Posted by Nancy Staples on Fri, Feb 18, 2011 @ 09:50 AM
Does that headline sound like something out of The Onion, satirical newspaper of record? Sadly, it’s real, inspired by a study in the Journal of Consumer Research (read Science Daily’s coverage).
The authors of the study report that “people typically fail to realize that the unit of quantitative information is arbitrary.” This “unit effect” leads to anomalous conclusions: to most consumers, the difference between an 84-month warranty and a 108-month warranty looks bigger than the difference between a 7-year and a 9-year warranty. A 95 out of 100 rating looks better than 9.5 out of 10.
This made me think of another priceless bit of satire: Remember Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap, who was convinced his amplifier was “one louder” because its dial went to eleven instead of ten? But one what, exactly? Nigel didn’t care, he only knew that it was one more.
More serious is when a borrower thinks that 36 months to pay is much longer than 3 short years. Of course we have known all along that merchandisers are very good at playing off our failings in number sense.
The good news here is that these mistakes were not replicated when subjects were reminded of the arbitrary nature of the units used to express a given bit of information. Math teachers: here’s another example of the crucial importance of what you do. Keep forging away at number sense; and while you’re at it, throw in plenty of unit sense, too.
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Posted by Catherine Conway on Mon, Feb 14, 2011 @ 02:34 PM
The PISA 2009 results provide a snapshot of the world’s educational rankings, but McKinsey & Co. recently put out a report examining the specific qualities of school systems that produce positive results. The report, titled How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, identifies 20 different educational systems – ranging from city school districts to those of entire countries – that have been seeing strong and sustained improvements in performance.
To understand what brought about these successes, McKinsey studied school systems at all stages of improvement: schools moving from poor to fair quality, as well as those moving from great to excellent quality. The conclusion: rather than follow the examples of the highest-achieving systems (e.g. Finland or Singapore), school systems can learn the most from the successes of systems at similar performance levels.
According to the report, cultivating improvement at any level does share six common interventions:
- Improving the skills of teachers and principals
- Assessing students
- Developing data systems
- Creating supportive educational policy and law
- Revising standards and curriculum
- Establishing a rewards system for teachers and principals.
These six interventions apply to the poor systems as much as the excellent ones. The difference lies in the methods of intervening. A poor or fair system typically focuses on improving data systems and policy coming from a central authority; a good or great system would focus on giving schools and teachers more freedom to craft their curriculums, and on developing teacher-to-teacher accountability.
Read the Executive Summary of the McKinsey Report
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Posted by Catherine Conway on Mon, Feb 14, 2011 @ 02:17 PM
Every few years, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures the academic achievement of countries around the world. In 2009, students from 65 different countries and economies participated – 34 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries and 31 partner countries.
The top 5 performers were Shanghai-China, Singapore, Hong Kong-China, Korea and Finland, with scores of 600, 562, 555, 546 and 541, respectively. The United States’ score was 487, 17th of OECD countries (31st overall), and 9 points below the OECD average.
The results also showed that among OECD countries, boys outperformed girls by an average 12 points in math (whereas girls outperformed boys by 39 points in reading). Countries overall showed little change in math performance since the 2003 testing, with 6 OECD countries and 2 partner countries having significant gains. For the other 28 OECD countries, the percentage of top math performers decreased slightly.
Read the executive summary of the PISA 2009 Results
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Posted by Jennifer Chintala on Fri, Feb 11, 2011 @ 12:30 PM
Recently, discussions about America’s educational program have had an increased focus on health and exercise programs for children. I think most of us can understand the importance of increasing student awareness about health issues and helping students recognize the value of improved eating and moderate exercise. I’ve learned, however, that the benefits are not just related to students’ physical health, but may also increase their cognitive development – especially in the area of math.
A study completed by the Georgia Prevention Institute at Georgia Health Sciences University indicates that students who engage in moderate amounts of exercise have increased “executive function.” This promotes students' ability to achieve goals and exercise self-control. Such increased brain function has been shown to increase student achievement in areas such as mathematics. In essence, exercising your body leads to increased brain exercise, as well. In addition, the study shows similar positive effects regardless of gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Hence, strides may be made to close the achievement gap between various groups.
While the study that was completed was relatively short term, an additional long-term study is planned to prove the conjecture that a long-term program would lead to even greater positive outcomes. Promoting an increase in student exercise has so many benefits on its own. Now, there is even more reason to focus on health-awareness programs for America’s youth.
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Posted by Cathy Tran on Tue, Feb 08, 2011 @ 01:26 PM
I often hear anecdotes about study methods that work well, but what happens when you pit some against each other to see which works best? A recent report in the journal Science detailed an experiment that did just that – students had to use one of three techniques to remember information in a reading passage:
- Take a test that asks them to recall what was read
- Repeatedly study the material (similar to cramming)
- Draw diagrams to document what they learned
Researchers at Purdue University found that students who took a test recalled 50 percent more information a week later than students who used the latter two methods. As reported by the New York Times, the students who took the recall test may "recognize some gaps in their knowledge," 
according to Marcia Linn, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And she added that "they might revisit the ideas in the back of their mind or the front of their mind."
In the ongoing dialogue of how to best use technology in education, this research illustrates that formative testing is one promising possibility. These findings bode well for Scholastic's FASTT Math, which integrates formative assessment so that students can test themselves throughout the studying process and learn how to focus their efforts effectively.
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Posted by Nancy Staples on Fri, Feb 04, 2011 @ 09:37 AM
Some reasons to be cheerful from a study at Mass. General Hospital: after an 8-week program in meditation, subjects showed measurable and POSITIVE (my interpretation) changes in some pretty important ares of the brain.
Key points include:
- MR images taken before and after showed increased grey matter in the hippocampus, a center for learning and memory, as well as in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection.
- MRIs also showed decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, the area associated with anxiety and stress. Correlated with this was a participant reporting reduction in feelings of stress.
The subjects practiced what is called mindfulness meditation – nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind – for an average of 27 minutes per day.
Previous studies have indicated that this sort of effect exists, but this appears to be the first one to document that the changes are due to meditation. You can read a nice summary at the MGH website.
So what's the takeaway for teachers from findings like this? As Scientific American summarized: "The brain is much more plastic than scientists thought even just a decade ago." And young or old, that is reason to be cheerful.
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Posted by David Dockterman on Wed, Feb 02, 2011 @ 03:34 PM
The headline of a recent New York Times article seems to imply that testing is a better way to learn than studying. The article, “To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test”, summarizes research at Purdue University comparing how well students learned the contents of short science articles by simply reading the article, reading and making a concept map, or reading and taking a retrieval practice test. The practice test got the best results. However, before you start peppering your students with daily quizzes, it’s good to take a look under the hood of this study.
The retrieval practice was not simply taking a multiple choice quiz. Students read the passage and then wrote down as much as they could remember. They then re-read the passage and once again wrote what they could remember. Since these students were undergraduates, we might assume (although the study did not investigate) that they have developed some metacognitive skills and that they would self-assess their learning between the two retrieval exercises. The second reading of the article gave the students immediate feedback on how well they had remembered the first time, providing an opportunity for adjustments. As the authors of the study note: “Retrieval is not merely a read out of the knowledge stored in one’s mind — the act of reconstructing knowledge itself enhances learning”. Previous research (summarized very nicely by Rohrer and Pashler last year) has shown that open retrieval is more effective than multiple choice. It appears that actively trying to remember works better at improving memory than recognizing the information in a multiple choice list.
Of course the Purdue study, and many behavioral and functional MRI studies, involve undergraduates, who simply by making it to college have demonstrated some level of academic success. How well do the findings of this research apply to struggling middle school children? Are their executive function skills developed enough to receive the same benefit from open retrieval practice tests? These are questions worth exploring. I’m sure there’s more to come.
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