Via Flickr

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.
• Forty-two percent said they sometimes lie to save money — 49 percent of the boys and 36 percent of the girls.
• Despite such responses, 93 percent of the students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character, and 77 percent affirmed that “when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.”

The real numbers are probably even higher: About a quarter of the students admitted they’d answered some survey questions dishonestly.

So what’s going on here — Are public figures modeling bad behavior for children? Are schools and families failing to inculcate strong values in their students? Are kids responding to greater pressure to perform by looking for shortcuts? Are there just too many opportunities to cheat in a world dominated by standardized tests and Internet tools? Or are kids less embarrassed to tell the truth than they used to be about their cheating ways?

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 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.

On a national level, the U.S. Department of Education released a table charting the progress of American schools on five indicators. The Department of Education concludes that our schools are doing better on 4th and 8th grade student achievement and closing the racial achievement gap, but haven’t made much progress in increasing high school graduation rates or preparing students for success in college.

BoardBuzz suspects the Department of Education might have drawn their indicators from the NSBA’s Center for Public Education list of “Good Measures for Good Schools,” which provides 28 key questions — addressing student achievement, graduation and college, school staffing, funding, and programs and facilities, district and school climate, and student demographics — for parents, policymakers, and the media to ask when thinking about school performance. Each topic page includes links to data sources (such as School Data Direct, a tool that allows you to search for and compare schools and districts) and studies to help answer those questions, and an explanation of the usefulness and limitations of the data.

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:

The effect of implementing the Core Knowledge curriculum is often relatively small in the first year or so, but it tends to be larger after the students have been in a CK school for several years.

One study showed large effects in the later elementary grades, but not before. This is exactly what one would expect. It takes a while for background knowledge to build up to the point where it shows up on tests of reading comprehension, but there’s no getting around the connection between background knowledge and reading comprehension. There are no quick fixes.

Davis says that Chancellor Klein chose the program, in part, “in light of the continuing disappointing performance of 8^th and 12^th graders on reading tests.” If CKRP is designed to address comprehension gaps that don’t show up until late elementary or middle school, when children are asked, increasingly, to “read to learn,” then the program’s effectiveness ought to be studied for the next six to eight years, at least. In the meantime, decisions must be made about what programs to use, based on the best available evidence.

(Via CoreKnowledge Blog)

Screenshot originally posted at the Stanford News Service.

Screenshot originally posted at the Stanford News Service.

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.

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.

Echoing Hirsch, cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf notes in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,

Unbeknownst to them or their families, children who grow up in environments with few or no literacy experiences are already playing catch-up when they enter kindergarten and the primary grades. It is not simply a matter of the number of words unheard and unlearned. When words are not heard, concepts are not learned. When syntactic forms are never encountered, there is less knowledge about the relationship of events in a story. When story forms are never known, there is less ability to infer and to predict. When cultural traditions and the feelings of others are never experienced, there is less understanding of what other people feel.

So, the more the child knows about the world, the more language experiences the child has had across a range of literary genres, and the more vocabulary the child knows, the more likely the child can use the reading comprehension strategies teachers spend so much time on, like learning new words from context or making predictions about what will happen next. Children without that background knowledge and vocabulary gain less from each text encountered, and the gap widens.

A child who knows 90% of the words in a passage on the English Language Arts (ELA) test, and who has read or heard similar types of texts, has a fighting chance of figuring out unknown vocabulary and understanding the story; a child who knows only 80%  and has never encountered a text in that genre may be stuck.

More to come on how content is selected, and what teachers in upper elementary, middle, and high school — even or especially content area teachers — can do to help kids understand what they read.

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? The kindergarten curriculum includes two strands, Skills — which teaches phonological (sounds within words) awareness — and Listening and Learning — which builds vocabulary and content knowledge through teacher read-alouds and discussion. The Listening and Learning strand includes twelve topics, ranging from Nursery Rhymes and Fables to Seasons and Weather, designed to help young students build knowledge which will improve comprehension as they learn to read. The CKRP website includes samples of program materials and video from pilot schools in other regions, along with links to the research underlying their program.

In an interview at Public School Insights, E.D. Hirsch, founder of Core Knowledge, says they created the program in response to the fact that with the pressure on reading and mathematics from No Child Left Behind, many schools were shortchanging science, history, and the arts.

“If you push out subject matter, you’re also pushing out reading comprehension,” Hirsch says, pointing to rising reading scores in the lower grades due to increased emphasis on decoding, but flat or falling reading scores in middle and high school, where comprehension becomes crucial. Hence the dual strands of his reading program, emphasizing both phonics and development of content knowledge through oral language.

Hirsch cautions that dramatic results are unlikely in year one: “In the first year of implementation, you don’t see much,” he says of studies of the basic Core Knowledge Program. “But it’s cumulative and it’s geometrical and the difference by the end of sixth grade is enormous.”

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).

Willingham advises teachers to be familiar with the broad patterns in child development, but not to rely on them too much. Instead, teachers should keep a diary about what kinds of teaching tasks worked well for their students, which ones did not, and should share this information with other teachers. Furthermore, he says, any academic content can be taught in a way that children of different ages and cognitive development can understand – it’s a matter of playing around with the specifics of the task and making sure your students have the necessary background information.

Willingham respects the ability of teachers to know their own students and critique their own practice, which is good, but he leaves the teacher in me wanting more.

In my own experience, students’ background knowledge – or lack thereof – had the greatest impact on what they could understand. And it’s important to remember that background knowledge can include not just content, but types of thinking. To give an example from science, students who’ve never been asked to describe a relationship between two variables will struggle with this, no matter what their age, but with modeling and when the question is posed in a way they can understand, they can learn to do it. Some can look at numbers and see a relationship, others need to see a graph, and others need the hands-on experience of doing the experiment for themselves. How they express an answer may vary; younger children may not use sophisticated scientific language but might still grasp the idea.

Educators, please join the conversation, share thoughts, and point to resources. I look forward to exploring this more as the school year starts.

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)

If Black students did poorly in all schools, we would plausibly seek solutions to the problem of their achievement among those students themselves. The same would be the case if, in schools with majority Black enrollments, Black students did poorly and the other students did well. But in reality, Black students in good schools do well. At the same time, White, non-Hispanic students who attend schools where most of the students are Black and their graduation rates are low, also do poorly. The crisis of the education of Black males sits squarely in the middle of the crisis America faces as we work to create a world-class public education system that will support and maintain the values of a fair and equitable democratic society.

According to the report, in New York State, 39 percent of black male students graduated from high school in 2005-06, compared to 75 percent of white male students, and far more black male students performed at the Below Basic level on all sections of the NAEP tests compared to white male students. Also, as the report points out, on the eighth grade NAEP reading assessment, “virtually none reach the Advanced level.” Furthermore, black males in New York State are about 5 times less likely to be placed in Gifted and Talented programs, and nearly 3 times more likely to be classified as mentally retarded.

To compare districts and states, the Schott Foundation calculated a “Schott Education Inequity Index,” taking into account both the size of the gap and the absolute graduation rate of black males.  According to this index, New York State ranks fifth from the bottom of the fifty states in educating black male students.

Overall,

The worst problems are concentrated in a few large metropolitan areas. Specifically, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and Dade County fail to graduate the great majority of their Black male students with their peers. Districts such as these, in which Black students are concentrated, tend to have racially segregated schools that are demonstrably inferior educational institutions; very few children do well in these schools.

Reading this report, I immediately thought of the July 20th New York Times Magazine article about class-based integration, The Next Kind of Integration – Class, Race, and Desegregating American Schools.  According to that article, decades of research shows that all children in high-poverty schools perform worse academically, although Ronald Ferguson, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, warns that racial achievement gaps can persist even in higher-class school districts unless educators make a strong commitment to the best instruction for all.

He stresses that to reap the benefits, poor kids have to be evenly distributed among classrooms and not just grouped together in the lowest tracks. “To the degree a district takes the kids who struggle the most academically and spreads them across different classrooms, they’re making teachers’ work more doable,” he says. “And that may be the biggest effect.”

The article goes on to look at examples of class-based integration across the country.  In Wake County, N.C., class-based integration helped raise black students’ test scores significantly, and with greater effects at older grade levels, apparently bucking the trend of falling-off performance in middle school.  So it seems that class-based integration holds some promise for helping alleviate the problems shown so starkly in the Schott report.

But what about New York City, where, according to the Times article, 74 percent of students are poor and 63 percent are black?  In this and other large urban districts, neither class nor race-based integration may be feasible.  We will have to continue to look for solutions that do not depend on socioeconomic diversity.

(An interesting footnote to the New York State section of the Schott report: “New York State enrollment and diploma data has been reported to the National Center for Education Statistics irregularly and is not considered as reliable as data from other states.”  Worth remembering that we’re still waiting for 2007 graduation rates here in New York State).

Academic redshirting is most commonly practiced by white, upper income parents who wish to give their children a competitive advantage over younger peers in academics and athletics.  At the same time, many states have raised their minimum school enrollment age by moving cut-off dates earlier in the year; according to the report, the average cut-off date has moved forward about 6 weeks over the last two decades, resulting in an older school population.

The authors challenges the conventional wisdom that the gap in high school completion between males and females has widened since the early 1990′s.  The gap in high school completion is, indeed wider at age 18 than it was 15 years ago, but when one looks at high school completion by age 19, the gap does not show an increase.  The authors attribute this to the greater numbers of boys redshirted in the early grades, who therefore graduate from high school a year later than peers who were not redshirted.  Similarly, adjusting for sex differences in kindergarten entry age explains some of the gender gap in college graduation rates at age 22.

The report examines reasons for the rising age at kindergarten entry, including increasing academic standards in kindergarten and pressure to raise achievement on standardized testing.  The authors note that the trend in rising school entry age began before the current push for high-stakes testing, though concerns about competitiveness on standardized tests have been mentioned as justification for state laws raising the entry age.

Currently, the New York State Assembly is considering two bills that would affect students’ entry into kindergarten.  The first, New York State Assembly Bill A08688, would require full-day kindergarten and thus lower the compulsory school entry age to 5, with a December 31st cut-off date.  Exceptions would be made for parents who choose to hold their child out of school for 1 additional year.  The second, New York State Assembly Bill A03425 would raise the compulsory kindergarten entry age by moving the cut-off date to September 1.  Meanwhile, New York City’s Chancellor’s Regulations require that all students enter first grade if they will turn six within the calendar year of registration, and kindergarten if they turn five within the year of registration, effectively preventing redshirting.

The danger in mandating later entry to kindergarten programs is that it raises equity concerns.  Middle and upper-income families have more day care and pre-kindergarten options available to them than lower-income families; differences in school readiness can only increase the longer we delay school entry.  Raising the age of entry also decreases the years a student must spend in school before reaching the legal age to drop out; since lower-income children are more likely to drop out, a later entry age affects them disproportionately.

“Stuck in the Middle: The Problem of Overage Middle School Students in New York City” chronicles the DOE’s decades-long track record of inadequately meeting the needs of overage students; describes the various reasons that students become overage, including academic failure, interruptions in schooling, and illegal discharge; and highlights schools where innovative initiatives appear to be helping overage middle schoolers make it to high school.

The issue of overage students is not new, and under the promotion requirements set by Chancellor Klein, the number of students held over in the gateway grades — 3, 5, 7, and, as of next year, 8 — has actually dropped because so many students are required to attend summer school. Still, the phenomenon is pervasive, the report argues. Because the DOE does not make available information about the number of overage students, the report relies on anecdotal data and a survey of nine Bronx middle schools, which found that 26 percent of students were overage for their grades.

The DOE has at times offered special programs for kids who can’t get out of middle school, such as the “8 plus” program that consolidated overage 8th graders and offered accelerated remediation and the prospect of mid-year promotion. However, that program was eliminated before the last school year, without anything to replace it. More recently, the DOE has focused on creating high-quality GED programs and transfer high schools, but they require students to be 17 and, in the case of the transfer schools, have successfully completed several high school credits, so those programs remain closed to overage middle schoolers. Earlier this year, when the DOE released its 8th grade promotion policy, it did address the issue of overage students, providing special dispensation for 8th graders who had previously been held over twice to be promoted if they attend summer school and make a good faith effort there, even if they ultimately do not pass the state tests or all of their courses. But as the report points out, research indicates that being retained just once seriously damages a student’s chances of completing school.

The Out of School Youth Coalition recommends that the DOE adopt the reform measures recommended last year by the City Council’s Middle School Task Force and the Coalition for Educational Justice, including enhancing professional development for middle school teachers, improving mental health services in middle schools, and providing Regents-level classes for all middle schools. Mayor Bloomberg announced last fall that all middle schools will offer Regents-level courses within two years, but the DOE hasn’t committed to most of the broader, non-academic goals the City Council and CEJ set forth. In addition, the coalition recommends that the DOE allow flexible scheduling for overage students who want to work or to move to high school mid-year; create a database of successful interventions that schools in New York can draw upon; improve the procedures for placing students coming from situations of instability; make data on overage students publicly available; identify and target students at risk of becoming overage; and clarify criteria for appealing retention decisions.

The report’s describes a handful of schools that have been successful in working with their overage populations. At MS 80 in the Bronx, for example, a mental health clinic serves students and their families, and overage students can get paid for interning in the school’s office. At PS/IS 89, high-performing and overage students together enroll in a “Seven Plus” program that allows them to complete 7th and 8th grade in one calendar year, including during summer session at a local high school. I’ve also visited a middle school that continued to offer informal “8 plus” programs to overage students even after the DOE eliminated the citywide program. In these small classes, teachers could target the unique needs of overage middle schoolers and provide them with age-appropriate work and enrichment experiences. The DOE could contribute mightily toward reducing the dropout rate by studying ways that middle schools help their oldest students and then supporting the proliferation of those practices — why instead does it pretend the problem of overage middle school students doesn’t even exist?

Question 1: Melissa’s school rings a bell to alert students that it is time to start class. When the bell rings, it vibrates. The use of vibrations to send messages is an example
of which type of energy?

This one ranged from 4.72 to 10.07 in estimated US grade level required to understand it, which certainly calls into question the reliability of the readability analyzers, but also the ability of average 5th graders to understand this question.

This one ranged from 8.26 to 12.08 in grade level readability analysis:

Question 15: The Florida panther is an endangered species living primarily in and around the Everglades. Cows, raccoons, black bears, and bobcats also live in Florida. The teeth of these animals enable them to eat different things. A drawing of a Florida panther and a chart comparing the diets of these Florida animals are shown below.

Whatever the validity of the readability analyzers, these questions seem to be written at a sophisticated reading level considering that the test aims to assess content knowledge and reasoning rather than reading skill. Obviously, students who read better will perform better on this test, but does that correspond to better scientific reasoning or grasp of scientific knowledge? A fifth grader might stumble over words like “primarily” and “enable,” but have no problem with the concept that animals that eat similar foods tend to have similar teeth. What does the test really assess in this question?

Finally, while reading, writing, and mathematics are all important to scientific understanding and communication, high quality science instruction goes beyond what can be captured in a paper-and-pencil test. The Science FCAT includes some “read-inquire-explain” questions that ask students to demonstrate scientific thinking; for example, question 14 asks:

At the park, Matthew has collected 20 pill bugs from under rocks, logs, boards, and bricks. Matthew wants to conduct an investigation to find out if pill bugs prefer moist areas or dry areas. Design a procedure Matthew could follow to test whether pill bugs prefer moist areas or dry areas.

Being able to design a procedure is important, but this question makes me wonder how many of Florida’s students who attend F-sanction schools get to go beyond hypothetical experiments and do real ones. Unlike New York’s Intermediate Level Science Exam, which includes a more authentic “performance” section in which students conduct hands-on investigations and draw conclusions from data they gathered themselves, Florida’s test is all reading and writing. While students may perform somewhat better on this test, the danger remains that other aspects of science are still being “crowded out” of the curriculum as they are not assessed by the state at all.

After a closer look at the study, I had some questions about the methods.  Since Florida does not test students in science in 4th grade, the authors used the students’ math and reading scores in 4th grade to estimate their performance in science. They then compared this estimated 4th grade performance with 5th grade performance on the Science FCAT. The authors stated that “this procedure assumes that student proficiency in these subjects is highly correlated and that there was no differential relationship in student knowledge among these subjects in the five categories of schools before the F-grade sanction was introduced.” Given that the authors also conclude (tentatively) that math and reading ability enable learning of science, it seems that their method of estimating 4th grade performance assumes the very outcome they purport to discover. A commenter on Eduwonkette raises this and other relevant questions about the methods.

More on “Building on the Basics” tomorrow….