A new international grading index that provides states, school districts and policymakers with a way to determine where their students rank in comparison with their peers around the world finds that U.S. elementary school students show average performance, at best, in mathematics and are widely outperformed by their counterparts in several Asian countries, including Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR and Japan.
This new approach to benchmarking simplifies international comparisons by grading the countries, states and school districts with a comparable system that is more familiar to policymakers - grades of A, B, C, D, or BD (below a D). The study assumes that the international benchmark, against which we should calibrate our expectations and monitor our success, is a grade of B.
The report, issued by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), based on international performance benchmarks in math for 4th and 8th grade students concluded that only 4th graders in a handful of states - among them Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Kansas and Vermont - are learning at B or B- levels when compared with students internationally.
At Grade 8, only Massachusetts achieves a grade of B.
"The Second Derivative: International Benchmarks in Mathematics for U.S. States and School Districts, is the first national report that captures the essence of what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and others have mentioned about international benchmarking," said report author Gary Phillips, a vice president and chief scientist at AIR. "This grading index achieves the important goal without adding any significant additional costs for states or the federal government."
The study was sponsored by AIR, a non-profit, non-partisan research organization, as part of its mission to provide relevant research to policymakers and practitioners seeking to improve school performance.
Phillips, who also served as the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the U.S. Department of Education from 1999 to 2002, and is nationally known for his expertise in large-scale assessments and complex surveys, said the grade of B was chosen as the benchmark because it is statistically equivalent to the proficient level recommended by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as the level of performance we should expect from our students.
"These Asian nations consistently perform at the B+, B, and B- levels," Phillips said. "Their students are learning mathematics not just at a higher level than students in the United States, but at a level that is a quantum leap higher." The math proficiency average for U.S. students is C+ in grade 4 and C at grade 8.
In an increasingly competitive global economy in which skills are a pathway to opportunity, the report averred, the findings are cause for concern, recounting President Obama's belief that "the countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow."
"The highest achieving countries are so far ahead of us, we will never catch up if we run at the current pace," said Phillips. "Our states and school districts should no longer be comparing themselves to their neighbors. They will be competing for jobs and innovations with students around the globe."
"The race to the top starts with knowing where we stand and how high the bar is over which we need to jump," he added. "Establishing state or national thresholds uninformed by what is happening around the world is like flying without radar."
In rating the performance of states and school districts, the AIR report found even more cause for concern, noting "a general tendency among the states and districts to drop in performance from grade 4 to grade 8."
By Grade 8, for example, five major school districts (Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, the District of Columbia and Cleveland) had fallen from C grades to the D+ level. Previously only the Washington, D.C., school system held this distinction.
Similar drops do not occur among the high-performing Asian nations.
"To get a feel for how far ahead these countries are, we compared the 4th grade students in the highest achieving country, Hong Kong, to those in the United States," explained Phillips. "The difference is comparable to the difference between the highest achieving state (Massachusetts) and the lowest achieving state (Mississippi). That is a huge achievement gap."
The report cites several reasons why the international grading system employed by AIR is a good choice for comparing educational outcomes within the context of a global educational environment.
- The grading system is a familiar metric and is intuitively understandable to the public and policymakers.
- The grades are connected to rigorous international benchmarks. This is indicated by the fact that only a few high-achieving countries and states received a B grade and no country or state received an A.
- The international benchmarks that underlie the grades were established through an international consensus process and have a scientifically based criterion-referenced interpretation.
- The grading system is comparable across Grades 4 and 8, across years of administration, across countries and now, as a result of the AIR report, across states and school districts.
One especially disturbing finding the report cited was "that there are a relatively large number of countries in which the students are performing at the BD (below D) level of proficiency." A few countries do a good job of teaching mathematics to the overall population of students, but in many countries the average student is not learning much mathematics.
"No one believes international benchmarking is a silver bullet that will solve all the problems with American education," the report concluded. "But it certainly should be at the front of the list of strategies for making improvements."
Full report:
http://www.air.org/news/documents/AIRInternationalBenchmarks2009.pdf
Online tool that compares the ranking of individual states with foreign countries:
http://assessment.air.org/Psychometrics_Chart.aspx
Online tutorials help elementary school teachers make sense of science
Interactive Web-based science tutorials can be effective tools for helping elementary school teachers construct powerful explanatory models of difficult scientific concepts, and research shows the interactive tutorials are just as effective online as they are in face-to-face settings, says a University of Illinois expert in science education.
David Brown, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education, said that elementary school teachers need high-quality, research-based resources to help them build a meaningful scientific knowledge base.
“Refining one’s scientific knowledge base through online interactive resources can help teachers develop a deeper conceptual understanding of scientific phenomena, making them better prepared to engage students in science-based activities,” Brown said.
In any curriculum, there is teacher background literature or other forms of digested information that teachers can study to refresh their memories or get the broad stroke outlines of what they’re going to teach.
The trouble with those teaching aids, according to Brown, is that the information they contain is “usually fairly terse” and isn’t interactive or research-based.
If teachers lack confidence in their scientific knowledge base, they’re probably going to avoid situations where they might be caught flat-footed by a student’s question, because they don’t want to be asked a question they don’t know how to answer, Brown said.
So they’ll fall back on more traditional lesson plans that emphasize the rote memorization of scientific terms over inquiry-based forms of learning, such as hands-on activities and discussions of those activities.
But an emphasis on routinized learning doesn’t help students grasp the foundational science behind what they’re learning, Brown said.
“If online tutorials focus on explaining the underlying scientific concepts behind the phenomena rather than on the rote memorization of facts, that can help teachers form a more meaningful conceptual understanding of what they’re going to teach,” he said. “A teacher who has a firm scientific knowledge base can then help students understand the fundamental scientific ideas and concepts behind what they’re learning better.”
To test his hypothesis, Brown developed “Making Sense of Science,” an online multimedia tutorial that tested subjects’ pre- and post-test knowledge of the scientific concept of buoyancy.
In the first 10 interviews, the average post-test score increased by 16 percent; in the second group of 10, by 28 percent; and for a group of 68 online users, by 33 percent. Similarly, Brown discovered that the average post-test confidence scores nearly doubled after the respondents interacted with the tutorials, and the written explanations of their ideas went from “somewhat incoherent” to “coherent explanations that made use of relevant ideas,” he said.
“We found that our resources were effective, and they were as effective online as they were face-to-face,” Brown said.
The tutorials were also crafted to address the perceived deficiencies that Brown thought other teacher background information and online resources suffered from.
“The resources are designed to help teachers develop their ideas,” Brown said. “They’re not designed for teachers to use directly with the students, but rather as background information for the teachers to develop their ideas so they’ll be in a better position to engage students in activities.”
Those positive results make Brown guardedly optimistic that online resources for teachers can be developed that will be helpful in advancing reform in elementary science education.
“The focus in both national and state standards is involving students in inquiry-oriented activities,” he said. “This is just trying to provide a resource for teachers for what they’re already being asked to do at the national and state levels.”
Brown believes having better prepared elementary school science teachers will ultimately lead to more students interested in science.
“There’s a world of difference between a drill-and-kill lesson versus an inquiry-oriented one in terms of student engagement and retention,” he said. “There’s a wealth of potential there that we’re not tapping into.”
School program cuts problem behaviors in fifth graders in half
A study by Oregon State University researchers suggests that school-based prevention programs begun in elementary school can significantly reduce problem behaviors in students.
Fifth graders who previously participated in a comprehensive interactive school prevention program for one to four years were about half as likely to engage in substance abuse, violent behavior, or sexual activity as those who did not take part in the program.
The study, supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health, will appear in the August, 2009, print issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The online version of the article is viewable today.
"This study provides compelling evidence that intervening with young children is a promising approach to preventing drug use and other problem behaviors," said NIDA Director Nora Volkow. "The fact that an intervention beginning in the first grade produced a significant effect on children's behavior in the fifth grade strengthens the case for initiating prevention programs in elementary school, before most children have begun to engage in problem behaviors."
The study was conducted in 20 public elementary schools in Hawaii. Participating schools had below-average standardized test scores and diverse student populations with an average of 55 percent of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.
The intervention tested was Positive Action (PA), a comprehensive K-12 social and emotional development program for enhancing behavior and academic achievement. Schools were randomly assigned from matched pairs to implement PA or not. The program consists of daily 15-20 minute interactive lessons focusing on such topics as responsible self-management, getting along with others, and self-improvement. At schools implementing the intervention, these lessons occupied a total of about one hour a week beginning in the first or second grade.
In fifth grade, 976 students (most aged 10 or 11) responded to a written questionnaire that asked about their use of substances, including tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs; involvement in violent behaviors, such as carrying a knife or threatening someone; and voluntary sexual activity. The total number of students reporting that they had engaged in any of these behaviors was small. Strikingly, however, students exposed to the PA program were about half as likely to report engaging in any of these behaviors as students not exposed to PA. Among students who were exposed to PA, those who had received the lessons for three or more years reported the lowest rates of experience with any of these problem behaviors.
"This study demonstrates that a comprehensive, school wide social and character development program can have a substantial impact on reducing problem behaviors of public health importance in elementary-school-age youth," said Brian Flay, professor of public health at OSU and the study's principal investigator.
PA is an interactive program that integrates teacher/student contact and opportunities for the exchange of ideas as well as feedback and constructive criticism. The program is school wide and involves teachers and parents as well as students. It takes a positive, holistic approach to social and emotional development rather than focusing on the negative aspects of engaging in substance abuse and violence. Finally, at one hour a week, students' exposure to the program was intensive. "These features likely account for the large effect observed," said Flay.
Flay plans to conduct a follow-up study to determine whether the beneficial effects of the PA program on fifth graders are sustained as the children grow older.
Study promotes educational reform based on school self-management
Researchers from the University of Murcia (UM) have investigated the issue of cooperation between families and schools, and are proposing changes be made to the organisational structure of schools to allow families to take an active part in managing them and to take on joint responsibility for their educational programmes. The study underscores the crucial educational role of the family as a great environment within which to teach children ethical values.
The debate about dividing teaching between the classroom and the home is nothing new. Teachers argue that education should not be limited to the confines nor the timetable of the classroom, but that it should continue beyond this through the help of parents – but what subjects should be shared in this way?
Pedro Ortega, a senior professor at the University of Murcia who led this research, tells SINC that "the conflict aroused by the new subject Education for Citizenship has awoken many families from their lengthy lethargy and led to them exercising their rights to play an active role in the educational work carried out by schools".
The study, published in the latest issue of the Revista Española de Pedagogía includes warnings from teachers about the fact that families "are starting to see themselves as clients, as consumers of education services, demanding greater product quality. They do nothing more than demand services and choose those schools that best reflect their preferences". The socialisation and educative functions of the student's immediate emotional environment have thus been delegated to schools.
The researchers say that the heart of the problem lies in "the lack of collective consciousness about the need for families to be effectively involved in the entire range of pupils' educational and socialising processes", and "the lack of political will to enact the changes that the old organisational structure of our school system has been demanding for so long".
The problem, from the teaching point of view, is two-pronged. The first problem is parents' lack of trust in the professional work carried out by teachers and, as Ortega points out, "their resistance to becoming involved in a task they do not believe they share responsibility for". The other side of the coin, according to the study, is the lack of will among teaching staff to implement mechanisms that would make it possible for families to become effectively involved in managing schools.
How to involve families
The study proposes promoting the "effective autonomy" of schools in order to help "each school find its own identity, according to its socio cultural context, so that its educational programmes can be designed to meet the needs of its pupils, and to ensure that these programmes really act to guide the entire range of educational activities", say Ortega and his team.
There are, however, obstacles to putting these measures into action, because the current legal framework governing families' participation in school management is, according to the experts, ineffective. "The experience of the AMPAS (parents' associations) is clear evidence of this", say the researchers at the University of Murcia.
The research team adds that "it would be worth taking a risk in some places and testing out a new model of school self-management that would ensure provision of the minimum nationally-required curriculum contents and also comply with our constitutional principles". This solution, they say, would make it possible for the centre to be governed by regulations stemming from the school community itself and for it to follow an educational programme "that would fulfil the needs and interests of both the students and the actual context of the school itself".
Anime's Fan Girls
Girls are gathering online to remake male-oriented Japanese animation videos into romances -- and in the process are picking up skills in film editing, storytelling and feminist literary criticism.
"Boys are more into the fighting aspects of anime," says Elizabeth Birmingham, an associate professor of English at North Dakota State University. "Girls have created this subculture where they cut the animation videos up, mix them around, and create their own stories, often romances."
One anime video, "Full Metal Alchemist," has inspired some 35,000 fan-girl remakes, says Birmingham, who has found that most fan girls are teenagers. She estimates there are hundreds of thousands of fan-girl videos on YouTube and other sites.
Anime is a style of animation that originated in Japan and favors action-filled plots with fantastic or futuristic themes. It is used in comic books, computer games and videos.
Birmingham, who also teaches gender studies, decided to research the fan-girl subculture when she discovered that fan-girl versions of anime stories often involve romances between male characters.
"I'm interested in why straight teenage girls are interested in this sexuality," she says.
One hypothesis: Fan girls choose to identify with male anime characters rather than create female characters because female anime characters often exist only as monster bait.
"By expressing themselves through boy characters, the girls can experience more active roles," Birmingham suggests. "They're dealing with the sexist artifacts of our culture, and deciding 'I'm not going to let them do this to me. I'm going to turn it on its head.'"
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