More focus should be spent on teacher development and support
What began in the 1980s as a possible way to relieve teacher shortages and improve instructional quality in areas such as mathematics and science, alternative teacher certification programs (ATCP) have become a widespread strategy used in almost every state. In a new study, University of Missouri researchers have found that ATCPs, which are designed to allow industry professionals to become certified teachers, may not be meeting initial expectations and some experience in a learning profession seems to predict better teaching in schools.
"We found that career length, number of prior careers and career relevance to the subject area are not necessarily related to instructional quality," said Jay Scribner, associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis in the MU College of Education. "However, we found that ATCP teachers whose prior career was related to education demonstrated a higher level of instruction."
Scribner found that most teachers in the study were unable to draw on their prior experience in ways that positively and substantively influenced their teaching practices. This disconnect appears to be attributed primarily to teachers' lack of understanding on how to translate their knowledge into the curriculum they are teaching. The researchers also found that teachers with prior education-related experience express more empathy for their students as learners and understand the importance of students' active engagement in the learning process.
"ATCP teachers with some kind of prior education experience were more focused on the importance of the teacher-student relationship as a foundation for an excellent teaching practice, not solely their content area," Scribner said. "Understanding the learner and the learning process were the overarching themes that emerged from our data that best described the difference between teachers with and without a prior educational-relevant career."
As more ATCPs develop around the country, Scribner suggests that policymakers strengthen ATCPs in ways that focus standards-based instruction and encourages school districts to do a better job supporting ATCP teachers once in the classroom. ATCP directors should focus on the types of past experience and education prospective teachers possess, not just that they have past experience.
The study, "Exploring the relationship between prior career experience and instructional quality among mathematics and science teachers in alternative teacher certification programs," was co-authored by Scribner and Motoko Akiba, assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis and will be published in Educational Policy.
Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-8 Countries: 2009.
This report describes how the education system in the United States compares with education systems in the other G-8 countries--Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom. Twenty-seven indicators are organized in five sections: (1) population and school enrollment; (2) academic performance (including subsections for reading, mathematics, and science); (3) context for learning; (4) expenditure for education; and (5) education returns: educational attainment and income.
This report draws on the most current information about education from four primary sources: the Indicators of National Education Systems (INES) at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
Complete report:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009039.pdf
Structure More Effective in High School Science Classes
Self-led, self-structured inquiry may be the best method to train scientists at the college level and beyond, but it's not the ideal way for all high school students to prepare for college science.
That's according to findings of a study conducted by University of Virginia professor Robert Tai and Harvard University researcher Philip Sadler. Their study appears in this month's International Journal of Science Education.
Data show that "autonomy doesn't seem to hurt students who are strong in math and may, in fact, have a positive influence on their attitude toward science" Tai said. However, "Students with a weak math background who engaged in self-structured learning practices in high school may do as much as a full letter grade poorer in college science," he said.
Tai, associate professor of education in U.Va.'s Curry School, and Sadler, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ Science Education Department, conducted the study, which used data from a national survey of more than 8,000 high school science students.
"The findings suggest that students with lower levels of high school mathematics attainment had greater success in college science when they reported more teacher-structured laboratory experiences in high school," Tai and Sadler report in their study, "Same Science for All? Interactive Association of Structure in Learning Activities and Academic Attainment Background on College Science Performance in the U.S.A."
According to Tai, many secondary science classes are turning to a self-structured method of learning with the notion that students will discover science on their own. "Advocates should be sobered by this study's findings," Tai said.
"Self-structured instructional practices – sometimes referred to as self-led inquiry – have many advocates, but this study suggests that this approach does not fit all students," Tai said. "Giving more guidance to some science students and more freedom to others seems likely to pay off in college."
"Student-led projects and investigations do not appear to be as productive as other approaches to teaching science in high school," Sadler said. "Increasing student autonomy may be motivated by the goal of providing experiences more akin to scientific research, but only the strongest students appear to get much out of such opportunities in most classrooms."
Tai and Sadler point out in their report that it is important for a teacher to carefully decide how much guidance to provide in an inquiry-based teaching approach based on each student's achievement. They write: "Of primary concern is the quality of student work produced in these activities. For many teachers who assign independent inquiry activities and rely on students to design and conduct them, the reality is that while some students may do good work, others languish."
For more on the study, go to the International Journal of Science Education[link to: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713737283].
Social skills, extracurricular activities in high school pay off later in life
It turns out that being voted “Most likely to succeed” in high school might actually be a good predictor of one’s financial and educational success later in life.
According to a University of Illinois professor who studies the sociology of education, high school sophomores who were rated by their teachers as having good social skills and work habits, and who participated in extracurricular activities in high school, made more money and completed higher levels of education 10 years later than their classmates who had similar standardized test scores but were less socially adroit and participated in fewer extracurricular activities.
Christy Lleras, a professor of human and community development, says that “soft skills” such as sociability, punctuality, conscientiousness and an ability to get along well with others, along with participation in extracurricular activities, are better predictors of earnings and higher educational achievement later in life than having good grades and high standardized test scores.
“That’s not to say that academic achievement in high school doesn’t matter – it does,” Lleras said. “But if we only look at standardized test scores, we’re only considering part of the equation for success as an adult in a global marketplace. Academic achievement is part of the story, but it’s not the whole story. You’ve got to have the social skills and work habits to back those achievements up.”
With the generational shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service- and information-based one, employers value workers who can not only boast about their GPAs and SAT scores, but are also able to get along well with the public and co-workers, Lleras said.
“I think we’ve known this intuitively for a long time that employers are looking for something beyond cognitive skills,” Lleras said. “Leadership now is not an individual thing, it’s how well you get along in a team and get people organized.”
But thanks to the strict accountability measures of the No Child Left Behind law, struggling schools are increasingly cutting the extracurricular programs and activities that foster soft skills in order to focus almost exclusively on achieving adequate yearly progress on state-mandated standardized tests, Lleras said.
Consequently, low-achieving schools are put in a bind: Measure up, or lose funding. Either way, it’s a zero-sum game for students, Lleras said.
“There’s this pervasive idea that if we just teach and test the basic skills, students are going to do much better in school and in life,” she said. “It would be great if we could just snap our fingers and tomorrow everyone could read, write and do math at grade-level. But an obsession with testing and routinized thinking doesn’t foster the non-cognitive soft skills that pay off as an adult.”
Inadequate funding for education also has meant that many schools are not able to reduce class sizes or hire more qualified teachers, two important factors for “creating the academic and social environment that foster these kinds of soft skills in schools,” Lleras said.
“In addition to testing, what high-performing schools do really well is provide the kinds of opportunities through extracurricular activities, rigorous course work and
high-quality teachers that help create good citizens and good workers and foster the kinds of work habits, behaviors and attitudes that we know employers value,” she said.
If high-stakes testing is the only remedy for low-performing schools, Lleras said, “then we may fail to help those students develop the soft skills they need to successfully complete higher levels of education and secure a better job in the labor market.”
Ironically, the original version of the No Child Left Behind law had a behavioral component.
“NCLB did have this notion that there are other things going on in education besides testing, but it was grossly underfunded and targeted drug, alcohol, tobacco and violence prevention activities,” she said.
Lleras sees access to high-performing schools not only as an educational issue, but also as a social justice issue. In the course of her research, she discovered that participation in fine arts programs was associated with “significantly higher earnings” for African-American and Hispanic students 10 years later, yet those students often attended schools with fewer opportunities for fine arts participation. The same measure had little effect on the earning power of white students.
If we care about those low-achieving schools and their effect on students, it’s imperative for schools and educators to go beyond No Child Left Behind, which is “only about testing,” Lleras said.
“Most of our students don’t go on to college, and our young adults today are entering a workforce that’s very different from what it was 30 years ago,” Lleras said. “It’s a very tenuous, volatile market, especially for workers with a high school education or less, and our schools are failing students by not providing enough opportunities to develop the skills, habits and knowledge we know employers are going to reward.”
So what can parents take away from her research?
“I think that incentives are very important, particularly for adolescents,” Lleras said. “Teens need to see that their efforts in high school matter and will eventually pay off. This gives parents evidence they can use to talk to their kids about the importance of working hard, getting along with others and participating in extracurricular activities.”
A Randomized Field Trial of the Fast ForWord Language Computer-Based Training Program
This article describes an independent assessment of the Fast ForWord Language computer-based training program developed by Scientific Learning Corporation. Previous laboratory research involving children with language-based learning impairments showed strong effects on their abilities to recognize brief and fast sequences of nonspeech and speech stimuli, but generalization of these effects beyond clinical settings and student populations and to broader literacy measures remains unclear.
The researchers instituted a randomized field trial in eight urban schools. They generated impact estimates from separate intent-to-treat and treatment-on-the-treated analyses of the literacy outcomes of second- and seventh-grade students who were more generally at risk for poor reading and language outcomes.
The Fast ForWord Language program did not, in general, help students in these eight schools improve their language and reading comprehension test scores.
Full report:
http://epa.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/1/82
Visual learning study challenges common belief on attention
A visual learning study by scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston indicates that viewers can learn a great deal about objects in their field of vision even without paying attention. The findings will appear in the April 14 print issue of the journal Current Biology.
Contrary to common belief, attention may actually impair the ability of people to draw conclusions based on the visual images or stimuli they observe, reports Valentin Dragoi, Ph.D., the study’s senior author and an assistant professor at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston.
“Even when you ignore environmental stimuli, your brain may still be sensitive to their content and store information that will influence subsequent decisions,” Dragoi said. “Paradoxically, paying attention may actually reduce learning during repeated exposure to visual images.”
This new insight into visual attention could lead to novel teaching strategies to help people with sensory impairment after stroke or attention deficit disorder, Dragoi said.
Six people participated in the multiple-day study designed to measure the ability of human subjects to process visual stimuli in the absence of attention.
Participants were asked to stare at a dot in the center of a computer monitor while paying attention to one flashing stimulus and ignoring another. To make sure they were paying attention, study subjects were asked to press the spacebar when the stimulus they were concentrating on varied in contrast.
In the subsequent sessions, participants were tested to see how well they could detect changes in the angles of the flashing stimulus at both the location they were supposed to attend and the one they were supposed to ignore. The flashing stimulus in the exposure part of the study was a circle with parallel bars. It was later replaced with fifteen natural images.
“Surprisingly when subjects were tested for their ability to discriminate fine orientation differences between new stimuli, their learning performance was greater at the unattended location,” Dragoi said. “That is, ignoring the stimuli presented over days of exposure was more effective than actually attending them. We believe this finding can be explained by the fact that, typically, attention filters out unwanted stimuli so they are not consciously processed. However, in the absence of attention, stimuli are able to escape the attentional mechanisms and induce robust learning after multiple exposures.”
The next step, according to Dragoi, is to learn more about the neurophysiological mechanisms associated with this phenomenon, as well as to conduct additional experiments to investigate the generality of the findings. “The same could hold true with other sensory modalities, such as auditory or tactile,” he said.
“It is conceivable that the brain has developed mechanisms to take advantage of the signals outside the spotlight of attention. … Although it is well accepted that ‘practice makes perfect,’ we show here that robust learning can arise from passive, effortless exposure to elementary stimuli,” the authors wrote.
“Our visual systems have evolved during millions of years,” said Diego Gutnisky, lead author and a graduate research assistant at The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston (GSBS). “For instance, inhabitants in the poles can discriminate different white hues better than other people who are not commonly exposed to predominantly white environments. In this way, the visual system can learn, without the requirement of attention, to extract the most relevant features of the environment to be more efficient at representing it internally.
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