Evidence-based teaching methods for helping students who are at risk for school failure or who have disabilities.
Yep, those folks at “Weapons of Math Destruction” apparently do not find constructivist approaches to teaching arithmetic and mathematics palatable. In this cartoon, the school administrators have crossed out practice and skills and a parent is responding by preparing to (ahem) regurgitate or recovering from having regurgitated.
Follow this link to get to the full site where you can explore at your leisure.
Sphere: Related ContentOver 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.
Sphere: Related ContentMany 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.
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.
Sphere: Related ContentSol Stern, a regular contributor to City Journal, published an article in that source describing some successes that have occured under the Reading First initiative, successes that contrast clearly with absence of success in other places. He sees the contrasts as vindication for the actions of the Reading First leadership. Mr. Stern’s analysis is very good, in my view. To make one of those contrasts, he compares Richmond and Fairfax Virginia schools.
Continue reading ‘Stern on RF’
The What Works Clearinghouse posted three new reports of results 19 Jan 2007. They focus on Interactive Shared Book Reading, Phonological Awareness Training plus Letter Knowledge Training, and Talent Search. Link to the WhatWorks site’s page on PA and reading. Link to the section on Talent Search.
Sphere: Related ContentDeb Andrews of Oak Grove (OR, US) was a candidate for state superintendent of instruction in Oregon. Altough she was not elected, one of her campaign issues was effective instruction. Although I don’t know enough to consider endorsing her candidacy, I thought it was iintriguing to think of a candidate for such an office taking such a bold stance. Here’s a link to her Web site.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Fordham Insitute, a non-partisan think-tank in Washington (DC, US) that affiliates with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, has released a report entitled Whole-Language High Jinks that exposes the misrepresentations of some reading programs which claim to have a firm evidencary base, but actually do not. The report was written Louisa Moats and provides school officials, parents, and teachers advice about how to spot instructional programs that Professor Moats says are only pretenders to the status of being “scientifically based.”
Continue reading ‘Balanced literacy phonies’
That’s the title of an article by Joel Best, an academic at the University of Delaware, that is in the 14 April 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Knowing what I know about the problemsome practice of special education, I turned to the article to see what arguments he was going to use in discussing the topic in higher education. As it happens, Mr. Best cataloged a lot of familiar sounding fads in his discussion. Here’s his lead.
I have spent nearly 25 years chairing academic departments at three universities. Department chairmen attend many meetings where the future is unveiled, priorities are articulated, and innovations are announced. Over the years, I have been assured that our university — if not all of higher education — was about to be transformed by the Pacific Rim, assessment, active learning, cooperative learning, distance learning, service learning, problem-based learning, responsibility-based management, zero-based budgeting, broadening the general-education requirements, narrowing the general-education requirements, capstone courses, writing across the curriculum, affirmative action, multicultural education, computer networking, the Internet, water (don’t ask), critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and I don’t know what else. I have gone on retreats; participated in program reviews; served on task forces; puzzled over mission statements; written five-year plans, three-year plans, and niche reports; and listened to proclamations from pro-vosts, assistant provosts, deans, associate deans, and wannabe deans.
Some of those much-heralded innovations are long forgotten. Others remain housed somewhere on the campus, but I think it is fair to say that higher education hasn’t changed all that much, that none of these ideas proved to be as transformative as their advocates predicted. Compared to their advance billing, they all turned out to be short-term enthusiasms or — more bluntly — educational fads.
Mr. Best notes that fads are not solely the province of higher education. He lists medicine, elementary and secondary education, and business as also susceptible to the plague. What is more, Mr. Best hits the theme of Teach Effectively squarely on the head later in the article. He notes that fads are routinely adopted—and abandoned—before there are careful examinations of their effects. He strongly recommends higher education to “wait for some evidence that [a fad] actually works.”
Link to Mr. Best’s column [subscription may be required].
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