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Joyful Learning Network

New research around K-8 schools

10/11/2012

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"Do Middle Schools Make Sense?"
Mary Tamer, Ed. The Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Fall 2012

"New research finds that keeping students in K–8 schools has benefits.
...
"Not all students are so fortunate, as West discovered last spring when he released a study that explored the achievement and dropout rates of students enrolled in grades three through 10 in Florida’s public schools. The findings? In sum, students who left elementary schools for middle schools in grades six or seven “lose ground in both reading and math compared to their peers who attend K–8 schools,” he wrote in “The Middle School Plunge,” published in the spring 2012 issue of Education Next. Additionally, Florida students who entered middle school in sixth grade were 1.4 percentage points more likely than their K–8 peers to drop out of high school by 10th grade — a whopping increase of 18 percent.

"“Intuitively, I had not expected this to be an important policy lever, but there are a lot of indicators that things are not going well for students in the middle school grades in the United States,” says West, who serves as executive editor of Education Next. “If you look at international comparisons, kids in the United States perform better at elementary school than the later grades … so it made sense to look at whether grade configuration influenced this.”

"West decided to take a closer look after he read a 2010 study out of New York City by two Columbia University researchers that “produced compelling evidence that the transitions to middle schools were harmful for students in that setting.” That research found that students entering grades six through eight or seven to eight schools experience a “sharp drop” in achievement versus those attending K–8 schools. West wondered whether the same patterns would be evident elsewhere and, if so, whether the drop in achievement was temporary or persisted into high school.
...
"Important, yes, but while West hopes that his research will open the door for districts to take a closer look at more K–8 models, the configuration alone is hardly a magic bullet or panacea for success.

"“I happen to agree with the idea that it’s good to have K–8 or seven through 12 schools, but this is not based on data,” Rogers says. “Small schools, with less than 400 kids, can make a difference, as can having children over a longer period of time. None of these things, alone, makes a difference. The question is, what are the practices that are occurring to make some schools successful?”
...
"While some earlier studies questioned the role of grade configuration in school success and student achievement, including the 2008 National Forum “Policy Statement on Grade Configuration” and a 2010 study by EdSource, “Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better” in California, “the evidence on academic benefits has become much stronger in the past two years,” West says.

"“I’m generally sympathetic with this argument, especially to the extent that it points to a set of practices that middle schools could adopt to address their performance problems given that wholesale changes to grade configuration are unlikely to occur overnight,” he says. “That said, our evidence indicates that effective school practices are more common in K–8 schools than in middle schools and that the transition to middle school itself is detrimental for students and should be eliminated wherever possible.”

"Perhaps most importantly, Rogers says the one consistency she has found among K–8 schools is that “kids tend to say they feel safer, so there is less of a Lord of the Flies environment” at a critical stage when they are “navigating through social currents. For many kids, it’s distracting.”

"So whether the reasoning is leadership, safety, or the lessening of transitions that may affect academic achievement, West hopes policymakers will continue to review grade configurations for the benefit of all students.

"“The flip side of the point I’m making is that there is not one grade configuration for everyone,” says West, “but I think for policymakers, it is too easy to say we know there is a problem with middle schools and we can mitigate those problems. I don’t think my research or anyone else’s gives us the steps to take to mitigate them.”"

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Gifted and Talented education being neglected at cost to the US

9/19/2012

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"Young, Gifted and Neglected"
Chester E. Finn Jr., New York Times, September 18, 2012

"It’s time to end the bias against gifted and talented education and quit assuming that every school must be all things to all students, a simplistic formula that ends up neglecting all sorts of girls and boys, many of them poor and minority, who would benefit more from specialized public schools. America should have a thousand or more high schools for able students, not 165, and elementary and middle schools that spot and prepare their future pupils."
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How success is measured

9/4/2012

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'Children Succeed' With Character, Not Test Scores
NPR Staff, NPR.org, September 4, 2012

"A child's success can't be measured in IQ scores, standardized tests or vocabulary quizzes, says author Paul Tough. Success, he argues, is about how young people build character. Tough explores this idea in his new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character.

"On how schools are focused on scores rather than noncognitive skills

""Right now we've got an education system that really doesn't pay attention to [noncognitive] skills at all. ... I think schools just aren't set up right now to try to develop things like grit, and perseverance and curiosity. ... Especially in a world where we are more and more focused on standardized tests that measure a pretty narrow range of cognitive skills, teachers are less incentivized to think about how to develop those skills in kids. So it's a conversation that's really absent I think in a lot of schools, to the detriment of a lot of students.""



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No room for current events in the test-driven classroom

7/24/2012

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"The Final Bell Rings for Weekly Reader, a Classroom Staple"
Noam Cohen, New York Times, July 24, 2012

"While it is tempting to see the close of Weekly Reader as another example of a shrinking print audience, Mr. Goff said that would be misleading. Rather, he pointed to the focus on teaching to the test that has made anything other than math and reading extraneous. “There has been a general loss of teaching kids about current events,” he said. “That is something that has been squeezed out of the classroom.” "
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Knewton - educational data-mining in action

7/17/2012

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"A Conversation With 2 Developers of Personalized-Learning Software"
Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 2012

"Here's why education is different from search or social media. For one thing, the average student studies for more time than they spend on Google or Facebook. People spend way more time in Knewton than they spend on Google—they spend hours a day as opposed to minutes per day. So that's one big reason why we produce a few orders of magnitude more data per user than Google, just based on usage.

"But then there's the more important reason even than that, which is that education is not like Web pages or social media. It's a different product. And it lends itself infinitely more to data-mining than does any other industry right now. The reason is that nobody has tagged all the world's Web pages for Google down to the sentence level, the way that we ask publishers to tag every sentence, every answer choice of every question. They say, Here's what this sentence is about, or this video clip. They're basically telling us every single thing about every single piece of their content. That's how we can slice and dice it so finely."

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How grades *should* work

7/11/2012

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"Grading and Its Discontents"
Ahmed Afzaal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2012

"The nature of grading. Grading is a tool, I tell my students. And like any other tool, it is meant to perform certain specific functions. To explain those functions, I like to use a simple analogy.

"Consider a car's speedometer. It is a tool that performs two interrelated functions: (1) It measures speed, and (2) it communicates that information to the driver. In a somewhat similar way, grading is a tool that also performs two interrelated functions: (1) It assesses academic performance, and (2) it communicates that information to the student. When driving, you glance at the speedometer to determine the speed of the vehicle—if it is what you want, you try to maintain it; if not, you make appropriate adjustments. That is analogous to how students aresupposed to use, and benefit from, whatever it is that their grades are telling them.

"It's perfectly normal to desire good grades since they serve as evidence that a student has demonstrated competence in a particular area. But problems arise when students assume that their primary goal in college is to earn good grades so they can achieve or maintain a certain GPA. That is like believing that the primary goal of driving a car is not to reach a particular destination but to achieve or maintain a certain speed.

"Since grades have only instrumental value—rather than any intrinsic value—they must be treated as only means to some end, and never as ends in themselves. I tell my students: If your primary goal in college is to receive good grades, you will probably view the required work as an onerous obstacle and you're not likely to feel very motivated to do the work. But you are most likely to receive good grades when you are so focused on learning that grades have ceased to matter."
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The link between school start times and student achievement

5/3/2012

1 Comment

 
"Do Schools Begin Too Early?"
Finley Edwards, Education Next, Summer 2012 / VOL. 12, NO. 3
"Of course, increased sleep is not the only possible reason later-starting middle-school students have higher test scores. Students in early-starting schools could be more likely to skip breakfast. Because they also get out of school earlier, they could spend more (or less) time playing sports, watching television, or doing homework. They could be more likely to be absent, tardy, or have behavioral problems in school.
"Later school start times have been touted as a way to increase student performance. There has not, however, been much empirical evidence supporting this claim or calculating how large an effect later start times might have. My results indicate that delaying the start times of middle schools that currently open at 7:30 by one hour would increase math and reading scores by 2 to 3 percentile points, an impact that persists into at least the 10th grade."
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Stop Telling Students to Study for Exams

4/22/2012

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Stop Telling Students to Study for Exams
David Jaffee, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 22, 2012

"On the one hand, we tell students to value learning for learning's sake; on the other, we tell students they'd better know this or that, or they'd better take notes, or they'd better read the book, because it will be on the next exam; if they don't do these things, they will pay a price in academic failure."
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