Voucher opponents often argue that it's unfair to hold public schools accountable for results under the No Child Left Behind Act and various state rules while allowing private schools that participate in voucher programs to receive taxpayer dollars without similar accountability.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute sought the advice of twenty experts in the school-choice world. This paper presents their thoughts and opinions, as well as Fordham's own ideas.
The majority of experts agree that participating private schools should not face new regulation of their day-to-day affairs. They also see value in helping parents make informed choices by providing data about how well their own children are performing.
However, experts are not of one mind when it comes to making academic results and financial audits transparent. Some would "let the market rule" and are averse to transparency or accountability around school-level results. Others would "treat private schools like charter schools" when it comes to testing, financial transparency, etc. Some would also like government (or its proxy) to intervene if individual schools aren't performing adequately.
Full report:
http://edexcellence.net/accountability_and_school_vouchers/School%20Vouchers%20Report.pdf
Math Software Research Reports
The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance within the Institute of Education Sciences has released two new What Works Clearinghouse intervention reports.
The first report examines the research on "Odyssey Math", an interactive, software-based K-8 mathematics curriculum. It includes individualized instructional and assessment tools, and an administrative function that allows teachers to generate reports and tract student performance.
See the results of the Clearinghouse review at
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/reports/middle_math/odyssey_math/
The second WWC intervention report examines the research on "Destination Math", a series of computer-based curricula designed to be used for at least 90 minutes a week. Featuring sequenced, prescriptive, step-by-step instruction, this curriculum is designed for the development of fluency in critical skills, math reasoning, conceptual understanding, and problem-solving skills.
See the report now at
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/reports/middle_math/destination_math/
University of Colorado at Boulder Research Provides New View of the Way Young Children Think
For parents who have found themselves repeating the same warnings or directions to their toddler over and over to no avail, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder offers them an answer as to why their toddlers don't listen to their advice: They're just storing it away for later.
Scientists -- and many parents -- have long believed that children's brains operate like those of little adults. The thinking was that over time kids learn things like proactively planning for and understanding how actions in the present affect them in the future. But the new study suggests that this is not the case.
"The good news is what we're saying to our kids doesn't go in one ear and out the other, like people might have thought," said CU-Boulder psychology Professor Yuko Munakata, who conducted the study with CU doctoral student Christopher Chatham and Michael Frank of Brown University. "It also doesn't go in and then get put into action like it does with adults. But rather it goes in and gets stored away for later."
A paper on their study titled "Pupillometric and Behavioral Markers of a Developmental Shift in the Temporal Dynamics of Cognitive Control" will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 23.
"I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings," said Munakata. "There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they're just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different."
During the study, the CU-Boulder researchers used a computer game designed for children, and a technique known as pupillometry -- a process that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine the mental effort of the child -- to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds.
The computer game involved teaching children simple rules about two cartoon characters -- Blue from Blue's Clues and SpongeBob Squarepants -- and their preferences for different objects. In the directions for the game, children were told that Blue likes watermelon, so they were to press the happy face on the computer screen only when they saw Blue followed by a watermelon. When SpongeBob appeared, they were told to press the sad face on the screen.
"The older kids found this sequence easy, because they can anticipate the answer before the object appears," Chatham said. "But preschoolers fail to anticipate in this way. Instead, they slow down and exert mental effort after being presented with the watermelon, as if they're thinking back to the character they had seen only after the fact."
Using pupillometry to determine the time at which children exerted mental effort, the speed of their responses for each type of sequence and the relative accuracy of those responses, the researchers found that children neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it.
"For example, let's say it's cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside. You might expect the child to plan for the future, think 'OK it's cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm,'" said Chatham. "But what we suggest is that this isn't what goes on in a 3-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it."
Munakata doesn't claim to be a parental expert, but she does think their new study has relevance to parents' daily interactions with their toddlers.
"If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective," Munakata said. "What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom."
Munakata said the findings have broader implications for research in the field of cognitive development.
"Further study could help people figure out why kids are doing poorly or well in different educational settings," she said.
To view a short video highlighting the research finding visit http://www.colorado.edu/news and click on the cognitive development story.
Mayo Researchers Find Link Between Anesthesia Exposure and Learning Disabilities in Children
Mayo Clinic researchers have found that children who require multiple surgeries under anesthesia during their first three years of life are at higher risk of developing learning disabilities later. Several studies have suggested that anesthetic drugs may cause abnormalities in the brains of young animals. This is the first study in humans to suggest that exposure of children to anesthesia may have similar consequences. The finding is reported in the current issue of the journal Anesthesiology http://journals.lww.com/anesthesiology/pages/default.aspx).
Using data from the long-term Rochester Epidemiology Project (http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/mayo/research/rep/), researchers studied the medical records of 5,357 children from Olmsted County who were born between 1976 and 1982.
The research team, led by Robert Wilder, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist, found that although one exposure to anesthesia was not harmful, more than one almost doubled the risk that a child would be identified as having a learning disability before age 19. The risk also increased with longer durations of anesthesia.
"It's very important for parents and families to understand that although we see a clear difference in the frequency of learning disabilities in children exposed to anesthesia, we don't know whether these differences are actually caused by anesthesia," says Randall Flick, M.D., a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist and co-author of the study.
"The problem is that anyone who underwent an anesthetic also had surgery," says Dr. Wilder. "It's unclear whether it's the anesthetic, the physiological stress of surgery or perhaps the medical problems that made surgery necessary that are responsible for the learning disabilities."
Young children's brains are more vulnerable to a variety of problems because they are undergoing dynamic growth. The brain is rapidly forming connections between cells and trimming excess cells and connections, says Dr. Wilder.
The general anesthesia chemicals in use during the study period were primarily halothane and nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Although halothane is no longer used in the U.S., it has been replaced by newer agents that have similar effects on the brain. Nitrous oxide is widely used throughout the U.S. and the world.
Debate exists about the developmental correlation between the animal (rodent) and human studies. Some think that the related exposure period would be perinatal in humans (the last month of pregnancy and first six months after birth), so the researchers repeated their analysis, examining anesthetic exposure before age 2, and found similar results.
"Parents and physicians need to balance this information along with the normal decisions that we all go through when we decide to have surgery for one of our children," says Dr. Flick. "Although alternatives to the use of these medications exist, they are limited. Certainly, performing surgery without appropriate use of anesthesia is unacceptable."
The children in the study were tested as a natural part of the educational process in the Rochester school system. They did not perform as well in reading, writing or math as their IQ tests indicated.
Other studies have linked anesthesia exposure in young children to behavioral problems. Dr. Flick says the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is aware of the possible problems with anesthesia. "They've been very proactive in trying to gather information as quickly and thoughtfully as possible," Dr. Flick says, "but much more research is needed before we could conclude that anesthesia itself causes problems." He also encourages families with questions to go to the Web sites of the American Society of Anesthesiology and the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia.
The research team is working to obtain funding to extend the database for 10 more years (1982-1992), a period that would include the use of more modern anesthetics. They are also working with the FDA to complete a study that matches children who had an anesthetic with children who have a similar medical problem but did not receive an anesthetic.
INCONSISTENT PERFORMANCE SPEED AMONG CHILDREN WITH ADHD MAY UNDERLIE HOW WELL THEY USE MEMORY
Higher levels of hyperactivity, impulsivity correlate to inconsistent reaction times
Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show more variable or inconsistent responses during on ‘working’ or short-term memory tasks when compared with typically developing peers, a study by UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute Julie Schweitzer has found.
“We think poor working memory is a characteristic present in many children and adults with ADHD,” said Schweitzer, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
“Our study helps explain why working memory may be fine at one moment and poor at another, just as one day a child with ADHD seems to be able to learn and focus in class and on another day seems distracted and not paying attention,” Schweitzer said.
According to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 4.4 million youth, ages 4 to17, have been diagnosed with ADHD by a healthcare professional. In 2003 nearly 8 percent of school-aged children were reported to have an ADHD diagnosis by their parent. The current study, published online in February in the journal Child Neuropsychology, supports the idea that what underlies impaired working memory is a problem in how consistently a child with ADHD can respond during a working memory task.
“We have known for some time that children with ADHD vary in how fast they are able to complete working memory tasks when compared to normally developing control subjects,” Schweitzer explained .
Previous studies have suggested that children with ADHD might be slower at responding to tasks. The current study took a closer look at their performance using a relatively newer statistical analytical approach, to determine whether the children with ADHD were indeed faster, slower, or if perhaps another, more complicated process was occurring. The hypothesis was that children with ADHD were actually mostly responding at the same rate as healthy children, but with more frequent very slow responses than the control subjects.
To test this hypothesis, the study authors presented 25 children with ADHD and 24 typically developing peers with the Visual Serial Addition Task, a computerized program that presents children with a number on one screen and then asks them to mentally add it to another number shown on a second screen. The children are then asked to decide whether or not a given sum is correct. From session to session, the task is presented at different speeds and at different levels of difficulty.
“We found that the children with ADHD were much less consistent in their response times,” said Wendy Buzy, study lead author and a graduate student when the experiments were conducted.
Schweitzer and Buzy were both at the University of Maryland at the time. Buzy said that the children with ADHD had more frequent longer response times when compared with their typically developing peers, but the responses they did give were just as accurate.
“Once we controlled for omission errors, the accuracy of the two groups was the same,” she said.
Buzy and Schweitzer pointed out that one of the unique things about their study was the way in which their data were analyzed. Previous studies compared only the range of reaction times and average reaction times for children with ADHD and controls. The method used in the current study allowed researchers to compare variation in response times within and between individuals, as well as within and between the two groups. The researchers also showed that working memory variability correlated with ADHD symptoms as scored by parent surveys (using the Conners’ ADHD rating scale) prior to testing.
“We found that higher levels of hyperactivity and restlessness or impulsivity correlated with slower reaction times,” Schweitzer said.
The current results led another Schweitzer laboratory member, postdoctoral fellow Catherine Fassbender, to design a study looking at variability in response time during a working memory task in the brains of children with ADHD using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
“This study increases our understanding of what might be happening at a physiological level that underlies the inconsistency in responding in ADHD,” she said.
Schweitzer also hopes to look at whether behavioral interventions and/or medications can help reduce the kind of variability observed in the current study. Variability in working memory, she said, means children cannot generalize what they learn in one situation to another.
“Improving consistency in how children with ADHD respond to the environment should help them generalize what they learn in clinical interventions improving their skills across situations.”
Peer Victimization in Middle and High School Predicts Sexual Behavior Among Adolescents
Peer victimization during middle and high school may be an important indicator of an individual's sexual behavior later in life. These are the findings of Binghamton University researchers Andrew C. Gallup, Daniel T. O'Brien and David Sloan Wilson, and University at Albany researcher Daniel D. White. The study will be published in an upcoming issue of Personality and Individual Differences, the official journal of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID).
According to Gallup, peer aggression and victimization during adolescence is a form of competition for reproductive opportunities. Female college students who were frequently victimized during middle and high school reported having sex at earlier ages and more sexual partners than their peers, while males reported just the opposite.
In a sample of over 100 college students, surveys showed that over 85 percent of all victimization occurred between members of the same sex, and that indirect victimization (e.g., teasing, demeaning, isolating) predicted sexual behavior, while physical aggression did not.
According to the researchers, the relevance of victimization and sexual behavior may be embedded in our evolutionary past. "Aggression may resolve intrasexual competition for the same resources, often including members of the opposite sex" said Gallup. "Adolescence serves as a premier age in which to study competition for reproductive access. As the life span of our ancestors was greatly diminished, those who began having children at younger ages would have been selected over those who postponed their sexual behavior."
Competition among peers for a boyfriend or girlfriend may be influenced by these socially aggressive behaviors. Interestingly, study results indicate different effects for males and females.
"Nearly inverse outcomes were observed between the sexes in terms of victimization and sexual behaviors," said Gallup. "And according to evolutionary theory, these types of aggressive and socially dominant strategies operate by different means between males and females. For instance, females preferentially seek status when choosing mates, while males place a larger emphasis on physical attractiveness."
The researchers believe that victimization acts to lower social status in males, and thus females find these males less attractive. It is also proposed that limited physical prowess or physical immaturity may be contributing to this effect, by promoting both an increased likelihood of being victimized and reduced sexual opportunity.
The study presents multiple explanations for females as well. One interpretation is that females who are highly victimized by other girls may have lower self-esteem and could be more susceptible to male sexual pressure. Therefore, the heightened sexual activity of female victims could be an artifact of male coercion.
Another possibility is that attractive girls may simply be the target of aggression by other girls out of envy and resentment over male attention. For instance, research has shown that females often try to slander good-looking girls in front of men in an attempt to make them less desirable. As males focus on physical appearance and not status, attractive female victims do not suffer reduced sexual opportunities. It is important to note however, that this study did not measure physical attractiveness.
School kids 'wagging' breakfast are missing healthy brain fuel
The national MBF Healthwatch survey has revealed that a disturbing number of children 'wag' breakfast claiming there is 'no time' to eat, they are 'too tired' or 'can't be bothered' having a meal before going to school.
The survey found that 22% of parents interviewed said their children skip breakfast on three to five school days of each week, and a further 20% skip breakfast on one or two school days.
The remaining 58% of parents said their school aged children always ate breakfast before school.
Bupa* Chief Medical Officer Dr Christine Bennett said, "It is disturbing to find that 42% of children are sent to school on one or more days on an empty stomach because it sends a clear message at an early age that breakfast isn't important.
"Wagging breakfast is the healthy lifestyle equivalent of driving your car on an empty petrol tank – it inevitably runs out when you most need it.
"Research shows that skipping breakfast results in reduced learning, reduced attention and poor food choices for the rest of the day. Children who skip breakfast are more likely to be overweight which in the long term can lead to the development of chronic health issues.
"Children who miss out on breakfast are also less likely to get the recommended intake of dairy, fruit and vegetables," she said.
Asked why their children missed out on breakfast before school, just over half (51.6%) of parents said there was no time because of the pressures of being late for school or work or because of sleeping in.
"Parents should encourage their children to eat breakfast. Storing a few simple ingredients in the cupboard or fridge or organising breakfast the night before can help in the morning rush. Healthy shakes and cereal bars are great for eating on the way to school. Toast, yoghurt and fruit are also quick, easy options," Dr Bennett said.
Viewed nationally, the MBF Healthwatch survey showed that children missed breakfast at an average rate of 1.2 days a week – Tasmanian children were least likely to miss breakfast at 0.6 while Queensland and Western Australia had the worst record for breakfast 'wagging' at 1.4 and 1.5 days respectively.
"With many competing demands, we know that Australian families live in a 'time poor' society but the importance of making time for children to enjoy a healthy breakfast before going to school cannot be overstated," Dr Bennett said. "It can be the start of a lifetime of healthy eating habits," she said.
For more information on the MBF Healthwatch Survey, please visit: www.mbf.com.au/wellness
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