Teach Effectively!

Over on Kitchen Table Math the contributor who identifies himself as SteveH has a delightful post about some new test results. Here’s the lead:

Recent testing has shown improvement in shoe tying by fourth and eighth graders over the past two years, although the growth has been stagnant in some districts. Urban school activists, however, can be encouraged by the statistical improvement in areas with populations of 250,000 or more. This continues an upward trend that started 6 years ago when this testing began.

Jump over to Testing Shows Improvement in Shoe Tying.

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke to the National Education Association today, calling on its members to work with him toward the goal of ensuring that “every child in America is learning from an effective teacher—no matter what it takes.”

That’s a noble goal. In my view, it requires that educators shed their allegiance to theory and adopt effective teaching practices. That’s what it takes.

To be sure, there is a lot of emphasis on high-stakes testing. Mr. Duncan even discussed it as one of the four features of his plan for reforming education. The effective teacher idea is another of the four. High-stakes tests (which need reform of their own, in my view—that’s another post) are only part of the game. Another is using evidence to guide instruction.

But even in the absence of results on high-stakes tests and from pristine research projects, educators can ascertain whether they’re using effective methods. That is, we can devise our own means of ascertaining whether teaching practices are effective at a more micro level. In a lot of ways, the process is relatively simple:

1. Identify goals and objectives in objectively measurable terms. How will we know if the students have learned X?
2. Identify the skills and knowledge that students will need to demonstrate mastery of those goals and objectives. What is required to show that a student can competently and independently do X?
3. Devise teaching algorithms for leading students to acquire the skills and knowledge identified in (ii).
   • Model: Demonstrate the skills for the students or tell them the knowledge;
   • Test: Have the students perform the skill or state the knowledge;
   • Coach: Reinforce and correct their performance;
   • Practice to mastery: Have them perform the skill or repeat the knowledge until they are facile with it and can do it under different, increasingly more challenging conditions.
4. Assess students’ competence according to the goals and objectives specified in (i).

Sure, I’ve simplified it here. Sure, the goals and objectives would need to be integrated in a fashion consistent with an epistemology of various subject areas. And, you’ll have to cut me a little slack about my use of words such as “tell” and “correct”; telling would need to include providing materials to read, for example. But the idea is just about as simple as I’ve sketched it here.

The area of early reading has been mapped according to this perspective on teaching. We can say how we would recognize a competent reader (i), what the component skills are (ii), and how to teach those skills. But the to-be-learned material doesn’t have to be elementary level reading. If the area is chemistry and the objectives were conducting an experiment using electrophoresis, I think we could perform a similar analysis.

Of course, the real trick will be to get people on board with such thinking. Mr. Duncan seems to want to do something like that, but he’s talking about things at a much grander scale.

Remarks of Arne Duncan to the National Education Association—Partners in Reform

I took considerable pleasure today in reading an article by Maria Glod of the Washington Post in which she reported about plans to develop national standards in reading and mathematics for students in US schools. In her article, entitled “46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards,” Ms. Glod described efforts by the governors of most US states to describe a framework of knowledge and skills that would characterize a high-school diplomate who is ready for the world of work or higher education or, ideally, both.

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia today will announce an effort to craft a single vision for what children should learn each year from kindergarten through high school graduation, an unprecedented step toward a uniform definition of success in American schools.

The push for common reading and math standards marks a turning point in a movement to judge U.S. children using one yardstick that reflects expectations set for students in countries around the world at a time of global competition. Today, each state decides what to teach in third-grade reading, fifth-grade math and every other class. Critics think some set a bar so that students can pass tests but, ultimately, are ill-prepared.
Continue reading ‘Progress on US standards’

The current Bogus Bowl (it’s number 5) raised questions about the professorate, with one alternative mentioning the belief that there is no one best way to teach. The answer to the question, “Is there one best way to teach?,” is surely, “No.” There are actually something like, oh, a few million ways to teach. But some of them are better than others.

Better? Yes, better. That is, some ways of teaching lead to students who score higher on trustworthy measures of declarative and procedural knowledge than the students taught using some other ways of teaching. [Some people will complain that (a) declarative and procedural knowledge are not appropriate foci for education or (b) that trustworthy measurement is impossible; those are arguments for another discussion.] Of course, Teach Effectively is about identifying and employing, and preparing others to employ those methods that meet this standard.

Fortunately, TE is not alone in the quest for use of evidence-based education. Here’s a resource that some readers will find useful. It’s from the IllinoisLoop, a source that’s been over there in the blog roll for much of the tenure of TE.

Is There ONE Best Way to Run a School?

Is there only one way to run a school?

Does rhetoric about “best practices” point to a single “best” way to teach children?

Of course not.

But ed school theorists insist that there is one “best” method. Not only that, they claim that they know exactly what it is!

Consequently, most American schools have moved to that “constructivist” approach and continue to expand its usage further in their classrooms. But mounting evidence calls the whole constructivist framework into question.

The page goes on to integrate a couple of score or a few dozen sources related to the idea in the lead that I’ve reproduced here. There’s plenty of links to good sources. The page would serve admirably as a syllabus for a course on cutting through gobbledygook and identifying clearly reasoned arguments for teaching effectively. Here’s the link. Study hard. There will be quizzes.

Bogus Bowl III is closing and Bogus Bowl IV is about to open. Click here to vote in (or see the results of) BB III; voting is open until about 5:00 AM (US East Coast) 11 June. The new poll will appear in a post 11 June just after BB III closes.

For folks who are thinking about teaching students how to study for tests: Under the headline “Step Away From the Highlighter,” JJ Hermes published a brief article on the topic.

Does this sound familiar? Final exams start soon, and the pile of notes, highlighted textbooks and old exams has turned into a mountain.

To help students get through this intense study period, we asked experts to provide tips based on the latest research on memory and learning.

The two experts, one of whom is my colleague Dan Willingham, offer some good recommendations. Here is a list (see the article for explanations):

• The worst way to study is simply to read over notes
• Stop indiscriminately highlighting everything you think is important
• Alternate subjects until two days before the first test
• Study each subject in blocks, and take a break
• Don’t give up sleep
• Study throughout the year

Link to Ms. Hermes’ article.

Well, folks, I closed the poll about bogus reasons for not teaching effectively. It was a close contest:

1. That kind of instruction may be good for some students, but it just doesn’t fit my teaching style. (35%, 34 Votes)
2. 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’

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.