Tag Archive for 'Research and Reports'

In the Wee Small Hours

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 9, 2009 in Parents and Research and Reports. 11 Comments

An NIH study of over 15,000 teenagers shows a link between sleep and mental health.  “Teens whose parents let them stay up after midnight on weeknights have a much higher chance of being depressed or suicidal than teens whose parents enforce an earlier bedtime,” notes USA Today’s Greg Toppo. 

The findings are the first to examine bedtimes’ effects on kids’ mental health — and the results are noteworthy. Middle- and high-schoolers whose parents don’t require them to be in bed before midnight on school nights are 42% more likely to be depressed than teens whose parents require a 10 p.m. or earlier bedtime. And teens who are allowed to stay up late are 30% more likely to have had suicidal thoughts in the past year.  The differences are smaller but still significant — 25% and 20%, respectively — after controlling for age, sex, race and ethnicity.

Going to bed after midnight on weeknights reportedly increases the risk of depression by 42%.  The lead researcher, Columbia University Medical Center’s James Gangwisch, says the takeaway for parents is “try as much as possible to sell teenagers on the importance of getting enough sleep.”

Hey, it’s his study, but I have to wonder: Perhaps the difference-maker isn’t the sleep, but having a bedtime?  Is it possible that parents who set rules and routines for their children such asregular bedtimes are more involved in their kids’ lives?  Maybe their kids are less likely to feel adrift and depressed as a result.

 

 

Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 6, 2009 in Literacy and Research and Reports. 18 Comments

 A federal study on the effectiveness of different reading comprehension programs found three of the programs had no impact, while the fourth had a negative impact.  None of the four—Project CRISS, ReadAbout, Read for Real, and Reading for Knowledge—was found to be effective. 

It’s a dispiriting report, but Robert E. Slavin of the Success for All Foundation, makes an important point about it. He tells EdWeek’s Mary Ann Zehr that “IES-sponsored evaluations repeatedly evaluate programs by imposing them on teachers and school leaders who are not interested in them and are likely to implement them haphazardly, if at all, and then find, over and over again, that nothing works.”

There are is no shortage of bogus reading programs out there that overpromise and underdeliver.  That said, fidelity of implementation is huge and nearly impossible to evaluate.  There’s simply no effective way to tell if teachers believe in what they are teaching, simply going through the motions, or not using it at all.   You can’t impose a curriculum on unwilling schools and teachers and expect it to work.  High expectations matter for more than just students.

Aggressive as a Toddler, Bullied as a Kid

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 8, 2008 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Kids who are aggressive early on in life are more likely to be victimized by bullies than non-aggressive kids.  That’s one of the key findings of a new study this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry.  Newsweek notes experts have previously documented a link between being aggressive and being tormented.

When volatile and angry children act out on their frustrations—smashing a toy after someone takes their ball away—they aren’t exactly beloved by their peers….Kids who take their wrath out on other kids, as the children did in the study, are also at risk. Their classmates don’t like them—and some will eventually make their displeasure known. Prior research has focused largely on school-age kids, around age 4 or 5, and the studies have been relatively small. The new study, which followed 1,970 children in Canada, traces behavior all the way back to toddlerhood.

The researchers found two other risk factors for “peer victimization” as well, Newsweek reports: harsh or reactive parenting—anger, shouting and spanking when the kids were fussy—and lower income families.

The New Playground

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 7, 2008 in Research and Reports. 1 Comment

Three out of four teenagers report they were bullied online at least once in the last year, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists.  Not yours?  Only one in 10 reported cyberbullying to parents or other adults.

At Ars Technica, blogger John Timmer has a smart take on this.  Parents and teachers are concerned that the anonymity of online bullying exacerbates the problem.  But the study suggests it’s less of a new phenomenon than the playground gone digital.

The authors feel strongly that the fact that real-world bullying strongly predicts cyberbullying and the parallels in behavior both suggest that cyberbullying may not actually be a distinct phenomenon. “These findings further underscore the continuity between adolescents’ social worlds in school and online,” they conclude.

Roland Fryer’s Idea Lab

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 25, 2008 in No category and Research and Reports. 3 Comments

Roland Fryer is poised to become one of the most influential people in education research, leading a $44 million dollar effort to test the efficacy of various educational theories.  The New York Times reports the Harvard economist has quit his job as New York City’s “chief equality officer” to run the Educational Innovation Laboratory.  Funded largely by Eli Broad, the effort “is intended to infuse education with the data-driven approach that is common in science and business.” 

“If the doctor said to you, ‘You have a cold; here are three pills my buddy in Charlotte uses and he says they work,’ you would run out and find another doctor,” Dr. Fryer tells the Times. “Somehow, in education, that approach is O.K.”

Those who have followed his work will not be surprised to learn the first idea to be put under the microscope are incentive programs that reward students for good grades and passing standardized tests, an idea closely associated with Fryer in New York City.

You’re Not Going to Read This Post

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 20, 2008 in Education Theory, Higher Education and Literacy. 4 Comments

Digital technology has become an imperial force in education, and it should meet more antagonists argues Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein.  Clearly he’s among those antagonists.  Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he makes a strong case for reading online as a lesser kind of literacy, with profound implications for teaching and learning.  

Pointing to the work of Web researcher Jakob Nielsen, who has studied the eye movements of readers, Bauerlein notes that people read online in a physically different pattern than text on a printed page.   Online, readers eyes move in a pattern resembling the upper case letter F.  ”At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page,” says Bauerlein.  ”Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored.” 

In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, “‘Reading’ is not even the right word.” The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the “nut” and nothing else.

In short, online literacy is simply not literacy as we conventionally understand it.  “Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,” Baurlein writes, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading. Fast scanning doesn’t foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts, and it doesn’t translate into academic reading,” he writes.

Bauerlein is writing from the persepective of a college professor, and he concerns himself with higher education, but his arguments pertain to all classrooms where we are worshipping at the altar of technology.  “Given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces,” he concludes.  “Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students’ minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can’t do it by themselves.”

Good, smart stuff from an iconoclastic thinker.  Of course, you stopped reading two paragraphs ago.

Mommy and Me

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 11, 2008 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Children who were most prepared for kindergarten in a San Francisco study tended to be older girls who attended preschool, had no special needs, and mothers who went to college, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. 

The mother’s education was the most closely aligned with a child’s readiness, trumping all other characteristics including family income, ethnicity and English language ability. The study didn’t address why these characteristics were associated with being ready for kindergarten, but only noted the connection.

Researchers who evaluated 447 of last year’s kindergartners across San Francisco schools found that while half lack at least some needed skills, 11 percent were deficient both academically and socially.  They also found that preschool experience was a common trait among kids who showed up ready to learn, the paper reports.

Exhilarating Drudgery

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 21, 2008 in Curriculum and Essay. 3 Comments

The Internet puts the world’s knowledge at the ends of our rapidly twitching fingers, yet the academic research skills of “average” students are poorer today than when they “had to trek to a library, sift through periodicals, muddle through card catalogs, and blow off dust from stacks of books, just to access potential material for a term paper,” observes ed.org columnist Ron Isaac, who wonders “What has replaced this exhilarating drudgery?”

Too often a student will go online, key in, say, “Shakespeare,” double click, and then muster the energy for one more click so that their ready-made dissertation will be printing while they split to check out YouTube or to surf some video channel. At the next commercial break they will scoop up their term paper from the tray, sandwich it between colored covers, and adorn it with some “photoshop” work and computer graphics. They may also type a preface to the teacher along the lines of “I hope you like this. Have a nice day!” and add the finishing touch of an “emoticon” smiley-face.

He’s painting with a broad brush, obviously, but Isaac raises a legitimate point with his observation that “everyone professes a passionate belief in the importance of teaching students critical thinking, but generally it’s left at that. The ability to think critically is not a secondary sexual characteristic that happens involuntarily. Nor does it materialize from the study of a non-existent curriculum. It is, rather, the product of many years of literal note-taking ( sometimes a lonely endeavor) and reflection.”

 

 

 

Bundle of Joy? Not So Much

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 9, 2008 in Research and Reports. 2 Comments

Having children is supposed to make you happy.  So how can it be that several studies show that couples without children are happier than those with children?  One study finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless, Newsweek reports.

Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”

Who Is Eduwonkette?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 7, 2008 in Opinion. 1 Comment

NYC’s best education reporter, Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun, has a big piece this morning about anonymous blogger Eduwonkette, whose blog has become “a thorn in the side” of the New York City Department of Education.

DOE communications chief David Cantor and Eduwonk Andy Rotherham are among those who take shots at EW, alleging that her anonymity keeps readers from evaluating her bias. Having spent decades in the news business before becoming a teacher, I should be predisposed to agree. So why doesn’t her anonymity bug me? Perhaps it’s the nature of her blog. By focusing on research, EW on her best days functions as a first-rate BS detector, saying in essence “here’s the data. You decide.” The fact that she’s got deep pocketed institutions and major players in the edusphere taking shots at her is a testament to her impact. Indeed, you can probably divide edubloggers into two camps: those who admit they are envious of EW’s impact…and liars.

But that’s her second most significant accomplishment. Her first is that she makes education research entertaining. Her anonymity may be frustrating to her critics, but her blog is indispensible.