Slashdot Mirror
What Works In Education: Scientific Evidence Gets Ignored
nbauman writes "According to Gina Kolata in the New York Times, The Institute of Education Sciences in the Department of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, has supported 175 randomized controlled studies, like the studies used in medicine, to find out what works and doesn't work, which are reported in the What Works Clearinghouse. Surprisingly, the choice of instructional materials — textbooks, curriculum guides, homework, quizzes — can affect achievement as much as teachers; poor materials have as much effect as a bad teacher, and good materials can offset a bad teacher's deficiencies. One popular math textbook was superior to 3 competitors. A popular computer-assisted math program had no benefit. Most educators, including principals and superintendents, don't know the data exists. 42% of school districts had never heard of the clearinghouse. Up to 90% of programs that seemed promising in small studies had no effect or made achievement scores worse. For example a program to increase 7th-grade math teachers' understanding of math increased their understanding but had no effect on student achievement. Upward Bound had no effect."
http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf
Educators in some parts of the country are too busy trying to get "Creation Science" into real science textbooks. They don't have time to figure out what is actually best for the students!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/06/creationists-textbooks-texas_n_3689154.html
I've yet to see a competently written math book. Most of them are written by and for people with PhDs in mathematics. They'll show one example, fail miserably to explain what they did in any clear way, then later they will refer back to it as what they did in example 3. And the student is expected to be able to figure out what they did. Sure, given sufficient time, a student could reverse engineer the problem, but it's also trendy for teachers to hand out way too many problems as homework, without permitting the students time to understand.
I remember when I was in middle school and high school, the schools were using "integrated math." Which is to say we didn't have algebra, geometry or trig, we had all of them at once and we would start over again the next year. The problem is that just as we were beginning to grasp one of them, we'd move onto the next subject, and the next year, we'd have to start over as we hadn't mastered the material the last time we saw it.
Studies prove it, yet it continues to be funded with scarce dollars.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The problem is most education professionals are not so good at understanding Math, and many really do not trust is.
You go to any college and talk to education majors, and ask them why they didn't major in other majors, after they repeat the normal BS, about wanting to help children yadda yadda, It comes down to the fact that many of the other majors that has a clear career path requires much more Math study, and they don't like Math.
Sure we have a few educators like Math and Science teachers who get it, but they are the minority, and the ones who seems to get promoted to positions where they can make decisions, are usually History and English teachers. So they don't know about this research is because they are not looking for it, and they really don't want to find it, because the numbers may contradict what you opinion is, and no one likes that.
We have the State and Unions fighting over these details and little focus on what works.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Issuing iPads to everyone has no positive effect on learning.
Followed by; educators just can't learn that issuing iPads to everyone has no positive effect on learning.
Who would have guessed?
I took a quick look at the materials they're publishing, and if you can read a vulnerability report, you can read these. (e.g., http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practice_guides/mps_pg_052212.pdf#page=16)
... from the very moment that a parent will give a phone or a pad or anything of that sort to a very young kid, convinced that interacting with it will help the kid to develop the brain in a way that will help him/her during life. VERY FEW are aware that such early interaction does exactly the opposite to the brain: since a vry early stage it deeply plants reflexes of the form "solution to problem is ready. Click click click found!".
For elementary level education, it is a SIN to have any curriculum that only super/excellent/great teachers can teach kids well. My observation as a PTA board member now is that poorly a designed curriculum package make both teachers and students suffer.
^(oo)^pig~
I'm convinced that a lot of curriculum is written to satisfy bullet-points, not to benefit students or to help teachers benefit students. Unfortunately, while the bullets themselves are often good goals, they often come at the expense of what makes them actually come together into something useful.
Might as well build an engine with great specifications by the numbers and the finest quality control on the parts, but leave out all the wires and housings because the spec sheet didn't list them specifically.
That's where a lot of standardized tests used by the education department tend to lead as well.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Is anybody actually surprised that scientific evidence in the US gets ignored in favor of what people want to believe?
For a first world nation, I've never seen a country so insistent on ignoring science -- in America "because that is what I believe" often trumps "because this is what science tells us".
A nation of luddites, and often your leaders are the ones who are blatantly ignoring science.
This is why our education system is so sad. Its major influence is politics.
And when was the last time politics produced something good?
Why is this information not being pushed down from the top? The government funds education, the government should be very interested in what works and what does not in order to get value for money.
a) sposor studies on what works
b) publish studies and make sure knowledge reaches the bottom levels where funds are spent
c) create open text books and open class studies
Textbooks made in Texas!11!!1111!!!!11!!
Yee-haaaaa!!!!!!!!11!!1!!!
Again for the Nth time I'm going to fall back on my personal education experience.
I had horrible teachers growing up, when I say horrible, all but one of them was even worth her paycheck . An elementary school teacher should be an expert in all areas that they teach.
In my elementary school ( 1992 - 2000 ) we had one teacher for the entire day, that teacher did math, history, english and etc.... For the school system to effectively work what you need is for that teacher to be an expert in all of those subjects, an expert to the point that they don't require a textbook. The textbook is for the students to assist and supplement the information from the teacher, NOT for the teacher to use as a coverup for not knowing the subject.
So often we as students were told to close the textbooks and just understand the material well a lazy teacher sat at the front of the room and simply just read from it. A big secret to good education is that the teacher should never be doing the students job, reading from a textbook simple means that the teacher is only as qualified as the student and not really doing his / her job.
This post talks about the materials that the students can use to assist in there education. Well in my school we had the resources but the teachers and support staff just weren't trained on how to deploy and use the materials. The computer lab was off limits because ALL of the teachers had no clue how to really use them, the science lab was closed because the teachers and staff didn't know how to setup or use the equipment.
This is my problem with the school system, it's setup to protect the teachers and it leaves the students on the side of the road. I pointed this out in my school several times when I was there and every time I was given an excuse, "The teachers work very hard and it's not there job" or "The government wants us to teach this way so we are". It's sad and horrible, the school system ( in Canada ) is in the shitter. I have little cousins right now and from what they tell me the system hasn't changed.
So what's my point? Well here is the big secret to making the education system work, HIRE QUALIFIED TEACHERS AND GET THE RIGHT MATERIAL IN PLACE!!!!!! That's it, it hasn't happened yet at least from what I've seen and been through. Simple answer to a not complicated question.
To any teacher that doesn't fit into what I just explained I don't want to bash you. I know good teachers and good school exist, they do and they are great, just the majority of the system is broke and that shouldn't make the good few look bad.
One piece of evidence that's been around for quite a while is that smaller classes are better. However, this translates directly into higher costs, so there's a lot of incentive to ignore this.
Now I have that "Pina Colada" song stuck in my head.
#DeleteChrome
Very often every system in education becomes hijacked by some interest group. Textbooks are a great example. Looking through my daughters' very expensive textbooks I can see that the science and math textbooks were written by non mathematician/scientists. One of my favorite questions went something like Jamal has 5 candies that are 5 different flavours; how can he distribute them among his 5 friends? Write all the ways. WHAT? Or just the usual questions that are missing some element such as you have a triangle that is 2 units on the bottom side and 3 units high. How long is the remaining side? But there is no picture of the triangle. Is this a right-triangle. Are they talking about the hypotenuse? And then one of the best. A grade 10 math textbook with a section on parabolas. My daughter was assigned the usual questions 1-20 at the end of the chapter. I don't quite remember how to find the vertex or some such so I leaf through the textbook to find out how. All it does is define the parabola and give some examples of how they can be used for things like flashlight reflectors. But absolutely no math involving the parabolas. None. Lots of parabola questions but no math. This was not some kind of workbook but a textbook where they had just been sloppy.
Then there is the technology. They are so lost. So so so lost. They have just grasp at technology. The usual result is that they buy big systems where moodle would be fine. But at no point do they really leverage the technology much. A great example is both of my daughters' schools have robocalls to tell me about things like vaccinations, school trips, etc. This is very annoying in that the calls usually waste most of the call telling me things that I don't care about. The worst part is that the critical bits are at the end. So I hear about things like congratulations to some student for winning a sack race in Kalamazoo and then in the end learn that some critical form needs to be turned in by 9am the next morning. Hello please use at least email. Maybe a website? The 20th century is calling and wants their robocaller back! I wonder how much they pay for this service?
But there is a wonderfully effective way to use computers in education. You look at student's marks. You then look at the pattern of the marks as the student's pass through various teachers. I am not talking about standardized tests but just comparing the marks of various students in the same classrooms. The key being that you can see that when a batch of students hits a truly great or terrible teacher that their marks will thrive or suffer for years to come. Bad teachers are like boulders in the stream; they result in much turbulence and waves far beyond their position in the time stream. Both of my daughters hit the same terrible math teacher. I tutored both of them past this disaster of a teacher but many of their co-students may have lost any hope at a career in STEM as their grade 10 math would then suck with little time left to recover to the point where they could leave HS with a good mark in Pre-cal let alone Calculus.
He talked about a very successful text that all the teachers loved. The thing I remember most was each section ended with 20 question, but only TWO were on the current chapter. The other 18 were review. The idea was to reinforce knowledge and not turn learning into a cram-and-forget cycle. He'd also talked about a text-selection process that had started a cycle of dumbing down content to make students look smarter. In the Google age, it might be possible to track down that book. Heck, it might be possible to track down *him*.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
We need to stop pretending that all children are created "equal". The big ignored problem here is that the dumb students HOLD BACK the smart ones and they all suffer because the public school system is fundamentally broken. Not all kids should be in school at all, many of them would do better just getting jobs as soon as they are physically able and the rest simply going to private school or home school and going on from there without the drag of the stupid/abusive kids that too often come from welfare-addicted statist families.
Have gnu, will travel.
sounds like classic federal government
have a site full of good info but don't tell anyone about it so no one knows about it
If you are smart enough to master master, and real science, then couldn't you earn about 3X as much as a teacher?
...Surprisingly, the choice of instructional materials — textbooks, curriculum guides, homework, quizzes — can affect achievement as much as teachers; poor materials have as much effect as a bad teacher, and good materials can offset a bad teacher's deficiencies....
Surprisingly? I would have thought it was quite a strong possibility.
Why do you feel the need to put emotive adverbs at the start of your sentences?
For example: Korea has huge class sizes, and they kick our ass in math and science.
Propaganda from teacher's unions always say to just, randomly, throw money at the problem.
I might agree with you for virtually every other subject, but math is about the only thing that can be measured accurately using standardized testing. 3 X 3 = 9, whether you memorized the times tables or counted it out on your fingers. No matter what method you were taught, you should get the same answer. There are no cultural biases to deal with and even difficulty with understanding English shouldn't affect the outcome.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I don't think they are refering to the same thing but I had a couple courses with required Math software assignments. Now learning Matlab was valuable, but I spent the courses learning the quirks of the software rather than the material and the lack of that material has been harmful. Without a teacher who can walk you through the software to get at the material, math software can be as much of a distraction as a help.
"For example a program to increase 7th-grade math teachers' understanding of math increased their understanding but had no effect on student achievement."
Well if achievement is measured in grades received for that course, well of course not. They all have bell curves to maintain and everyone must still pass. If a teacher gets better at teaching, they will teach better and grade harder.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Newt Gingrich is the ONLY politician I have heard specifically support federal education research, of the many politicians whom publicly support better education (Jeb Bush). He also pushed for research into anti-Alzheimer drugs, to reduce expensive human caretakers later in life. Gingrich lies, cheats, and is corrupt, but he has intelligence.
Yes, I would like a moon base.
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
Maybe teachers would pick up this information if it wasn't presented in such a horrible way. I.e., they need a TL;DR version, not a massive wordy paper or newspaper article.
Since the summary is full of links not-to-TFA, this might be useful:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/science/applying-new-rigor-in-studying-education.html?pagewanted=all
The Underground History of Education
Commence the apologist "debunking" of this book slash "just a dumb Anonymous Coward trolling" in 5, 4, 3...
Richard Feynman's story on textbooks was eye-opening: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
(Thanks BobTree)
Because a large part of professional success comes from recognizing an encountered problem is similar to a previously problem, and one only has to change a few things to apply known methods to the 'new' problem. You need rote memorization to remember previous problems and their associated methods, you need pattern recognition to see that different problems may actually have a similar structure.
Frankly, testing everyone the same way, based on a standard syllabus on how material ought to be taught, limits a) the scope of the inquiry and b) the variance of the starting conditions of the student. The tests only measure the ability of students to solve problems, where the methods to arrive at proper solutions are what is taught in the course. There are only so many ways to write a calculus one, two, three test, and this is freshmen and sophomore college mathematics for engineers. A cursory examination of finals of the last 15 years by of those classes listed from the different department consists of similarly worded problems and types of questions. I can buy a 30 year old schaums that gives me practice problems that will prepare me well for a final in those classes. And quite quickly, one can look at the answers a student has submitted and know if the student has a clue of what is going on.
And before you argue that Algebra 1/2 are different courses than a college calculus course, do realize that the scope of the inquiry within high school classes are much more limited.
The scope of the material hasn't changed much over the years, the problems of testing the students haven't changed much either, why the resistance of standardized tests? It works well enough.
*Looks in wallet* Yep, Scarce dollars.
From the quick scan of the linked page, it seems that the leading math textbook was used to teach for an additional hour each week. It doesn't seem to me that all things were kept equal.
Secondly, it has been a constant source of frustration how "locked in" K-12 schools seem to be over math tuition. They will not deviate from what is "on grade" at any cost, the system seems to be set up entirely for the convenience of the teachers without regard for the students. If a student is doing well, they may consider promotion from, 6th grade to 7th or even 8th grade. But those are the only choices and they make no logical sense to me. If the teacher has a Phd in math I can't see why he/she can't shepherd students through material that is at least slightly tailored to their needs.
Nullius in verba
Educational standards are a mess because you have trends that are butting heads. Today's educational standards are largely dictated by political correctness, politics and avoiding anything that could be considered a legacy way of doing things. The result is that educators are loathe to take anything away from teaching their politically correct platforms. The second trend is standardized testing, intended to make sure that kids are actually being taught real world skills like reading, writing and arithmetic.
The result is an epic multi-billion dollar pissing contest between political correctness and having students prepared for the real world. Neither side will give an inch and to make matters worse where you live (California, Texas etc) largely dictates what your taught. Absent a miracle of a rational national standardized education platform of some kind that largely removes politics the situation isn't going to get any better.
Too lazy to google for examples right now, but you can easily find many examples of prominent historical figures being given only a single paragraph in a history book or evolution being taught as a hypotheses and so on.
This is what happens when scientists don't study literature.
If you want your kids to be highly educated. Either put them in private school or home school them.
Cue the low IQ morons that claim that social interaction skills are more important than actually having an education.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You can't expect a child with dyslexia to learn from the same program that works for an excellent reader. Less serious learning issues have similar effect.
One thing I never understood is why we don't have a public boarding school option for those kids whose parents clearly are the problem.
If your parents are homeless, drug addicts, or convicted felons, you have about a 50% drop out rate. If we just offered them public boarding schools, we could save those kids - at far less cost over the long term than what those drop outs will end up costing the government.
Boarding schools can go for as low as $25k / year, vs regular schools at half that while a year in prison costs over $100k If just save just one out of 8 of those kids from a life of prison, we come out ahead.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Because a large part of professional success
Not everything is about jobs or getting the right answer.
and one only has to change a few things to apply known methods to the 'new' problem.
A grand majority of students produced by the education system will emerge from it and will not have any sort of understanding of any of the material, which is, I think, a problem. As you say, they might be able to get the right answers (but only for a short time, because it's likely that they'll forget all the patterns and facts they memorized), but doing anything innovative will be beyond most of them because they have no grasp on the logic behind any of it.
You need rote memorization to remember previous problems and their associated methods, you need pattern recognition to see that different problems may actually have a similar structure.
The ability to memorize facts and recognize patterns is useful (although, in many cases, memorizing facts seems to be useless), but I don't think those skills are even nearly as important as understanding the material. Besides, I've found that if you have a good understanding of the logic behind what you're working with, you'll be able to retain facts about it in memory more easily simply because it becomes more memorable.
why the resistance of standardized tests? It works well enough.
Because it doesn't work, for exactly the reasons mentioned. If your goal is to create an educated populace, relying so heavily on such tests probably isn't a very good idea.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
is not.
It shows that the rambling of "education" specialists are widely ignored as they should be. Their methodoly to evaluate the efficency of teaching maths and science is usually disastrous because they have not the slightest idea on how maths and science work. But they believe the get it pretty well out of their own ignorance. My American colleages call their mental flatulences "ed-speak"
In my university they tried to "counsel" the engineering faculty (science faculty told them to f.. off) and the results were miserable. So now they are ignored by everyone relevant. The problem is their discourse has the abilty to make the suckers believe they were injustly treated by the institution. And there are more suckers than competent people. It give the "ed people" a big nuisance capacity.
Where i was raised, their influence is now limited to the public schools because the elites nearly never go there so nobody cares. Sad.
Maybe they should use their own methods. Maybe they should do studies on how to get teachers to learn what does and doesn't work. It seems like an awfully ironic problem for them to have.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Find teachers who love to teach and can evangelize their subject. Keep them happy at work by paying more and give them nicer working conditions.
Kids will respond.
I'm in the field, and education has made a fetish of randomized studies without realizing that such studies are defacto prone to bias (many randomized studies in education are to test some program that the researchers have an interest in) and that single studies are at best "interesting" but far from decisive. Repeated drug trials produce different results (see Dumit, _Drugs for life_). Education is a lot less controllable than human physiology (which is hardly controllable at all). As with the rest of science there is little glory in replicating others' work in any case, so at the end of the day all we have is a kind of frightening uncertainty about what works (in medicine and education).
This is why my wife quit education. She was a teacher. She left and got a PhD in education, became a prof and did some of the research that is widely ignored. What's the point of going to the trouble of doing education research if the results are going to be ignored.
Now she has a yarn store and teaches math part time at the local college because it's fun.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
This is predicated on not treating a school as if it was a factory.
This is a problem no one wants to talk about...
it is both excludable and rivalrous
however an educated populous can be considered to be a public good
I'm sure people smarter than me can better figure out how to reconcile these notions.
A good start would be keeping bums out of libraries so they are more welcoming to normal people.
It's either about money, or pushing a religious worldview that supports a particular political party, which favors those with money. Any actual benefit to education is either coincidental, accidental, or both.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
FYI: "double-plus good" is a literary reference.
I think people doing summaries and people writing NYTimes articles don't understand statistics. If you click through to the NYTimes article and follow on to the story of seventh grade teachers getting math instruction you will get to the study which is this link
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20114024/index.asp
Here you will find that the teachers improved their own score by 0.05 with a p-value of 0.79 (not statistically significant -- more likely to be null then a real effect). Students had a -0.01 decrease in scores with a p-value of 0.94. So the summary instead of " For example a program to increase 7th-grade math teachers' understanding of math increased their understanding but had no effect on student achievement." should state
For example one program to increase 7th grade math teachers understanding of math had no statistically significant effect on either the teachers understanding or the students achievement. ...
Good point but Offtopic; the topic is how SCIENCE is being ignored in education.... oddly, we keep wanting better science and math education but refuse to use them in order to achieve it.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
...is not that this material is, or is not available. It's not even that it is, or is not available and known by the study groups that select what textbooks school districts that they are responsible for. The fundamental problem is that this information is almost never of importance to those people.
Both Feynman, and Robert A. Heinlein have described their experience with being involved in this process, and while at the time they were involved in the process, neither would have access to this information, it didn't exist, I have serious reservations that with the pressures they were under, as well as the rest of the people on those boards, that the result of having this information would have significantly affected the selection of content for their districts.
What I got from reading both experiences is that unless you carefully compared the content of the material being made available with the requirements of the selection process, and stuck to that comparison, it was very easy to get caught up in the publishers promises to make changes to content in support of the requirements, even though (at least in Heinlein's case) the lead time to make those changes didn't exist.
Finally I think it was evident in both descriptions that there was not a lot of deep review of the material happening by others on the review committees. In entirely too many cases the decision was being made based on the behaviour of the publishers to the board members.
You never know...
Educators have been ignoring instructional and behavioral research for a long time. Changing the educational styles every few years sells tons of textbooks, computers, and now iPads. If they just found the one type that was most effective based on research, they would only have to buy new ones when they wore out. The educational companies couldn't have that!
There is actually a great book that goes into the it, written by a behavioral researcher involved in education: http://www.amazon.com/Amys-Game-Concealed-Structure-Education/dp/1419653474/
First, let me agree with some of your points before I tell you why you are wrong. Children do need to be socialized. They need to know how to interact with others. They need to interact with society. If you homeschool, you need to be acutely aware of this and be certain that your child is getting lots of this. There are many sports teams and hobby clubs out in the world that are a good place to lay this foundation. I also agree that children do need to be taught to be independent, however, public school is not *necessarily* the place where things like that are taught.
Second, I assume you must come from a well to do school district because of your view of the public school. Even the worst parent could put together a better program for their child than the schools in my area. I say that having seen some homeschool disasters, but they pale in comparison to the volume and magnitude of the public school disasters. How dare you paint all those who would homeschool their children as cult wannabes! You would guilt a parent into sending their child to an institution which has a large percentage of drop outs, arrests, and low "achievement" scores just so you can grind your axe against a religious bogeyman?
Third, I believe you are suffering from an observation bias. You see homeschool weirdos. You either confirm they are homeschooled, or assume so, then add that to your pile of evidence. However, you will never add observations of normal well adjusted homeschooled children precisely because they do not stick out! There is no way to avoid this sort of bias without a well designed, well controlled, properly evaluated statistical analysis.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Many here have hit the nail on the head. The political right pushes issues that embed religion and patriotism. The left pushes issues that help the teachers unions. The evidence that supports change that doesn't help one side of that debate or the other gets ignored. DARE doesn't work, kids learn language like native speakers before the age of 12, high school age children do better with later school starts times. If you taught language early, started high school late, and dropped DARE you'd save money and achieve better outcomes. http://moderatelyliberal.blogspot.com/2011/05/lip-service-to-education.html
In my opinion this is already known.
It simply isn't profitable to have great teachers and great text books.
Nor is it profitable for example for Universities to graduate everyone in 4 years.
Same thing with Health Care. It is not profitable for people to be healthy. It cuts into your profits to have healthy people, cures for disease or any sort of treatment plan that does anything but insure permenant subscriptions to health care like pills for example, is not acceptable.
Cures are really bad for business.
In the age of the internet, it is hilarious to think the outcomes are somehow different if you have a person sitting in a class room dictating information to people, versus somone at home studying on the internet.
Of course, the only difference is, the person at the University paid 120K over 4 years, vs the person who paid about 4K for a decent internet connection.
The person who studied on his own is not as profitable as the person who went to a University, so he is not qualified.
Normally people call these srts of things SCAMS and Pyramid Schemes, but we call them HealthCare and Universities.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
There is no school system in this country - there are many school systems.
That depends on value of "this country".
Who are you? Parents have a natural right to raise their kids however they damn well please and I'm pretty sure you have your own superstitions you'd like to cram between their ears. Germany has an anti-homeschooling law, and guess when it was imposed? During Hitler's reign. When the government teaches the children, the government makes itself a god in their eyes. Just look at the fruition of this, all the doe-eyed fools worshipping Obama even as he strips their freedom and eats out their sustenance.
Well, a great deal about surviving as an adult is having the right answers and having a job. A large majority of students produced by an education system will not only remember facts taught, but at least be able to regurgitate the official explanation as to why these facts occurred, as well as a few token methods of deconstruction. Those that want to understand more about their subjects at school would be capable of understanding how the education system.
A large part of working in the US is being trained for a vocation, where the particular parts of the vocation are neither interesting nor necessarily logical, but the skillset fits together and rote memorization leading to mastery. It is important for a linux sys admin to understand how a mail server interacts with the kernel by way of syscalls, but while it is nice, it's not really necessary to understand the fundamental
Your 'reasoning' was hardly reasonable. The statement 'Frankly, I find the notion that you can hand out one-size-fits-all standardized tests to everyone and quantify people's understanding of the material to be utterly absurd, and frankly, harmful.' is a poorly researched opinion. My statement of similarly worded tests for calc 1,2,3, as is evident as anyone who has taken these classes, as well as the very minor editorial changes that have occurred since between older text books in print vis a vis current text books, as anyone who owns multiple copies of calc 1,2,3 textbooks, knows that the material in these classes haven't changed despite some of these books were printed before standardized testing became popular, and some of them after. The curriculum has been standardized, the testing of this curriculum has been standardized, at least for these three subjects at the university level, without the presence of a standards committee. But it has effectively annealed.
I think the biggest issue here is that culturally, there is a distrust of education authorities in this country overall, and specifically that a test on paper has a difficult time simulating actual problem solving needs. America is not a country that has a culture that prizes intellect. But fortunately, it's not a belief that is shared by many other western and far east countries.
The benefit increasing test scores by approaching the problem a different way seems inconsequential to some because those are largely of the opinion that tests don't matter in the first place. The fact is that book learning is very well correlated to the performance on a test, and if nationally or at least within a school district, we agree on a curriculum to teach, then a paper test that is standardized properly should work very well for that curriculum.
and getting caught in the rain...
SOMEONE HAD TO SAY IT!
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Well, a great deal about surviving as an adult is having the right answers and having a job.
But it's not what education is about.
A large majority of students produced by an education system will not only remember facts taught, but at least be able to regurgitate the official explanation as to why these facts occurre
Will they, now? Is that actually true? Is knowing certain material unrelated to your job without understanding it beneficial? What of the fact that they likely won't be able to do anything innovative with the knowledge, or even know how to use it in complicated situations where not everything is given to them on a piece of paper?
Your 'reasoning' was hardly reasonable.
My reasoning?
is a poorly researched opinion.
Is it? They don't seem to be doing a very good job of measuring understanding of the material.
The fact is that book learning is very well correlated to the performance on a test, and if nationally or at least within a school district, we agree on a curriculum to teach, then a paper test that is standardized properly should work very well for that curriculum.
Okay.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
You make your own point. Whether it's GOP (right leaning) anti-science or your (left leaning) intellectualism. There are too many political groups that want to re-write textbooks to suit their world views. We need to learn something objectively for a change.
Read the book "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn" (Diane Ravitch) for examples.
There's nothing like a teacher who loves what they teach and love teaching it. This cannot be measured, and it is hard to gauge the long term effects, since inspiration can often flare up years after being taught, and lessons sink in years later. Measure obsessed bureaucrats should be treated for OCD, not rewarded with publication credits and plaudits for pointless research.
John_Chalisque
So, if I understand this study correctly, no amount of shifting the burden of teaching away from teachers and onto technology platforms produced any statistically measurable improvement in student grades, test achievement or understanding of the subject material.
Conclusion: Competent teachers still matter. Competent teachers can overcome poor textbooks, standardized testing regimens and hard heads.
Other thoughts:
We need to go to a three semester a year system. Three on / one off. More time to teach, more time to understand, and less time off between semesters when kids can forget things. And let's strip sports out of the curriculum entirely. I don't begrudge sports, I just don't think it should be part of our local school budgets.
The fact is that progress must be monitored, there simply is not a better way to measure progress. History has shown that you can't leave it up to teachers to evaluate their students. 21% of High School Graduates are functionally illiterate. National Adult Literacy Survey pdf page 43
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
If you are smart enough to master master, and real science, then couldn't you earn about 3X as much as a teacher?
Alaska pays up to $70,000 a year for someone with a masters degree plus 10 years of exprience and this includes a pension for life after 25 years!
So why would anyone with a masters do this? They get to bring the middle finger to corporate america and over time retire early with $70,000 a year with free health insurance for life!
Even starting out you get $44,000 a year which is excellent for an undergrad degree. Teachers used to get paid shit, but that is changing and maybe just maybe not everyone goes to jobs that pay the most and look for other areas of job satisfaction like taking the same time off as their kids, going kayaking and camping in the summer, getting decent vacation time, not having a PHB breathing down your neck all the time, pension taken care off.
Teachers can also become counselors, principals, coaches (sports or subject), trainers, start education related companies, or stay in academia too with nice discounts for advanced degrees with a guaranteed pay rise which is nice if you are an undergrad.
However, some states like Alabama and Louisiana pay just above Walmart wages so it varies. I would refuse to teach in these states but Georgia and Alaska pay very well so your mileage varies.
http://saveie6.com/
And, please, stop to think about the difference, and what part of math people could use better in their lifes before you start preaching something like that.
Yeah, for some subjects, route learning is the only one that works. Those are a tiny minority, and gerenalizing it can lead to serious problems once your students starts get get a bit more advanced.
Rethinking email
BULLSHIT!
I have never seen a pedagogical study where the (1) sample size was statistically significant, and (2) the authors did not diddle the data by throwing out massive numbers of students for incredibly flimsy reasons.
As a professor, when I see someone with a degree in education, I deduct that degree and another degree at the same level before evaluating their qualifications.
History shows no such thing. If we hired competent people who love the subject they want to teach, and if we stopped being dependent on poorly-made standardized tests, some (but certainly not all) of these problems would vanish. Honestly, at this point, rather than taking away funding from schools (How could that possibly help?) if their students do poorly on these awful standardized tests, we should just get rid of the tests.
We live and have lived in an environment where politicians force teachers and schools to comply with their nonsensical standards, and that's part of the reason we're suffering.
A grand majority of students produced by the education system will emerge from it and will not have any sort of understanding of any of the material, which is, I think, a problem. As you say, they might be able to get the right answers (but only for a short time, because it's likely that they'll forget all the patterns and facts they memorized), but doing anything innovative will be beyond most of them because they have no grasp on the logic behind any of it.
This describes the 'Big Lie' of our education system. Most people simply don't leave high school with better than a 7th grade education. As you say, they either don't understand the material in the first place, and they quickly forget the rote memorization that they regurgitated for the tests.
It is a cultural problem. Being educated is not a priority. Saying you are educated is what our society values.
At some point, you are building a building. You can't retrofit a foundation.
And the analogy breaks down a bit. Sure, you can't retrofit a foundation, but the high schoolers in question aren't trying to build the house, they're trying to live in it.
To use a more apt metaphor for Slashdot and for tool usage, I think ShanghaiBill and Khashishi are talking about the equivalent of driving a car -- you don't need to know how to synthesize gasoline or mill a camshaft in order to drive.
Similarly, high school students don't need weeks of theorems and proofs before getting to do something useful.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
... only about 15% of the population uses the public school system.
Assuming that 15% of the population consists of school-age children, I posit that 100% of the population still makes extensive use of the school system (both public and private).
If not for the school system,
* Who watches the kids during the business day?
* Who feeds the kids during the business day?
* Who ensures that the upcoming generation is even halfway informed?
Perhaps 15% of the population is in school. But everyone benefits from having a school system, even if it isn't doing a stellar job of turning out fully informed geniuses. Schools' role even just as daycare is important enough that some manufacturing towns start the school day in accordance with the local plants' shift schedules.
Moreover, teaching is complicated and specialized work. What gives you the impression that it should be inexpensive to educate? Or do you instead mean that teaching the younger generations should be a lower budgetary priority than keeping the oldest generations alive? I'm not sure where you're coming from.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
You meant the possessive "their" but used "there." You, ironically, sadly, and unknowingly, made your point re sucky teachers, oh so well. So when you go back home, and visit, teach your cousins that English is one messed up language, what with the your/you're, and the their/there/they're stuff. As I tell my kids - get over it. Teach them the meaning of the stuff that all sounds the same, but when you confuse them, in writing, you just appear illiterate.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. We need those who can to teach.
Knowing the material isn't enough.
One must also know how to teach.
Teaching is its own skillset. I've sat through a number of truly mind-numbing classes taught by subject-matter experts who couldn't teach to save their lives. That kind of educational environment isn't useful either. The related Slashdot thread today, Writing Documentation: Teach, Don't Tell , is most appropriate in this regard. Contrary to popular imagination, I did read the fine posting, and it was worth the time.
So I would amend your aphorism:
Those who can, do. Those who can't teach, don't belong in a classroom either. We need those who can teach.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Granted I'm saying this without investigating the specific studies referenced, but my experience with educational research (master's in instructional tech) has left me very wary of these studies. Most of them deal with a very small sample set, and conclude that a particular piece of software is a resounding success.. Others will use a larger sample to evaluate a piece of software, but fail to provide any training to the teachers on how to use it, and then conclude that the software is a failure when the reality is most of the involved teachers got frustrated and simply stopped using it due to a lack of knowing how. Still others make sweeping conclusions of the "technology has no effect on student performance" variety after finding no difference between writing on the board and using PowerPoint. Very few studies are of any quality or are even worth being aware of. Two books worth looking at for those interested are "Using Technology Wisely" by Harold Wenglinsky and "Scaling Up Success," by Chris Dede and others.
I showed these to my "family of elementary/high-school teachers". There's objection essentially: "So many words"!!!
...but I lost the will to live before I checked the comments to see if someone was talking about education and not religion
Over the years I've asked maybe 10 teachers who I interacted with in my job (not education) what they thought of Whole Language vs Phonics for teaching reading. Everyone I asked, their eyes glazed over, and not one gave me an answer. Most didn't even seem to understand the terms.
But, during the 1990's if you listened many talk show pundits, esp radio, that was the crux of the problem. Oh, many of the stations had advertisements selling materials for one method, I think phonics, for the parents. The best I could figure was that it was a manufactured controversy that had little to do with what they way reading was being taught, and the teachers were either blind sided because the controversy was gobbled-gook, or they sense that no matter what they said about it, it could only have a bad outcome for them. Maybe even I was trying to set them up to say something that could damage their career. (I'm serious).
I also believe that after the post WWII generation was the most educated, free thinking, creative generation ever. And after the 60's the power elites (and by that I don't the) said, never again. Never again educate the masses to think.
That's what I think.