Teach Effectively!

Over on On Special Ed, Christina Samuels had a post entitled “Differentiated Learning” that discussed plans by some schools to employ co-teaching. Because Peggy and I studied co-teaching a few years ago and because we are privy to a Current Practice Alert on the subject, we created a comment on Christina’s blog entry, hoping to advance the discussion of this popular approach to serving students with disabilities.

In essence, we urged caution about adopting co-teaching. We predicated our reservations on the Alert by Naomi Zigmond and Kathleen Magiera in which they examined the research on co-teaching. Professor Zigmond and Magiera concluded that educators should use caution in employing co-teaching.

Rather than reiterating the content, we’ll just point to the entry differentiated instruction and the comments on it.

The frequently maligned local education agency of Washington (DC, US) is taking steps to improve the services it provides to students with disabilities, according to an article by V. Dion Haynes entitled “Special-Ed Getting New Computer System, Staff” and published 27 February 2008 in the Wasington Post. These changes stem from a suit—Blackman v. District of Columbia—in which parents claimed that their children were not receiving special education services in a timely manner.

The District school system plans to spend $4.3 million on a computer system designed to keep track of special education students’ academic life, replacing several systems plagued by bad data and an inability to communicate with one another.

During a news conference yesterday, D.C. State Superintendent of Education Deborah A. Gist also announced that the city plans to hire 30 full-time case management workers, at a cost of $3.2 million, so that students referred to special education can receive services more quickly

The initiatives are “a way in which we intend to serve students more effectively,” Gist said. She was joined by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) at a news conference in the lobby of her office at Judiciary Square.

I am glad to see that the DC schools are responding to the issue of getting services to students quickly. Given the numbers of students served in large local education agencies, it is understandable that computer systems could be helpful. Including case managers also is quite sensible, and I hope that they can be authorized and prepared to work collaboratively with parents in ensuring the delivery of services.

What remains to be ensured, of course, is the quality of those services. I’m not talking about “Cadillac-vs-Chevrolet” quality of services. I’m referring to the nature or character of the services. Will the case managers broker evidence-based practices? Will the computers track progress on important relevant student outcomes and the services that produce those outcomes?

I hope that the DC schools place similar emphasis on preparing and empowering special education providers to deliver effective teaching practices.

Link to Mr. Haynes’ article.

Those clever folks over at Weapons of Math Destruction have stuck yet again with another witty take-down of mal-education in the mathematics area.

As much as I like this one, I think the image of the face for the child “on fuzzy math” should be different. I see fuzzy math and its cousins as resulting more in happy witlessness. That’s the idea: Make it fun and engaging; students’ll just figure it out magically…re-discovering everything from counting through Archimedian insights and onto the calculus. Shouldn’t those kids be smiling?

For those outside the US who are not familiar with the brain-vs-brain-on theme incorporated into this cartoon, here’s a hint: There was an advertisement that first appeared in the 1980s showing a man holding a chicken egg and saying “This is your brain,” then cracking the egg into a frying pan and saying, “This is your brain on drugs.” Here’s a link to a Wikipedia entry about the brain-on-drugs advertisement.

Oh Well…off to a thumbnail catalog from Weapons of Math Destruction for the big version of this cartoon.

While we’re on the subject, Ed Week reporter Christina Samuels posted some notes about an interview with Lou Danielson on RTI; they discussed federal assistance on RTI, how to take RTI to scale, and due process issues. Here’s a link to an entry on Ms. Samuels’ blog about the conversation.

Remember that Teach Effectively! has slides from the talks about RTI by Dixie Huefner (University of Utah) and Perry Zirkel (Lehigh University); Yvonne Bui (University of San Francisco), Jose Luis Alvarado (San Diego State University), and Rosalind Simpson (University of San Francisco); Diane Pedrotty Bryant (University of Texas) and Brian R. Bryant (Psycho-Educational Services, Austin, TX); Charles Hughes (Pennsylvania State University) and Donald Deshler (Kansas University); Kathleen Lane (Vanderbilt University); and Lynn S. Fuchs (Vanderbilt University) and Douglas Fuchs (Vanderbilt University). Just jump to RtI Commentaries for an overview of the sessions and links to the slides.

Later today (19 February), the Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement will host a Webcast entitled “Making Algebra Work: Instructional Strategies That Deepen Student Understanding.” It will feature Jon R. Star, Assistant Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Professor Star, who studied at the University of Michigan, specialized in students mathematics learning during the middle- and high-school years.

It is slated to run from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. (US Eastern). One can register for the event online. Learn more about Professor Star from his Harvard Web site. Link to the Web site of the Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement.

Education Week announced an Internet-mediated chat entitled “Helping Struggling Students: ‘Response to Intervention.’” It’s slated for Wednesday 20 February at 2 p.m. Eastern time. Readers can learn more about it by visiting the site www.edweek-chat.org. There are links available there to read background articles about RTI that have appeared previously in Ed Week and to submit questions in advance.

TE readers will likely recognize acronyms such as BEE, CSRQ, EEPI, and WWC from previous post on this site. In addition to having been cited in posts, they (along with the Campbell Collaboration) are listed among the Web resources in a sidebar. They are there of a purpose: These sites are important sources of reasoned consideration of the evidentiary basis for teaching effectively.

Regular readers will also recall that from time to time I’ve posted concerns about the evidence that some of these sources have provided. These review houses employ different procedures in their integrations of evidence, and those differences are important to note. Though my concerns may sometimes be strongly stated, they do not negate the general good work that these organizations have done. Just as two cars with different features may both provide many miles of safe transportation, so can these projects provide very helpful guidance for improving education. Indeed, the folks who work at these places are far more capable than I in conducting and reporting reviews of research about educational matters.

Outside of my evaluation of the differences among the approaches taken in these groups’ reviews, there are also analyses of the differences by others who have much greater expertise. The January-February 2008 issue of Educational Researcher includes and article by Bob Slavin the provides just such an analysis. In it, Professor Slavin provides a very timely and coherent commentary on how differences in the methods employed in research syntheses (what others might call “integrative literature reviews,” “meta-analyses,” and etc.) of program evaluation studies affect their validity and utility.

Syntheses of research on educational programs have taken on increasing policy importance. Procedures for performing such syntheses must therefore produce reliable, unbiased, and meaningful information on the strength of evidence behind each program. Because evaluations of any given program are few in number, syntheses of program evaluations must focus on minimizing bias in reviews of each study. This article discusses key issues in the conduct of program evaluation syntheses: requirements for research design, sample size, adjustments for pretest differences, duration, and use of unbiased outcome measures. It also discusses the need to balance factors such as research designs, effect sizes, and numbers of studies in rating the overall strength of evidence supporting each program.

I encourage folks to read it. For the lay reader, there are some inevitably technical sections, to be sure; but overall the exposition is quite clear and accessible. For the professional, this is a valuable summary of current concerns and a hillock from which one can scan the unexplored territory before striking out to explore.

Slavin, R. E. (2008). What works? Issues in synthesizing educational program evaluations: Perspectives on evidence-based research in education. Educational Researcher, 37, 5–14.

Many of us who advocate effective instructional practices include frequent assessment of student learning as a critical component of teaching. Witness, for example the emphasis on progress monitoring in most special education practices and its inclusion in sensible response-to-instruction or -intervention models. Indeed, consider the now-somewhat-dated-but-still-unrefuted finding by L. and D. Fuchs (1986) that teachers who use formative assessment have students who score nearly 3/4ths of a standard deviation above the students of teachers who do not use formative assessment.

Yesterday I learned that a study about to be published in Science strengthens my support for assessment. In “The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning,” Professors Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke reported that students’ learning of vocabulary improves when they are tested rather than simply required to study.

Learning is often considered complete when a student can produce the correct answer to a question. In our research, students in one condition learned foreign language vocabulary words in the standard paradigm of repeated study-test trials. In three other conditions, once a student had correctly produced the vocabulary item, it was repeatedly studied but dropped from further testing, repeatedly tested but dropped from further study, or dropped from both study and test. Repeated studying after learning had no effect on delayed recall, but repeated testing produced a large positive effect. In addition, students’ predictions of their performance were uncorrelated with actual performance. The results demonstrate the critical role of retrieval practice in consolidating learning and show that even university students seem unaware of this fact.

Previously, Professors Roediger and Karpicke showed that taking a test, not just studying for it, improved students’ outcomes. They allowed students to study a passage from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (ToEFL) and then assessed their performance. Some students were tested for retention of the ideas (study-test; ST), but others were given a second study session (study-study; SS). They then tested students in both groups 5 min, 2 days, or 1 week later. Initially, the study-study (SS) group performed better, but on the later tests the study-test (ST) group had higher scores. In another experiment the extended their findings, showing that students in a study-study-study-study condition initially had slightly higher scores, but that those in study-study-study-test and study-test-test-test conditions out-performed them dramatically on retention assessments. So, reading the content more frequently did not help as much as taking tests repeatedly.

The beneficial effects of brief tests such as these probably are largely irrelevant to the debate about high-stakes tests. In my view, these results show, however, that an alternative approach to assessing performance—smaller, more frequent, incrementally more difficult—assessments might have value as a means of monitoring whether students are making andmight actually help students to make that progress.

• Link to a press release about one of the studies: “Repeated test-taking better for retention than repeated studying, research shows,” by Gerry Everding.
• Link to the public materials from Science about the more recent study.

Fuchs, L. A., & Fuchs, D. (1986). Effects of systematic formative evaluation: A meta-analysis. Exceptional Children, 53, 199-208.

Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966-968.

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17, 249-255.