In her story for the Vancouver (BC, CA) Sun Janet Steffenhagen reported about the substantial gains in tool skills shown by students at an inner-city school in Vancouver. Under the headline “School leaps ahead in the rankings: Britiannia elementary principal credits a controversial reading program for students’ remarkable improvement,” Ms. Steffenhagen reported that aggregate scores on Canada’s Foundation Skills Assessment moved Britannia School from 636th rank to 232nd among 1000 schools in BC.
Continue reading ‘DI success story in BC’
Archive for the 'Written Expression' Category
My colleague Dan Willingham has posted a marvelous video that’s an introduction to thinking about neuroscience and education. Under the title “Brain-based Education: Fad or Breakthrough,” he illustrates important elements about what are reasoned extrapolations from cognitive neuroscience to education and what are not.
Update (18 May 2008): It’s heartening to see that other sites are pointing to Dan’s video. Here’s a preliminary list (please add others via the comments):
- D-Ed Reckoning
- Eduwonkette
- Will Talheimers’ Will at Work (an unusually well reasoned commentary on digital learning): Be Skeptical of Brain-Based Learning
Update (7 June 2008): A couple of days ago, Dan posted a new version of the video; I’ve modified the links in the box accordingly.
The US Institute of Educational Sciences released a summary of what educators know about teaching reading and writing to children to whom we often refer as “English Language Learners.” In Effective Literacy and English Language Instruction for English Learners in the Elementary Grades,, Russell Gersten, Scott Baker, Timothy Shanahan, Sylvia Linan-Thompson, Penny Collins, and Robin Scarcella provide explicit recommendations for improvining literacy instruction:
- Screen for reading problems and monitor progress;
- Provide intensive small-group reading interventions;
- Provide extensive and varied vocabulary instruction;
- Develop academic English; and
- Schedule regular peer‑assisted learning opportunities.
Gersten, R., Baker, S.K., Shanahan, T., Linan-Thompson, S., Collins, P., & Scarcella, R. (2007). Effective Literacy and English Language Instruction for English Learners in the Elementary Grades: A Practice Guide (NCEE 2007-4011). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee.
Link to the download (free) of the report.
I was pleased to happen upon a Web site entitled The Concord Review. The folks there—principally Will Fitzhugh—pitch the idea that academic excellence should be treated just as well as athletic excellence, so they have a varsity team of high school history writers. According to the home page, “Varsity athletics and athletes are celebrated everywhere. We celebrate varsity academics.”
Continue reading ‘Concord Review’
Over on Kitchen Table Math Catherine Johnson has a note about several articles on creativity she’d read recently. Upon seeing the entry, I remembered that there are several very interesting—at least to me—behavioral studies of creativity. So I slipped over to the site for the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and ran a quick search. Here are some of the results (with links to the abstracts; one can download the full article by following the link to the abstract):
Maloney, K. B. & Hopkins, B. L. (1973). The modification of sentence structure and its relationship to subjective judgements of creativity in writing. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 6, 425-433. The present study objectively defined and manipulated some compositional variables in 10-sentence stories written by fourth- fifth- and sixth-grade students, and related these operationally defined variables to subjective judgements of cr….
Glover, J. & Gary, A. L. (1976). Procedures to increase some aspects of creativity. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 9, 79-84. Instructions, reinforcement (team points) and practice were applied to four behaviorally defined creative behaviors of eight fourth- and fifth-grade students. All four aspects (number of different responses, fluency; number of verb forms, flexibility; number of words per response, elaboration; and statistical infr….
Parsonson, B. S. & Baer, D. M. (1978). Training generalized improvisation of tools by preschool children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 11, 363-380. The development of new, creative behaviors was examined in a problem-solving context. One form of problem solving, improvisation, was defined as finding a substitute to replace the specifically designated, but currently unavailable, tool ordinarily used to solve the problem. The study e….
Glover, J. A. (1979). The effectiveness of reinforcement and practice for enhancing the creative writing of elementary school children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 12, 487. Reinforcement (team points) and practice were applied to the written work of 16 fifth graders on three operationally defined components of creative writing, fluency, flexibility, and originality. These three components were assessed via five response measures. Fluen….
Read to Ms. Johnson’s post.
Our tour of the Republic of Korea has been wonderful. The temples, the foods, and (especially) the people have been quite delightful. Although Pat Lloyd and I have been seeing some sights, I’ve also been meeting with special educators in Changwon, Busan, and Seoul.
Continue reading ‘Korea talks’
Several years ago I published a paper for some folks. Carl Binder, Elizabeth Haughton, and Barbara Bateman had written Fluency: Achieving True Mastery in the Learning Process and were looking for a way to disseminate it. It’s been out in the wild since 2002 and I know a few folks have read it. But lots more folks should read it, in my view. So I’m issuing a reminder about it here.
How can you tell whether someone has truly mastered a skill? What is the measurable indicator that a person really knows how to do something? These questions should be at the heart of every teaching decision, every observation of a child’s performance, and every evaluation we make about the success of an educational program. Yet for many educators, and certainly for most parents, answers to these questions are anything but clear. Most of us have grown up in a “percentage correct world” where 100% correct is the best anyone can do. But is perfect accuracy the definition of mastery? Or is there another dimension that makes the difference? In fact, we see many children and adults who can perform skills and demonstrate knowledge accurately enough – given unlimited time to do so. But the real difference that we see in expert performers is that they behave fluently – both accurately and quickly, without hesitation.
Continue reading ‘Promoting mastery’
Here are links to some pretty vapid resources on teaching:
- http://www.ehow.com/how_13757_teach-reading-students.html
- http://www.ehow.com/how_11465_teach-teenager-with.html
- http://www.ehow.com/how_13153_help-child-with.html
- http://www.ehow.com/how_11461_teach-teenager-with.html
- http://www.ehow.com/how_13756_teach-students-with.html
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