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March 2009 Archives

March 31, 2009

Thin Crowds for AERA Meeting?

If this article in Friday's issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is correct, attendance is going to be down at next month's meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

The Washington-based group typically draws between 12,000 and 16,000 researchers to its yearly conventions. And this year's meeting is scheduled to take place April 13-17 in sunny San Diego, a not unattractive destination.

But the association is anticipating a dip in attendance because of the current economic climate. Budget constraints, in fact, have prompted some state university systems to limit convention travel to professors or other faculty members who are scheduled to present papers.

As Felice J. Levine, the association's executive director points out in the Chronicle piece, that's a hardship for graduate students and other young scholars who stand to benefit the most from the chance to network and learn from the senior scholars in their fields.

Empty hotel ballrooms or not, yours truly still plans to attend. Look for my blog posts from the convention every day that week. If the Starbuck's lines are going to be shorter this year, I should have plenty of time to write.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 5:00 PM | | 1 Comment | Recommend

March 30, 2009

The High Cost of College Remediation

Remedial courses are intended to provide an academic leg up to students who come to college lacking the academic skills they need to survive in higher education. But the courses can be expensive, costing colleges across the nation an estimated $1 billion a year. And students don't get academic credit for remedial coursework, which can lengthen the time it takes for them to earn a degree and start a career.

So are remedial courses worth all that expense and time? Possibly not, according to a new study that's in the publishing pipeline.

Paco Martorell of the RAND Corp. and Isaac McFarlin Jr. of the University of Texas at Dallas analyzed data on 454,000 Texas students who entered two- and four-year colleges in the 1990s, and who took Texas Academic Skills Program tests. Those are the tests that the state's colleges and universities use to determine which students will be required to take remedial courses.

The researchers compared the academic and earnings trajectories for students who just barely passed the exam with those who just barely failed. In a lot of ways, they found, the remedial courses didn't seem to help much. The students required to take them were only slightly more likely than the barely-passing students to complete a college degree, to transfer to a four-year college if they started out in a two-year school, or to be earning more money seven years after starting college. The differences were not statistically significant, according to the study.

Here is what the authors say are some possible implications of their findings: One is that the state could have set its passing scores too low or too high. Another is that students at the passing margin just might not benefit from remediation.

And here's a caveat: We're just talking about Texas here. Although it's a diverse, populous state, studies in other states, such as Ohio, have come to different, more positive conclusions.

Martorell presented the findings last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness in Washington. I can't provide a link but look for his report soon—in academic time, that is—in a journal near you.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 4:07 PM | | 1 Comment | Recommend

March 27, 2009

STAT OF THE WEEK: Is 'What Works' Living Up to Its Name?

We're going to have to stop calling the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse the "nothing works" clearinghouse.

Set up in 2002 to vet research on educational programs and practices, the clearinghouse got that unfortunate nickname because so few of its early reviews turned up educational interventions that were any more effective than what educators were already doing.

This new statistic from Mathematica Policy Research Inc., the Princeton, N.J., company that operates the clearinghouse, suggests that times have changed: Of the 100-plus reports now posted on the clearinghouse Web site, 62 percent have at least one outcome that's positive.

If you go to the Web site to see for yourself, check out the nifty new search tools. They can spit out charts showing you how all the interventions in a particular topic area—say, reading or dropout prevention—stack up against one another by What Works standards. You can also customize the results by grade level, student population, or the learning outcome that interests you.

With all those new bells and whistles, the clearinghouse ought to come up with a slogan—perhaps "put what works to work for you"—to bury the "nothing works" moniker once and for all.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:34 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

March 26, 2009

Back Off, Burger King!

A hat tip to the NYT for this article, which was published in today's paper. It reports on research that found that 9th graders whose schools are within a block of a fast-food outlet are more likely to be obese than students whose schools are a quarter of a mile or more away from one.

The researchers studied a sample population that included millions of students over a decade and took into account differences among the students in income, education, and race.

Bottom line: They found that obesity rates in schools within one-tenth of a mile of a pizza, burger, or some other type of fast-food joint were 5 percent higher than they were for schools located farther away. Read the full study here on the Web site for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The National Restaurant Association is, predictably, not happy with the results.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:44 AM | | 1 Comment | Recommend

March 25, 2009

Research for America?

Borrowing from the Teach For America concept, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, guest bloggers over at the NYT's The Wild Side, have proposed an intriguing way to spend some of the $8.2 billion in federal stimulus funds set aside for research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Their idea is to recruit college graduates to spend a few years working, TFA-style, in research laboratories. The recruits would spend a few weeks in the summer at a lab skills boot camp and then dive into the laboratory workforce in the fall.

The hope is that the experience, besides providing much-needed employment for young job-seekers, might persuade as many as 60 percent of them to make a career in science.

"The time is right to call young people into scientific research," Wang and Aamodt write, noting also President Barack Obama's pledge to "restore science to its rightful place."

While the proposal targets biomedical research, it's not a huge leap to imagine the same sort of effort at work in education research.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 8:59 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

March 24, 2009

The Dark Side of Parent Involvement

In education, encouraging parents to be involved in their children's schooling is like motherhood and apple pie. Everyone likes it, and who would argue against it?

But a study published last month in the American Journal of Education suggests that parent involvement can have a downside, too.

Researchers Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick of the University of Chicago and Barbara Schneider of Michigan State University spent more than 200 hours observing classrooms and interviewing parents and teachers at an unnamed charter elementary school in a large city. The school's 100 percent African-American enrollment included families from a range of income levels, from working poor to upper middle class.

According to the study, the middle-class parents essentially "surveilled" the teachers in the school. They kept close tabs on the goings-on by volunteering in their children's classrooms during the school day, networking with other parents, and peppering teachers with questions during their free time.

The low-income parents, on the other hand, rarely engaged in such activities. They relied on their children to tell them what went on at school.

The teachers chafed under the scrutiny, but the constant presence of the middle-class parents did persuade educators to open up the proverbial closed-doors of their classrooms. The problem, though, was that the middle-class parents used the information they gathered to advance their own children's education, which further disadvantaged the classmates from poorer families.

That's food for thought.

I don't know whether the scenario that the report lays out is typical, but I have met parents like those the authors describe. And I've not been above buttonholing other parents myself for intelligence on the best teachers and classes available at my local public schools. But where is the line between responsible and over-zealous parent involvement? And is it up to educators to let us know where that line ought to be?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:03 PM | | 8 Comments | Recommend

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