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September 9th, 2010 in
Education Articles |
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Allocating Resources To Tutoring Versus Teaching
Good question from Paul in comments, about teacher-tutor tradeoff.
Benjamin Bloom, the guy who coined Bloom’s Taxonomy, wrote an article called The Two Sigma Problem. Thanks to Shaun Doherty for the article.
U of Chicago studies showed that tutoring created a ginormo, 2 standard deviation improvement in learning. “Good teaching,” which they call “mastery teaching,” created a 1 standard deviation improvement. The baseline was regular ol’ teaching, I suppose.
Bloom wondered in 1984: can we devise teaching (i.e., a whole group at a time) methods that generate the same level of learning as tutoring?
We’re obsessed with the same question today. Bloom’s team thinks if you combine a bunch of stuff, you can get there. Like a drug cocktail. But so far as I can tell, they don’t have evidence. They just argue t
September 9th, 2010 in
School Business |
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Are ACT Tests For All Students A Good State Policy ?
Eight state require all students to take ACT college tests in grade 11. Questions have been raised on how ACT tests align with the other state tests for grades 2-10. Is the content and rigor similar? How does ACT align with the new common core standards adopted by 38 states? ACT is a good signaling device for students to know whether they are college ready.
A proposed plan by the North Carolina Board of Education would require most 11th-grade students to take the ACT. Students also will take pre-tests leading to the ACT in 8th and in 10th grade. ACT scores will be used as a factor in determining how well schools are educating students. Schools also will be able to identify students who do poorly on the exam and encourage them to attend an academic “boot camp” in the summer after their junior year. See a new Center for Evaluation and Education Policy report on this topic
Little Rock 9′s Jefferson Thomas Passes
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Jefferson Thomas, who as a teenager was among nine black students to integrate a Little Rock high school in the nation’s first major battle over school segregation, has died. He was 68.
Thomas died Sunday in Ohio of pancreatic cancer, according to a statement from Carlotta Walls LaNier, who also enrolled at Central High School in 1957 and is president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation.
The integration fight was a first real test of the federal government’s resolve to enforce a 1954 Supreme Court order outlawing racial segregation in the nation’s public schools. After Gov. Orval Faubus sent National Guard troops to block Thomas and eight other students from entering Central High, President Eisenhower ordered in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division.
Soldiers stood in the school hallways and escorted each of the nine students as they went from classroom to classroom.
Each of the Little Rock Nine received Congressional Gold Medals shortly after the 40th anniversary of their enrollment.
Learning Disabilities: Mind the Gap
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I hope that you’ve had a chance to check out my article exploring the decline in students identified as having specific learning disabilities. It’s particularly important to examine trends with the students in this category, because they made up about 40 percent of all the students served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act as of the 2007-08 school year, the most recent year for which data is available. (Information on the 2008-09 school year is coming in the next few weeks.)
(Interestingly enough, for all the attention that the disability has received, autism is still a tiny percentage of the students served under the IDEA, at 4.5 percent as of the 2007-08 school year. But the category is growing quickly.)
For years, educators and experts considered it a given that the number of students with disabilities would rise, so I found it interesting that the conventional wisdom seems to be out of date.