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I’m still waiting for the study that goes beyond asking students if they cheat and seriously investigates why.

Until then, all we can do is speculate about what’s powering a rise in cheating revealed in a recent survey of almost 30,000 high school students. From an Associated Press article, some results of the survey:

• Cheating in school is rampant and getting worse. Sixty-four percent of students cheated on a test in the past year and 38 percent did so two or more times, up from 60 percent and 35 percent in a 2006 survey.
• Thirty-six percent said they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment, up from 33 percent in 2004. (more…)
  

At the intersection of earlier discussions of elementary school content knowledge, vocabulary development, and instruction of English Language Learners is P-SELL, Promoting Science among English Language Learners, a curriculum and professional development program in Miami-Dade County, Florida. The program provided three years of workshops for teachers, to build their content knowledge and help them feel more comfortable teaching science. They received all necessary supplies and a hands-on curriculum. Here’s what P-SELL looks like in the classroom:

The children run their tests. They are asked to provide written explanations to a number of questions about the results of the experiment, a task that reinforces their English skills and asks them to put their reasoning on paper.

The students’ background materials include an English-to-Creole vocabulary sheet, which helps them translate such words as magnetism from mayetis in Creole, and charge from chaj or chaje. Though the youngsters mostly converse in English, Ms. Perez recalls hearing words like batri and pozitif (battery and positive) as she moves among the groups, and other dialogue she can’t follow.

She steps in here and there, telling the students to stay on task and to record information from their experiments precisely. “Did the paper clip conduct electricity?” Ms. Perez leans in and asks one group. Yes, the children respond. Then write it down, she says. They won’t be able to summarize their results without that information.

Teacher and students are newly enthusiastic about science — and schools using the program saw improvements in both their science and math test results, compared to similar schools without P-SELL.

Okhee Lee, an education professor at the University of Miami and the principal investigator for this project, stresses that science lessons shouldn’t be seen as taking time away from reading and math instruction. “Our science curriculum reinforces what is taught in other subjects, including mathematics, reading, language arts, and English as a second language,” she told the University of Miami News.

New brain research shows that cognitive control areas of 8-year-olds’ brains respond more to positive feedback than negative feedback, while in 12-year-olds’ brains, and those of adults, these areas respond more to negative feedback.

Crone herself was surprised at the outcome: ‘We had expected that the brains of eight-year-olds would function in exactly the same way as the brains of twelve-year-olds, but maybe not quite so well.  Children learn the whole time, so this new knowledge can have major consequences for people wanting to teach children: how can you best relay instructions to eight- and twelve-year-olds?’

But don’t drop all positive feedback once your children turn twelve: the article notes that brains of all ages have a separate area that responds specifically to positive feedback.

How does this fit in with Alfie Kohn’s warning that praise can kill kids’ intrinsic motivation, I wonder?

In the wake of this week’s release of school progress reports, many parents, educators, and policymakers around New York City are asking how to meaningfully assess schools. How much should a parents take a school’s grade into account when deciding where to send their children? What does it mean if a school’s grade rose dramatically or dropped precipitously from last year to this? Do the progress reports provide a complete picture of the work of a school?

In a well-timed coincidence, the National School Board Association’s (NSBA) BoardBuzz points us to two additional resources for figuring out how schools are doing. (more…)

Yesterday, Michael Shaughnessy of EdNews interviewed Dr. Matthew Davis, who is leading the implementation of the Core Knowledge Reading Program pilot in New York City. Much of the interview covers basics of the program which we’ve discussed here already, including the two-strand approach to teaching reading and comprehension and the body of research supporting this method. What the interview highlighted for me are the contradictions of researching a program while trying to decide whether to continue using it, especially when real children are the subjects.

Davis says that the pilot will begin this year in kindergarten classes at 10 high-needs schools, then add grade 1 next year and grade 2 in 2010-11. But the continuation of the pilot “will be contingent on success in year one and a continuation of funding,” he says. Sounds fair: a program should prove itself before people (in this case, the Fund for Public Schools) invest further. Davis describes the plan for assessing the program:

Within the next several weeks, students in both sets of schools will be administered nationally standardized reading assessments in order to establish a baseline performance. These same tests will be administered again at the end of the kindergarten. In addition, there will be formal observation of all teachers in the pilot classrooms to ascertain any possible correlation between the level of implementation of the Core Knowledge program and the level of student achievement. In addition, specific case studies will be conducted by the NYCDOE in three pilot schools to provide additional qualitative information.

As far as the test are concerned, we hope to see a significant difference in word attack, word reading, decoding skills, and spelling by the end of the kindergarten year — because the program has what we think is a very strong way of teaching the mechanics of reading. Background knowledge and vocabulary take a bit longer to build, and gains don’t start to show up on some tests until later, but, by the end of the three-year period, we hope to see the front end of what we think will eventually be a very significant difference in vocabulary, oral comprehension, and reading comprehension.

So although the survival of the program may rest on a single year’s results, the promised impact of the program — increased vocabulary and content knowledge — may take three years to show up. At least three years: (more…)

Photosynthesis, glucose, chloroplasts: the language of science can sometimes be a stumbling block for students as they try to understand new concepts. A new study from Stanford University’s School of Education suggests that teaching the ideas first, using simple language, helps students learn a topic better. The researchers created interactive software to teach students about photosynthesis. One version used simple language at the beginning, then added scientific language after students grasped the basic concepts. The other version used the simple language only once before switching to scientific vocabulary.

“The thing that we’re most excited about is that the students in the treatment group”—which learned the basics in everyday English first—”got higher scores on every type of question—multiple choice and open-ended,” Brown said. “They got higher scores when questions were asked in everyday language. They got higher scores when questions were asked in science language. And when they were asked to write answers to open-ended questions, they were much better at writing their ideas in science language.”

The researchers caution that more research is needed with a larger sample size, though they acknowledge that many people find their work intuitively sensible, asking, “Isn’t that just good teaching?”

Teachers, what do you think? Have you tried presenting concepts — in Science or other subject areas — in simple language before transitioning to technical vocabulary?

And parents, I think this presents a possibility for helping your children with topics they are struggling with: break it down for them in language they can understand, but don’t neglect to introduce the vocab once they’ve got the concepts mastered.

In response to yesterday’s post about the Core Knowledge Reading Program, reader Smith asks,

Is he saying their is a core set of content that would prepare a student to understand a randomly selected reading passage on a standardized test? Could someone explain this idea to a non-ELA teacher? I’ve always assumed those reading passages could range from “The Mysteries of Ancient Egpyt” to “Sally’s Bad Day at School” to “Roger’s Time Machine Adventure”. How is content selected?

Great question. It’s true that the content of test reading passages varies, and I don’t think anyone believes that a child can be prepared with content knowledge specific to every possible topic.

Rather, some children enter school knowing thousands more words than others, and this difference compounds over years of schooling in a “rich get richer” scenario called the “Matthew Effect” by researchers. (Don’t take my word for it: this study, one of many, found that by age 3, children of parents with smaller vocabularies not only knew fewer words, used fewer words per hour, and used a smaller variety of words per hour, “but they were also adding words more slowly.”)

Hirsch summarized this effect in a 2006 article in American Educator:

Many specialists estimate that a child (or an adult) needs to understand a minimum of 90 percent of the words in a passage in order to understand the passage and thus begin to learn the other 10 percent of the words. Moreover, it’s not just the words that the student has to grasp the meaning of—it’s also the kind of reality that the words are referring to…. When a child doesn’t understand those word meanings and those referred-to realities, being good at sounding out words is a dead end. Reading becomes a kind of Catch-22: In order to become better at reading with understanding, you already have to be able to read with understanding.

(more…)

A week after Sol Stern argued in City Journal that New York City should create an office of reading improvement and provide low class sizes and scientifically-based reading instruction in high-poverty, low-scoring schools, the DOE announced a new reading initiative: teachers at 10 pilot schools will implement the new Core Knowledge Reading Program (CKRP) in grades K-2.

Education historian Diane Ravitch wrote in favor of the program in the Post on Monday, saying it’s a smarter choice than the “unproven” Balanced Literacy curriculum that Klein introduced in 2003. “Balanced Literacy doesn’t stress content knowledge, vocabulary or phonics. And we now know that it didn’t work,” she says, citing flat reading scores on the 4th and 8th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

What will the new reading program look like? (more…)

How do you know when something is developmentally appropriate? asks the Science Goddess.

My first thought was, I’ll bet Daniel T. Willingham has addressed this one.  Willingham, from the University of Virginia, writes a regular column in American Educator called “Ask the Cognitive Scientist,” and sure enough, his column this summer asks, “What is developmentally appropriate practice?”

Willingham writes that research has disproved some key assumptions behind the “developmentally appropriate” concept.

The problem is that cognitive development does not seem amenable to a simple descriptive set of principles that teachers can use to guide their instruction. Far from proceeding in discrete stages with pervasive effects, cognitive development appears to be quite variable–depending on the child, the task, even the day (since children may solve a problem correctly one day and incorrectly the next).

(more…)

Forget safety or motivation - the real reason to give a child a cell phone is to promote literacy. Newsweek reports that though many parents and English teachers worry that texting is the downfall of standard English, linguistic studies show a link between fluent texting and literacy skills:

In one British experiment last year, children who texted—and who wielded plenty of abbreviations—scored higher on reading and vocabulary tests. In fact, the more adept they were at abbreviating, the better they did in spelling and writing. Far from being a means to getting around literacy, texting seems to give literacy a boost.

Kids who got cell phones earliest had the highest scores. Language skills build upon language exposure - of any kind - says David Crystal, author of Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, who studied texting language and found it both not very deviant and part of the on-going evolution of language.

As long as kids learn how to code-switch, or choose the appropriate form of language for a given situation, we can accept - or even embrace - the ways they play with language on their cell phones.

(Via Joanne Jacobs)