s making a virtue of necessity.   We would be far better served if we committed ourselves to ensuring that children leave elementary school with the background knowledge they need for fluency in the content areas, rather than sentence them to what feels like perpetual remediation.

Overweight? Inactive? Maybe It’s Your Gym Teacher’s Fault

by Robert Pondiscio
January 8th, 2010

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Posted in Education News, Research and Reports | 10 Comments »

Another potential hazard in the minefield of teaching.  A new study says humiliation in gym class can turn kids off of physical fitness for life.  Science Daily quotes one of the study participants:

“I am a 51-year-old woman whose childhood experiences with sports, particularly as handled in school, were so negative that even as I write this my hands are sweating. I feel on the verge of tears. I have never experienced the humiliation nor felt the antipathy toward any other aspect of life as I do toward sports.”

According to Billy Strean of the University of Alberta, good or a bad experiences in gym can be “based on the personal characteristics of the coach or instructor.”  For example, negative experiences may come from a teacher who has low energy, is unfair and/or someone who embarrasses students,” says Science Daily.  Ed Week’s Debra Viadero points out the research is qualitative and based on 24 accounts from adults looking back on their childhood gym experiences.

There’s No Such Thing as ‘Teaching’

by Diana Senechal
January 7th, 2010

Posted in Assessment and Testing, Research and Reports, Teaching, accountability | 22 Comments »

According to Amanda Ripley’s article “What Makes a Great Teacher?” (The Atlantic, January/February 2010), Teach for America has been gathering test score data to identify the personality traits of those teachers who bring results. Supposedly, if they determine those traits, they can recruit prospective teachers with the desirable personalities and thereby raise achievement.

So far, what have they found? First, the usual: score-raising teachers set big goals for their students and continually look for ways to improve. They are in touch with families; they are focused; they plan their lessons thoroughly. They work relentlessly. But then come a few surprises. Experience working in poor neighborhoods does not seem to matter. A tendency toward reflection does not seem to matter. Perseverance does. Life satisfaction does. But the most consistent predictor of future teaching success—in terms of driving up test scores—is the “achievement of big, measurable goals,” especially grade point average and “leadership achievement.”

This should come as no surprise. If the goal is to drive up scores, then the people best suited to do it are those who can drive up numbers of various kinds—be it the membership of a club or their own GPA. But are they prepared to teach Victorian poetry, medieval history, or trigonometry? Have we even thought about what they will be teaching? Do we have a conception of education beyond the raising of scores?

There is no such thing as ‘teaching’ removed from subject matter. One teacher may be brilliant with math at the high school level but miserable with elementary school. One may flail as a literacy teacher but thrive as a teacher of grammar, nineteenth-century poetry, ancient drama, or expository writing. What makes us love teaching is not only the interaction with the students and the satisfaction of helping them learn, but the subject.

Too many schools and districts treat subjects like so much old hat. At the college level, students are demanding more career preparation and fewer classics. Elementary, middle, and high schools have cut corners over many decades. They have dropped subjects they deem unnecessary; they have made the remaining subjects easier; they have merged test preparation with regular instruction; and many of their professional development sessions focus exclusively on pedagogy. An aspiring history or literature teacher may have to search far and wide for a middle school that teaches and values history and literature.  

In part this is an effect of NCLB: many schools have narrowed their curricula to reading and math, and reading and math scores count for more than the others. But part it is the result of a circular track of thought: we have become so accustomed to talk of “results” that we forget what the results are supposed to mean. Our teaching, recruiting, and quasi-curricula are aimed at increasing test scores. Then, because we have limited our teaching in this way, we are left with no vision, nothing to hope for but scores. We are like the drunkard in The Little Prince, who drinks to forget that he is ashamed of his drinking. Even reading and math, for all the emphasis we place on them, have been drained of their rigor and meaning. The focus on ‘results’ has cheapened the currency of results..

If we begin instead with a definition of education, then a curious thing may happen. The results will likely be better, yet they will not rule what we do. We will recognize that learning is for the long term as well as for the next day. We will recognize that some of the most difficult concepts and works last the longest in the mind. They may not translate immediately into results, yet they are unlikely to vanish. We will expect short-term results but teach beyond them.

 In such a setting, teaching becomes, at least in part, a matter of conveying lasting knowledge, ideas, values, and habits. In that sense it cannot be generic; a geometry teacher, a philosophy teacher, and an art teacher cannot trade places and do each other’s work. Their personalities are only part of what they do; they intersect with their subjects and with their students. Teachers are interlocutors—they know how to bring a difficult subject to their students, and their students toward it. There’s no such thing as ‘teaching’ unless we are teaching something. The best way to recruit good teachers is to ensure that we are teaching good things.

Diana Senechal taught for four years in the New York City public schools and has stepped back to write a book. Her writing has appeared in Education Week, GothamSchools, the Core Knowledge Blog, Joanne Jacobs, and Common Core. She has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale.

Movies in School: Seeing Is Believing (Unfortunately)

by Robert Pondiscio
January 5th, 2010

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Posted in Research and Reports, Teaching | 4 Comments »

Good news and bad news about showing movies concerning historical events to students.  The good news is that a film based on a historical event seems to increase student engagement and retention of information.  The bad news is that the information they retain quite likely wrong. 

That’s the upshot of an interesting study highlighted by Dan Willingham on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  Researchers at Washington University gave undergraduates nine texts, all accurate.   “For six of the texts, there was an accompanying film clip; three were fully accurate, but three had an inaccuracy and thus contradicted the text,” Willingham writes.

Some of the subjects got a general warning about potential inaccuracies in Hollywood movies. Some got the same warning but the inaccuracy in a particular film clip was specified, and the correct information was provided. Some of the subjects were not given any warning at all.” 

So what happened?

Watching the film plus reading a text led to better memory than the text alone, and students expressed greater interest in texts when there was a movie to go along with it.  However, watching the movies “led people to remember the incorrect information at fairly high levels,” says Willingham. “Between a third and half of the time, people answered a question by using the inaccurate information from the movie, rather than accurate information from the text.”

But what about that warning to beware of inaccuracies?  It was only effective if it pinpointed the exact inaccuracy.  A general warning had no effect. 

“Teachers may dislike the idea of using movies in their classrooms that contain inaccuracies, but if they decide to show them to students, they can negate the danger that students will misremember the incorrect information by providing specific information about what is inaccurate,” Willingham concludes.

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