Yep, with a little help from friends, I’m about to post Bogus Bowl IV. That means that BB III will soon close. Now, in football one doesn’t get to vote for the winner of Super Bowl I, II, IV, XXVII, MCII, or IIIVMC,; those have been decided. But, it’s late in the 4th quarter for Bogus Bown III; you can still get in your votes on BB III over the next few days. Just click on the link to Teach Effectively Polls. (My vote on this one went for an explanation that is running behind right now.)
Archive for the 'Musings' Category
Don Hirsch published an editorial in Education Week that tells it true. We need, he argues, to place a greater emphasis on what and how we teach during children’s early school years. Of course, he champions his recommendation for adopting a clear curriculum during the early years, too. But, the big idea is that the primary and elementary grades are very important if students are to be able to excel in high school and college.
The elementary grades are much more important than is apparently credited by philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has recently been giving many millions to high school reform—with negligible results per dollar. For many years, the philanthropic and policy worlds have placed a lot of emphasis on the two ends of precollegiate education—high school and preschool. They are right about preschool—but not about high school. The general knowledge and vocabulary required for effective learning at the high school level are the fruits of a long process. The way to reform high school is to prepare students effectively in the elementary years to thrive there. If, in recent decades, high school has become a place where students are offered a smorgasbord of watered-down subjects, that is because watered-down subjects are all that our ill-educated students are now prepared to understand.
Link to Professor Hirsch’s editorial (note that a subscription may be required to read the entire piece, but you can get one for free).
Well, folks, I closed the poll about bogus reasons for not teaching effectively. It was a close contest:
- That kind of instruction may be good for some students, but it just doesn’t fit my teaching style. (35%, 34 Votes)
- Students will learn it when they’re ready. (33%, 32 Votes)
Now it’s time to start a new poll. This time we’ll examine bogus reasons for failing to test whether students actually learn what educators say they “teach.”
Continue reading ‘Bogus Bowl III’
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.
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.
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.
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