Tag: Test prep

Posted on

Innovations in Teaching and Learning: Top Down or Bottom Up?

Up-down

Head to the vendor area of an educational conference and you'll see a "top-down" vision of innovation in schools – expensive stuff that delivers information – lots of flashy equipment like display systems, interactive whiteboards, etc. They might give the illusion of modern, but in fact they're just a glitzy versions of the old standby – teaching as telling. Does anyone really think there's an instructional ROI in jazzing up test prep with a "Jeopardy-style game" delivered by "cutting-edge display technology?" 

In fact, the best innovation in instructional practice is coming from the "bottom up" – from teachers who find effective ways to harness the creative energy of their students. These teachers don't simply deliver information to kids, they craft lessons where students can research, collaborate, and reflect on what they're learning. They harness a flood of new platforms that enable students "see" information in new ways and support a more self-directed style of learning. Unlike the expensive wares being hawked by the convention vendors, most of these web tools are free. 

Want to find out more about instructional innovation in action? That won't cost you a thing either. Just jump on my Twitter feed and you find superb teachers willing to share their latest student projects. And that free flow of information contrasts with a second "top-down" approach to innovation in schools – the professional learning committee. Imagine being told that, "teachers will now attend PLC meetings.. and don't forget to fill out the PLC report form and turn it in to your administrator." No one at the top seems to notice that teachers who want to network have already created their own "bottom-up" support systems via the social web.

Most kids have a "bottom-up" expectation of curating their own information and creating something with it. The barriers to producing content (music, art, books, etc) have all but disappeared. Schools should be helping students develop better skills at critically evaluating information and using it in responsible ways. But many schools cloister students behind internet filters. And instead of finding innovative ways to take advantage of the student's personal smart phone, they ban them. "Susie put your iTouch away and please focus your attention on the output from our classroom's expensive new wireless document camera."

Corporate music, publishing and film were transformed from below. Do we expect education (another legacy information gatekeeper) to be spared the forces of the digital revolution? Unlike the vanishing local newspaper, schools won't disappear entirely. After all, someone has to watch the kids. While it may be difficult to replace the custodial function of schools, I suspect that education's "top-down" approach will eventually be breached. Or perhaps life will just become an "open book test" and we'll no longer notice how our information moves through it. 

As Matt Ridley noted in a piece about the evolution of the social web,  "The very notion that we once discussed the relative merits of text, email, social-network messaging and tweeting will seem quaint. In the future, my part of the cloud will get a message to a friend's part of the cloud by whichever method works best, and I will not even know which way it went. The distinction between a newspaper column and a blog will dissolve, as will the difference between a book and an e-book."  ~ Microchips Are Old Hat. Can Tweets Be Far Behind? Wall Street Journal  March 5, 2011

Image credit flickr/visualpanic  

Posted on

Vintage 1910 French Postcard Predicts Bill Gates and NCLB

What an uncanny prediction of contemporary American education – digitized information being force-fed into bored students. Looks like a vision of one of those computerized test prep programs guaranteed to bring up the standardized test scores.

But I’m not sure – do you think that’s educational savior - Bill Gates, or an overpaid public school teacher unwilling to give away his collective bargaining rights?

For another satirical look at the current education scene see yesterday’s post –
“John Stewart “Teachers are Destroying America“

NCLB-predicted

Click image to enlarge

Part of series of images (circa 1910) attributed to French artist Villemard in which he predicted Paris life in 2000. Hat tip to D’Arcy Norman

For another uncanny prediction, see my post “First Google Map Discovered – Created in 1652”

Posted on

Revising Advanced Placement: Will Thinking Beat Memorizing in the New AP Tests?

Think by Stig Nygaard

The NY Times recently showcased the proposed revamping of the AP program and testing – “Rethinking Advanced Placement” (1/7/11)

“A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests … The goal is to clear students’ minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. … Trevor Packer, the College Board’s vice president for Advanced Placement, notes that the changes mark a new direction for the board, which has focused on the tests more than the courses. …’We really believe that the New A.P. needs to be anchored in a curriculum that focuses on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge,’ Mr. Packer says.”

In recent years, many high schools have stopped offering AP courses, and a growing number of universities have raised AP score requirements or no longer award credit for the test. Memorization might have been a valued skill when AP testing began in 1956, but today many AP courses have become little more than relentless test prep.

As the College Board phases in the new courses and tests over the next few years, more teachers will feel free to restructure courses to support greater depth and student-centered inquiry. I urge teachers to forge ahead courageously. My experience teaching AP in “seminar approach” back in the 1990’s convinced me that advanced placement can be much more engaging than memorizing loads of information for an exam.

I was fortunate to have been mentored in that format by senior members of my high school social studies department – a hat tip to Brian Bell, Jim Wittig and Pete Crooker who pioneered the seminar approach used in our AP social studies classes. BTW – Our students scored very well on the AP exams.

Class size typically ran between 24 – 36 students. All students in the class would meet one day per week in a large group session. This might be used for unit testing, or to introduce or conclude a seminar with a lecture or full group discussion. The large group was also was divided into 4 seminar groups of 6-9 students. They would meet with me one day per week. Thus each student met one day per week in seminar and another day in large group. During the remainder of their week they worked independently or with their seminar group in preparation for the upcoming assignment. Today, we would call that “flipping the classroom.”

Of course, there were many weeks that were modified because of vacations and other interuptions – but you get the idea. Our high school was on traditional 8 period schedule. These AP classes were taught in a double period configuration of about 95 minutes for either the seminar classes or large group sessions.

My first experience was teaching one semester of AP US History while one of my colleagues was on leave. I focused on essential questions that fostered greater depth and relevance. Thus the typical question – “Should the Constitution be ratified?” became “How powerful should the national government be?” Anyone following the reauthorization of NCLB or the proposed health care legislation knows the enduring relevance of that question. For more on that approach, see my post “Essential Questions in American History: The Great Debates.”

After my semester of APUSH, I settled into my primary AP assignment – one semester classes in AP American Government / Politics and AP Comparative Government. There I used the seminar approach to give students guided experience in research, critical thinking, collaboration and presentation.

Visualize the typical American government lesson. Teacher standing up front asking students to follow along as they go over the diagram of “how a bill becomes a law.” Contrast that with an outline of one of my AP US Gov seminars on the same topic.

Congress and the Lobbyists
This extended seminar will investigate the relationships between Congress and the lobbyists. You will develop an investigative report which will ultimately answer the question “Does Congress represent the needs of its public constituency (the electorate) or its financial constituency (its contributors)? Weekly seminar abstracts will be used to prepare Tabloid TV-style PowerPoint report in support of your investigation. To see the full seminar assignment click here.  

Students were assigned a member of Congress who sat on one of the major committees. Their task over the next few weeks included researching and developing the following:

  • Demographic / political profile of their legislator’s elective constituency.
  • Profile of their financial contributors.
  • Committee jurisdiction and major lobbyists.
  • Voting record on legislation of interest to their elective constituency and financial contributors.
  • Their answer to the seminar question with supportive reasoning.  
  • Presentation and reflection

The latest word from the College Board says that they plan to delay their implementation of the new AP US History until 2012-13 See: “New Advanced Placement Biology Is Ready to Roll Out, but U.S. History Isn’t”
I hope that won’t delay teachers from realizing that they can get students prepared for the AP exams without resorting to a force-fed test prep model of instruction.

Historian

My SlideShare of DBQ resources / strategies for students historians

“Think” image credit flickr/Stig Nygaard

Posted on

Stop Worrying About Shanghai, What PISA Test Really Tells Us About American Students

Sputnik replica
Sputnik replica

The latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are public, and already some pundits are declaring it “a Sputnik wake-up.” Others shout back that international comparisons aren’t valid. Rather than wade into that debate, I’d rather look more closely at the questions in the PISA test and what student responses tell us about American education. You can put international comparisons aside for that analysis. 

Are American students able to analyze, reason and communicate their ideas effectively? [Think Common Core standards] Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? Have schools been forced to sacrifice creative problem solving for “adequate yearly progress” on state tests? For more on that last question see my post “As NCLB Narrows the Curriculum, Creativity Declines.” 

PISA provides some answers to those questions and offers an insight into the type of problem solving that rarely turns up American state testing. FYI: PISA is an assessment (begun in 2000) that focuses on 15-year-olds’ capabilities in reading literacy, mathematics literacy, and science literacy. PISA assesses how well prepared students are for life beyond the classroom by focusing on the application of knowledge and skills to problems with a real-life context. For more examples of PISA questions and data click here. 

Do American students learn how to sequence or simply memorize sequences

Here’s one insight into what American students can (and cannot) do that can be gleaned from the 2003 PISA test results. We spend a lot of time in school getting students to learn sequential information – timelines, progressions, life cycle of a moth, steps for how to. Typically the teacher teaches the student the sequence and the student correctly identifies the sequence for teacher on the test. Thus we treat a sequence as a ordered collection of facts to be learned, not as a thinking process for students to use.  This memorization reduces the student’s “mastery” of the chronology to lower order thinking. I was guilty of this when I first started teaching history “Can someone give me two causes and three results of WWII?” 

Sample sequencing problem from PISA

The Hobson High School library has a simple system for lending books: for staff members the loan period is 28 days, and for students the loan period is 7 days. The following is a decision tree diagram showing this simple system:

Pisa-1

The Greenwood High School has a similar, but more complex library lending system:
All publications classified as “Reserved” have a loan period of 2 days.
For books (not including magazines) that are not on the reserved list, the loan period is 28 days for staff, and 14 days for students. For magazines that are not on the reserved list, the loan period is 7 days for everyone.
Persons with any overdue items are not allowed to borrow anything. 

Task

Develop a decision tree diagram for the Greenwood High School Library system so that an automated checking system can be designed to deal with book and magazine loans at the library.  Your checking system should be as efficient as possible (i.e. it should have the least number of checking steps). Note that each checking step should have only two outcomes and the outcomes should be labeled appropriately (e.g. “Yes” and “No”).

Student Results

Only 13.5% of US students were able correctly answered the question. Does it really matter if students in Shanghai did any better? (The student results were rated on a rubric scale.) 

When students are asked to observe a process and develop a sequence they have an opportunity to use a full spectrum of higher-order thinking skills – they must recognize patterns (analyze), determine causality (evaluate) and then decide how they would communicate what they’ve learned to others (create). Sequencing can be taught across the curriculum at a variety of grade levels – we simply have to ask the students to observe and do the thinking.

In case you’re wondering,  correct response should look like this.
Click image to enlarge.

pisa answer
pisa answer 
 

Image credit/ NASA
 

Posted on

Education for Innovation or More Test Prep?

Intel is hosting an education digital town hall at the Newseum that will explore new ways to “cultivate tomorrow’s thinkers and entrepreneurs to sustain economic and educational success.” (December 7 at 8:45 a.m. – 11:45 EST) Participants include Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Angel Gurria, the Secretary General of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development; Rob Atkinson with ITIF; and Tom Friedman of the New York Times.

Let’s see how the Duncan sidesteps the issue of testing and innovation – while US students spend endless hours honing their test taking skills, the demand for routine skills has disappeared from the workplace. Anyone know of a meaningful and rewarding career that looks like filling out a worksheet? Maybe Friedman will be willing to tackle the stifling impact of testing on creativity thinking among our students. For my thoughts on the subject, see my post “As NCLB Narrows the Curriculum, Creativity Declines”

“Education for Innovation” a live digital town hall 

Watch the video here.

You can submit questions you would like the moderators, PBS NewsHour’s Gwen Ifill and Hari Sreenivasan, to discuss with the speakers. Then, vote the questions you like best to the top. Click here

You can join the for the live, interactive webcast on Tuesday, December 7 at 8:45 a.m. – 11:45 EST or join the conversation at Twitter/InnovationEcon use the hashtag #Ed4Innovation
 

PISA-sample

 

More on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)

PISA is an assessment (begun in 2000) that focuses on 15-year-olds’ capabilities in reading literacy, mathematics literacy, and science literacy. PISA studied students in 41 countries and assessed how well prepared students are for life beyond the classroom by focusing on the application of knowledge and skills to problems with a real-life context. For a detailed example of how PISA assesses sequencing skills see my post “Why Don’t We Teach Sequencing Skills?”

 

For more PISA questions in reading, math and science see my blog post “Are Students Well Prepared to Meet the Challenges of the Future?” You can find some great critical thinking questions to use with your students

 

Response to sample question
This short response question is situated in a daily life context. The student has to interpret and solve the problem which uses two different representation modes: language, including numbers, and graphical. This question also has redundant information (i.e., the depth is 400 cm) which can be confusing for students, but this is not unusual in real-world problem solving. The actual procedure needed is a simple division. As this is a basic operation with numbers (252 divided by 14) the question belongs to the reproduction competency cluster. All the required information is presented in a recognizable situation and the students can extract the relevant information from this. The question has a difficulty of 421 score points (Level 2 out of 6).