Tag Archive for 'critical thinking'

Teaching to the Tex

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 21, 2008 in Assessment and Testing. 1 Comment

A section of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) is coming under scrutiny.  Even Texas’ best students struggle with a section of the test that asks students to express themselves and back up their claims with evidence, revealing either faulty tests or preparation.

Three short-response questions require students to stretch their brains by generating clear, reasonable ideas from a reading selection, the Dallas Morning News reports.  Then they must support those ideas with evidence from the text in a well-written response.  ”Students are passing the ninth-, 10th- and 11th-grade language arts TAKS at higher rates than ever, the paper notes. “Some even post near-perfect passing rates. But on the short-response portion, fewer than half of North Texas students pass.”

Texas Education Agency officials say the short-response questions provide a better window into how well students can think, communicate and write.  ”This paints a much different picture for teachers and parents than the multiple-choice test,” Victoria Young, a testing official with TEA tells the paper. “You’re finding out two very different things about kids.”  Richard Kouri of the Texas State Teachers Association said curriculum doesn’t have the depth it used to because teachers are pulled in so many different directions by the TAKS demands.

Here’s the scoring rubric for the short-answer reading section of the test.  Seems a reasonable set of tasks for high school students.

Content With Not Knowing

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 28, 2008 in Curriculum, Podcast and Video and Teaching. 1 Comment

The Common Core survey by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, which shows a troubling lack of historical background knowledge among American 17-year-olds, is enjoying a nice run this week, with stories in USA Today, the New York Times, and lots of broadcast coverage. But alas, the coverage has been all cause and no effect. At best, it irritates people that students are ill-informed. At worst, it’s seen as irrelevant. There’s a lot of “tsk-tsk” reporting. How embarassing! It would be nice to see a few journalists take the next step and look at the impact of a content-free education on outcomes.

The CBS Evening News did a piece on the Common Core report which started out as a standard issue “tsk-tsk” piece. In the words of correspondent Ben Tracy, “A lot of educators say all this talk about the ‘dumbest generation’ is quite stupid…students don’t need to know a litany of dates because they can just Google them.” The problem here is twofold: the continued absurd association of content knowledge with rote memorization of dates (does any school do that?) and the idea that content and critical thinking are mutually exclusive. One high school teacher in the CBS piece says, “I know that this generation is the smartest that we’ve had.” Based on what empirical evidence, exactly?

“Students are expected to analyze concepts rather than memorize dates,” Tracy reports knowingly. I continue to await an example of a concept that can be analyzed in the absence of content knowledge. This kind of thinking by educators (and uncritical reporting by journalists) implies a content-free education that infantilizes the learner. Some years ago, I was marched off to a social studies professional development session. The theme of the session was “No More Trivial Pursuit.” “It doesn’t matter if your students don’t know when the War of 1812 happened,” the staff developer said. “It’s more important to grapple with ‘essential questions’ like ‘Is war ever justifiable?’” Clearly no meaningful response would be possible without a solid grasp of history to bolster one’s point of view.

Linda Bevilacqua, the President of the Core Knowledge Foundation, was a guest on G. Gordon Liddy’s Radio America show yesterday to weigh in on the Common Core study. A caller described how he was taught in school that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King were the same person. It’s not merely embarrassing to not know the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. Even those—especially those—who believe that critical thinking is the purpose of school should be alarmed. How much critical thinking about the Reformation and the Civil Rights movement is a student capable of who doesn’t know that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King are two different people separated by 500 years, language, culture and the Atlantic Ocean?

Until and unless we start to make a connection between content knowledge, reading comprehension, and critical thinking, I fear we’re not going to move the level of concern above the level of “tsk-tsk…these kids today!”

Critical Thinking About Critical Thinking

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2008 in Education Practice and Education Theory. 0 Comments

The Washington PostThere are two types of people in education: those who know the work of University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham, and those who should. A piece by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post examines education’s fixation on teaching critical thinking skills. Willingham has a different view:

“There is no such thing,” he tells the Post.

Willingham and other cognitive psychologists say critical thinking skills are developed in relation to the content area in which they are acquired. They are not skills that can be acquired—or taught—in the abstract.

“You may have these fabulous critical-thinking skills, but you don’t know when they are appropriate,” Willingham says. “If you think of thought as having two components, you have factual knowledge that you know and the processes that manipulate those facts,” he added. “Everyone understands that half is no good when that half is knowledge. People don’t seem to understand that it works the other way. Having processes alone doesn’t work, either. You can’t acquire these processes in the absence of facts.”

Willingham questions the value of educational programs that offer a way to teach critical thinking — sometimes through exercises and brainteasers — that are not rooted in any particular subject. “To understand the structure and the nature of poetry, you need to read a lot of poems,” he tells the Post. “It’s the same thing with mathematics and science.”

Willingham, who is Core Knowledge board member, stole the show at EdTrust last November with his presentation “Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading” (If there’s a better rallying cry for curriculum reform, I haven’t heard it). And his regular columns in the AFT’s American Educator are required reading for the kinds of teachers who prefer research to the pedagogy du jour.

He is also the subject of a “myth busters” piece in the Post on teaching to kids “learning styles” — visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. According to Willingham, “There is no evidence that the idea holds water.”

E.D. Hirsch on “Educational Incoherence”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

ednews.orgA coherent curriculum trumps school choice in promoting student achievement, says Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in an interview with Michael F. Shaughnessy of EdNews.org. The interview was conducted in response to the Sol Stern/school choice dust-up. Hirsch and Shaughnessy delve deeply into curriculum and Hirsch’s concept of “educational incoherence.”

“Children go to school for more than a decade because learning is gradual, and there is a great deal to be learned — especially in matters relating to general knowledge and the build up of vocabulary,” Hirsch observes. “If the specific content for each grade level does not build on what went before and prepare for what will come after, there will be big gaps, and boring repetitions. Those are the conditions that now prevail in charter schools and regular schools. A great deal of school time is being used unproductively, and the hardest hit by this incoherence are disadvantaged children.”

Hirsch also takes issue with those who claim content knowledge must take a back seat to problem solving and critical thinking. “Critical thinking skills cannot be learned in the abstract,” he retorts. “They always pertain to concrete knowledge of subject matter. I review the scientific literature on this in The Schools We Need. Writing skills are obverse of reading skills. They both depend more on knowledge of the unspoken within the language community than on knowledge of the spoken. The main, somewhat revolutionary point I have been making is that teaching content is teaching skills, where as teaching formal processes is, in the end, teaching neither content nor skills. This is not only clear in the scientific literature, it is also clear from comparative results. Students who have had been taught coherent knowledge are more highly skilled than those who have been taught “skills.” See the (unfortunately repressed) book by the late Jeanne Chall: The Academic Achievement Challenge.”

Do Tell Mama

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 1, 2008 in Education Practice and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Vanderbilt UniversityTurns out Mom was actually helping you learn when she asked, “What did you learn in school today?” Research from Vanderbilt University indicates that four- and five-year-olds learn the solution to a problem best when they explain it to their mother. Previous research indicated that kids learn well with their mothers or a peer, but what was less well understood was whether learning was enhanced because kids were getting feedback and help.

“In this study, we just had the children’s mothers listen, without providing any assistance,” notes the study’s author, Bethany Rittle-Johnson, an assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt. “We’ve found that by simply listening, a mother helps her child learn,” says Rittle-Johnson, who believes the study shows parents can assist their children with their schoolwork, even when they are not sure of the answer themselves.

“The basic idea is that it is really effective to try to get kids to explain things themselves instead of just telling them the answer,” she said. “Explaining their reasoning, to a parent or perhaps to other people they know, will help them understand the problem and apply what they have learned to other situations.”

Commentary: Just the facts, please

Published by CKF on July 26, 2007 in Opinion and Teacher Training. 0 Comments

Why teaching facts is more fair than teaching “critical thinking.” A commentary by Scott Hurban.

Tracy PressIf anyone wants to understand the general decline in academic education, especially among the urban poor, I recommend, “The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them,” by E.D. Hirsch. It is a researched indictment of teacher training during the past 50 years.

… Teachers are taught that the accumulation of knowledge is happening at such a frightening pace that it is futile to emphasize facts, since facts will become obsolete over a short time. It is better to teach students “critical thinking” skills so they can analyze the changes and become “lifelong learners.” Teachers are to emphasize process and pedagogy, instead of factual content.

Teachers are taught that learning is natural and that forcing students to learn what they don’t want is detrimental to a child’s natural curiosity. Teachers are to be “facilitators” and not “drill instructors.”

The outcome of these high sounding ideas is the destruction of egalitarianism (equal opportunity) for the urban poor and socially disadvantaged.

Read the entire essay