April 2009 Archives

In education, one of the hottest imports from Southeast Asia in recent years has been Singapore Math, a collection of textbooks developed by Singapore's Ministry of Education for use in that nation's schools. Pockets of educators and parents all around the United States rave about the books, which are also available for purchase here.

Slimmer and decidedly less flashy than the books that weigh down the backpacks of most U.S. students, the Singapore books provide more in-depth coverage of a smaller number of topics. For a more detailed treatment of what makes such an approach to math instruction so appealing, see this Education Week article from 2005.

The books' popularity also stems from Singapore students' consistent ranking at or near the top of the world on international math tests. After all, if Singapore students do so well year in and year out, the textbooks must be doing something right.

That's why it was a bit of a surprise yesterday when the What Works Clearinghouse posted a ho-hum review of the research on the Singapore Math curricula for middle school. The federal researchers analyzed 12 studies on the program that were conducted between 1983 and 2008 and found none that could pass its tough evidence screens.

The reviewers concluded:

The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Singapore Math.

The clearinghouse reached the same non-conclusion two years ago when it reviewed the research on Singapore Math programs geared to elementary school students.

The new report's timing, though, may have been slightly impolitic. Only a week earlier, the education ministry hosted an event at the embassy of Singapore to showcase its approach to math education for educators and the media.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:22 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

It could be weeks, even months, before the U.S. Senate confirms nominee John Easton as director of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The lull in leadership at the nation's top education research agency leaves Washingtonians to engage in their favorite armchair sport: reading tea leaves. What direction, they wonder, will the institute take under the new regime?

One insightful reading came last week from Mark Schneider, a vice president of the American Institutes for Research. As the former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of IES, Schneider is someone who actually knows what he's talking about. In last Friday's Education Gadfly—in case you missed it—he offers a unique insiders' roadmap to some of the areas where change is most likely to occur under Easton's watch.

He suggests keeping an eye, in particular, on the regional education laboratories, or RELs, that the institute operates around the country.

Under their current contracts, the RELs have been instructed to conduct RCTs [randomized controlled trials] and much of their autonomy and regional responsiveness has been curtailed. That has led some lab staff and constituents to complain that their ability to address the needs of state and local education agencies has been weakened and that they have been forced to sacrifice relevance on the altar of rigor.

According to Schneider, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the research group that Easton currently heads at the University of Chicago, offers an alternate model for the labs—one that is rooted in the needs of the local community and involves practitioners and policymakers. And the labs' contracts, he notes, are due to be re-competed in about a year.

The former statistics commissioner also recommends watching the institute's 13 national research-and-development centers.

Will he [Easton] establish processes that align the work of the R&D centers with that of the RELs and build a coordinated system whereby research-based tools and resources get to practitioners in usable forms?

You can read the full text here. In the meantime, at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli puts in another pitch for the Fordham Institute's call for making research and development the engine of federal education policy.

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Lots of studies explore the best way to teach reading or run schools or prevent teenage pregnancy.

But few studies look at what people in the day-to-day world of policy and practice actually do with new research knowledge. Does it get used, or do the findings float out like soap bubbles, gleam in the sunlight for a few seconds, and then disappear? More likely the latter, but no one really knows for sure.

To find out, the William T. Grant Foundation has launched a $1.5 million-a-year grant program. The grants of $100,000 to $600,000 will go to underwrite research aimed at studying how policymakers and practitioners acquire, interpret, and make use of research evidence.

The philanthropy wants to know, for instance, whether school administrators rely more on social networks in choosing classroom curricula than they do on formal programs like the federal What Works Clearinghouse? How influential are commercial vendors, advocacy groups, or think tanks in the decisions that policymakers make?

The grants aren't just for education research. Studies focusing on youth-related research in justice, child welfare, health, family support, and other areas also qualify. Applicants have until May 12 to submit a letter of inquiry.

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Looking for more light reading? Try this: The American Educational Research Association

With a whopping 1,045 pages and 62 chapters, the book represents a massive undertaking and one that doesn't shy away from controversy. You can find research reviews here on the reading and math wars, efforts to reduce class sizes, collective bargaining agreements with teachers, charter schools and private school vouchers, home schooling, reducing achievement gaps, the use of randomized experiments, and so on. If researchers somewhere produced credible studies on it, it's in there.

The book is only the third handbook series produced by the Washington-based association. The first two focus on teaching and complementary research methods. And the policy handbook's creation reflects the burgeoning role of that line of work within the association and in the field at large.

"We just felt the time was right to organize and pull together a disparate body of work that makes the connection between policy research and practice and represents that work to the field," said Gary Sykes, the Michigan State University scholar who co-edited the book.

You can order the book from AERA here. If you never get around to reading it, the hardcover version, at $295 a pop, can also double as a very expensive doorstop.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

John Q. Easton, the man that President Obama plans to nominate to head the

But Easton has dropped some hints about where you can go to get a flavor of his thinking on that subject. It's a report called Consortium on Chicago School Research: A New Model for the Role of Research in Supporting Urban School Reform. The publication chronicles the 19-year history of the research group that he heads and describes its unique conception of the role that education research can play, working in partnership schools and districts, to improve learning in urban schools.

Even if you don't give a fig about federally funded education research, you might want to check out the report. The consortium's model for bringing research to bear in the service of local, on-the-ground school reform is catching on in other cities, including New York, New Orleans, and Baltimore.

Happy weekend reading!

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:14 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

A study out today suggests that California's high school exit-exam policy may be doing more harm than good for the state's lowest-performing students—especially those who are young women and students of color.

Implemented with the graduating class of 2006, California's exit test—known as the California Hlgh School Exit Exam or CAHSEE—has been controversial from the start. Proponents hoped the test would spur students to study harder, but opponents, in lawsuit after lawsuit, worried that an unintended consequence of the exams might be a drop in graduation rates among some of the state's most disadvantaged students.

The report posted online today by Stanford University's Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice confirms some of the critics' worst fears. It shows that the exit exam led to an overall decline in graduation rates of 3.6 to 4.5 percentage points in the years after the policy took effect, yet without producing a strong effect on student achievement on other state tests.

Among females in the bottom achievement quartile, graduation rates fell by 19 percentage points after the high-stakes exam policy was put in place. That compares with a drop of 12 percentage points over the same period for male students with similar academic profiles.

Likewise, the poorest-performing black, Hispanic, and Asian-American students saw their graduation rates decline by 15 to 19 percentage points following the enactment of the exit-exam policy. The comparable graduation-rate decrease found among white students, in comparison, was a mere 1 percentage point.

"These are clearly troubling, and no one can be happy with a policy that is having such disproportionate effects," said Sean F. Reardon, the Stanford scholar who led the study. (For a look at what California's chief state school officer has to say about the results, see here.)

Just as intriguing, though, is the researchers' explanation for why the effects hit some groups of students harder than others: They chalk it up to "stereotype threat."

Stereotype threat, you may recall, is the idea that people's test performance can be artificially depressed if they are afraid they will confirm an unflattering stereotype about their racial or gender group by doing poorly. For example, women and African-Americans have been found to do worse on math exams after being asked to write their race or gender on their papers or after being told that their group typically scores low on an exam.

The Stanford researchers said they reluctantly fingered stereotype threat as a culprit in the post-CAHSEE graduation-rate declines after ruling out most other possibilities. Thinking that minority students might be attending schools with poorer resources, for example, they analyzed data for subsets of students in the same schools. The patterns stayed the same. They also eliminated possible bias in the tests themselves as an explanation after reviewing studies on that topic.

But, when the research team examined students' previous scores on other state tests, they turned up some evidence that minority students and women had underperformed on particular sections of the state exit exam. Women fared worse than their earlier performance might have predicted, for example, on the math portion. Asian students did worse-than-expected on English-language arts.

"It's a very specific pattern, so it's hard to explain it based on effort," Reardon says. "That's what persuaded me that there was a stereotype-threat story going on, that we have this other set of tests to compare it to, and they don't show the same pattern."

Look for more on this interesting study in next week's print edition of Education Week. I'm doing a story wrapping up the new findings from California with those from a handful of the nearly two dozen other states that now require students to pass an exit exam in order to graduate from high school.

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FRESH OFF THE PRESS: The feds published new statistics on school crime this morning, one day after the 10th anniversary of the horrific school shootings at Colorado's Columbine High School.

The report, which is published jointly by the National Center for Education Statistics, the Institute of Education Sciences,

The report says that, in the 2006-07 school year, the most recent year included in the report, there were 27 homicides on K-12 school campuses. That's an uptick from the 19 in-school murders that took place the previous year, but it's still less than 2 percent of the total number of youth homicides for that year.

In fact, as a percentage of all youth homicides, the number of murders at school has remained in the same general range for all 11 years of the survey — and that's including the 1998-99 school year, when 13 people lost their lives in the Columbine massacre. (To read more about what researchers have learned since that tragedy, see my story here.)

Ironically, the opposite is true for thefts among young people, most of which occur in school. According to the study, for every 1,000 12- to 18-year-olds in 2006, 34 were victims of theft while they were on campus. The number of reported thefts that occurred away from school that year, in comparison, was 25 per 1,000 students.

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Richard C. Atkinson, the former president of the University of California, is widely credited with having helped make the SAT what it is today.

That's because, in 2001, when he was still at the helm of that huge university system, Atkinson recommended dropping the test as an admissions requirement in favor of subject-matter tests. His criticism led the College Board to undertake a dramatic overhaul of the widely used test. The result was the SAT-R, unveiled in 2005. It dropped those pesky, esoteric verbal analogies, covered higher-level mathematics like algebra, and included a new writing exam.

But the changes seem to have failed to impress Atkinson. In a speech last week before the American Educational Research Association in San Diego, the former university president and current professor emeritus, said that, while he likes the writing test, the overall exam isn't any better than the old one at predicting which students will be successful in their first year of college — even though it takes an hour longer to complete.

He characterized the revamped exam as "a test at war with itself" because it attempts to test both students' aptitude and what they learned in high school, thus sending mixed signals to high schools. You can read the full text of his speech here at the Web site for U.C.'s Center for Studies in Higher Education. What colleges ought to be basing admissions on instead, Atkinson and his co-author Saul Geiser write, is a combination of high school grades and curriculum-based tests that are tied more closely to what students learn in high school.

Sounding the counterpoint for the discussion, Robert L. Linn, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said "buying the best prediction" was not the point of the SAT overhaul. The idea was to do a better job of signaling what colleges and universities value.

"I think there is an important role for a national testing system," Linn added, "and the technical quality of the ACT and the SAT is better than most state tests developed for high school students."

Meanwhile, the number of universities dropping the SAT-R as an admissions requirement grows. The latest schools to join the "test optional" movement: Sewanee University of the South and Fairfield University.

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The closing of the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association always signifies a changing of the guard. New presidents and vice presidents take over. Outgoing officials go home to catch up on lost sleep.

One of the new officers stepping into the job today is William C. Ayers, the 1960s radical who was at the center of a presidential-election controversy over the extent of his ties to President Barack Obama. A prominent education professor, advocate for social-justice teaching, and commentator, the scholar from the University of Illinois at Chicago will be one of 14 new division vice presidents taking office. His division is curriculum studies.

Ayers attracted attention for his ties to the Weather Underground, a Vietnam War protest group that was involved in several bombing incidents. (No one was injured by any of the bombs set by the group, but three Weather Underground members were killed in 1970 when one accidentally exploded in New York City.)

You'll recall that Ayers' election to the AERA post last March ignited a firestorm in the blogosphere, with some bloggers calling on the organization to oust Ayers and others suggesting that their fellow bloggers ought to leave the guy alone, already. To get a flavor of those posts, see here and here.

The AERA has a very big tent, though, and here in San Diego, Ayers has been just another badge-wearing member of the crowd.

According to the meeting program, he was scheduled to take part in three sessions, including one on "public pedagogy and social action," and he served mostly as a discussant. He also advised graduate students in a "fireside chat" and attended his division's regular business meeting. The low profile probably suited the AERA just fine.

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As predicted, the recession seems to have resulted in thinner crowds this week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. But it's not as lonely here as you might think.

By midweek, 13,450 conference-goers had registered for the the April 13-17 event — down from 16,000 for last year's meeting in New York City. But the truth is that organizers were already expecting a drop-off because of the meeting's location in San Diego. While San Diego is a lovely city, it doesn't have the heavy concentration of colleges, universities, and think tanks clustered around gateway cities like New York and Chicago.

Still, the midweek participation numbers suggest that the fall-off in attendance is beyond what the organizers had expected due to the West Coast venue. Nevertheless, those numbers still represent more than half of the Washington-based group's 25,000 members.

Felice J. Levine, the association's executive director, said the real test may come at next year's meeting in Denver. "We think that there are enough signs that 2009-10 will be a very difficult year on campuses and at other research-related sites that we can anticipate consequences for AERA," she said.

The association will know for sure as early as July. That's when researchers have to submit their proposals for scholarly presentations at the 2010 meeting.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 3:18 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

HEARD IN THE BALLROOM: The final details on the proposed 2010 spending plan that President Barack Obama outlined in February may not yet be available, but one of the department's top advisers said yesterday that the budget promises good things for education research.

"Where is the research money going?'" Marshall S. "Mike" Smith, a senior adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and a former undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton administration, told a packed crowd at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association here in San Diego. "I think you'll see in the budget that it's not going down at all."

"Let's put it this way," he added coyly. "I would be very surprised if it went down or stayed even."

That had to be a bit of a relief to this group, because education research got nary a mention in the federal economic-stimulus package.

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The worldwide recession hasn't deterred international scholars from attending the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting this week in San Diego. More than 2,000 foreign education researchers, hailing from 73 countries — possibly a record — have shown up for the April 13-17 meeting.

A handful of their number yesterday, along with certain U.S. researchers, offered interesting perspectives on how charter-style schools operate in other countries. (Did you think the U.S. had the monopoly on that concept?)

Publicly financed, independently run schools in Qatar, for example, were allowed to earn a profit until policymakers in that country put an end to that practice in the last few years, according to Louay Constant, a RAND Corp. analyst who studied Qatar's education reforms. Even so, the wealthy Persian Gulf nation is well on its way to converting all its government ministry-run schools to charter-like entities. Already, the country's 87 independent schools enroll 60 percent of Qatar's schoolchildren, Constant said.

In Australia, the impetus for charter schooling came from Catholic schools, according to Jessica Harris, a researcher from Australia's Griffith University. She said the movement to establish that country's charter schools came after Catholic schools went on strike in one rural area, amid parental resentment over having to pay taxes for public schools their children. The schools' action dumped more than 1,000 students into the local public school system and helped persuade policymakers to allocate public funds for independent schools, including those that are religiously affiliated, Harris said.

And in the Canadian province of Alberta, where charter-like schools enroll a mere 1.1 percent of the school population, the schools are permitted to charge fees for transportation and instructional costs, according to Kat Thompson, an Alberta native and a researcher from Teachers College, Columbia University. (Charters are also allowed to charge fees, by the way, in Australia, Hong Kong, Qatar, and Singapore, according to researchers here.)

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Here's an interesting statistical nugget I picked up yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association: The odds that a teacher in a charter school will leave the profession are 230 percent greater than the odds that a teacher in a traditional public school in their state will do so.

The disturbingly high figure comes from a study by a pair of researchers from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. David A. Stuit and Thomas M. Smith analyzed federal data from the 2003-04 school year on 14,428 teachers from charters and traditional public schools in 16 states.

In the charter schools, nearly a quarter of the teachers ended up leaving by the end of the school year, 14 percent of them leaving the field altogether and 11 percent transferring to another school.

By comparison, the average turnover rate in the regular public schools in the same states was around 14 percent. Half the departing teachers were leavers and half were switchers.

In the charters, most of the turnover came in schools that were being launched from the ground up rather than in so-called "conversion schools," which are existing public schools that were converted into charters. It didn't seem to make much difference, though, whether the schools were being managed by private outside providers or some other entity.

Stuit said the findings could help explain why research so far has failed to turn up any consistent advantages for charter schools in terms of student achievement. But, as one commenter at the session pointed out, there could also be two sides to that coin. The charter schools may be using their staffing flexibility to get rid of teachers who aren't performing up to par and that might be a good thing.

Here's one more possibility: The charter school teachers, like Teach For America teachers, may have intended from the start for their teaching careers to be a temporary gig.

I hope to write more on this and other charter school studies later on in the week. But the competition for coverage is stiff. More than 2,000 presentations are on the five-day program here in San Diego.

UPDATE: Thanks to my sharp-eyed readers for spotting a mistake in an earlier version of this post, when I listed the odds of charter school teachers leaving their jobs as 230 times greater than those of teachers in regular public schools in their states. I have changed that to 230 percent, based on the information I have at this time. I'm trying to seek further clarification and will give another update if need be.
UPDATE II: I just got a look at the paper. The 230 percent figure refers to the number of teachers leaving the profession and that change has been made in the entry above. I'm working on getting a link to the paper so that readers can analyze the math for themselves.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:28 AM | Permalink | 16 Comments | Recommend

The Philadelphia school system began a long-running — and much-studied — experiment with privately managed schools in 2002. That's when frustrated state officials took over the struggling district, parceling out some of the worst-performing schools to for-profit and nonprofit providers.

Studies continue to differ, though, on how well that little venture has worked out. The newest such study, posted online today at the American Journal of Education, makes the case that, at least in the middle grades, the privately managed schools have not kept up, academically, with the rest of the system's schools.

Researcher Vaughan Byrnes of Johns Hopkins University analyzed 10 years of reading and math test scores for 88 district schools enrolling students in the middle grades.

While students at most of the schools improved their test scores after the takeover, the schools run by outside managers did so at at a slower pace, according to the study.

But Harvard University researcher Paul Peterson, in a 2007 study, claimed just the opposite. He studied two successive waves of 5th graders and found that the students in the privately run schools outperformed their peers in district-run schools.

In a subsequent study, Peterson also gave an achievement edge to for-profit schools over those managed by either the district or by nonprofit organizations. Read this article in Ed Week's archives for more details on that.

So why the difference between the studies? It may be a matter of timing, according to Vaughan. His study, spanning from five years before the takeover to five years after, covers a longer period of time.

Plus, he says, 2001, the starting point for Peterson's study, was an unusual year for the schools that were "on the list" for potential outside management.

"There was a big panic in the district and teachers were starting to transfer out," he says. "It turns out it was a unique year."

You may have to read both articles and judge for yourself.

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In yesterday's post on an updated study of Teach For America teachers in North Carolina high schools, I mused about whether the same pattern of findings would hold true in elementary schools. In other words, would Teach For America teachers be more effective than the teachers that students would otherwise have?

Apparently so, according to reader Paul Decker. Decker, who also happens to be the president and chief executive officer of Mathematica Policy Research Inc., reminded me of a study he co-authored in 2004 that involved more than 2,000 students in elementary schools in Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Delta.

Math scores for the average student of a TFA recruit improved over the course of the school year, moving that student from the 14th to the 17th percentile on a nationally normed test. Students of non-TFA teachers, in comparison, stalled at the 15th percentile. You can read a detailed summary of the study here.

One point to keep in mind with all of this research, though, is that TFA teachers typically end up in hard-to-staff schools. That means there's no guarantee that these smart, well-meaning college grads would automatically do a better job than the existing staff in any school they are placed.

P.S.—I am not shilling for TFA.

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The Urban Institute made national headlines last spring when it released an influential study suggesting that Teach For America recruits were more effective than other teachers in North Carolina's high schools. One criticism of the study at the time, though, was that the researchers were comparing the TFA teachers with a group of teachers with a hodgepodge of training.

In answer to the critics, researchers Zeyu Wu, Jane Hannaway, and Colin Taylor decided to update their study with a larger sample of teachers and students. They added data for 32 teachers and more than 2,000 students, and re-ran the numbers so that they could do more "apples to apples" comparisons. The results were the same: Across the eight subjects tested, the students of TFA teachers racked up bigger learning gains than their non-TFA counterparts.

The TFA teachers were also found to be more effective than teachers who had graduated from a fully accredited North Carolina teacher-training program and those who were licensed in the subjects they taught. The overall TFA boost, in fact, was bigger than the size of the learning improvement that students normally get from having a teacher who's been on the job for three years or more.

That last point is important, the researchers write, because one of the slams against TFA is that its teachers often leave the classroom after two years, cheating students of the benefits of more experienced teaching. You can read the full text of the revised study here.

Something to wonder about: Would the results be the same for elementary schools, where pedagogical know-how may be just as important for teachers— if not more so— than subject-matter expertise?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:41 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

The blogs were buzzing over the weekend with the latest findings from the federal evaluation of the District of Columbia's Opportunity Scholarship Program. You can catch some of the chatter here and here. Also, see the full story on EdWeek's homepage today.

Begun in 2004, the program attracts notice because it's the first federally funded school voucher program in the United States and it's up for renewal. In the first two years of the study, though, the federally funded researchers found the voucher students were not doing any better academically than those who had applied for—but failed to nab—one of the "golden tickets" in the voucher lottery.

Not so this year. According to the third-year findings released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, voucher students were scoring more than three months ahead of their voucher-less peers in reading. There were still no differences between the two groups, though, in terms of math achievement. The program also had no impact on the group of students for whom it was intended:students transferring from schools deemed to be in need of improvement.

What's missing from all the media coverage, though, is the fact that this study is another one of the randomized controlled studies that the IES has been rolling out in recent years. If you've read my story on this spate of research, you'll know that most of those studies are finding few, if any, program effects. So the fact that the D.C. program is beginning to yield positive academic results may be especially noteworthy.

On the other hand, the third-year evaluation also shows that the voucher recipients were doing only slightly better in reading than the much smaller group of students who received a voucher, but decided not to use it. Go figure.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:25 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Here's today's quiz item for readers: In the illustration at right, draw a line to show that the bottle is half full. Easy, right?

Apparently, not for everyone. Pennsylvania State University researcher Lynn Liben has posed this question to hundreds of adults and children and found that surprisingly high percentages of them get it wrong. Instead of drawing a line parallel to the horizon—that's the right answer, in case you're spatially challenged—test-takers might draw slanted lines in different directions. And females are more likely than males to answer incorrectly, or to be unsure of their answers.

The problem, Liben says, is that spatial skills like this one are important for a wide range of scientific endeavors.

To test her theory, Liben and Kim Kastens, a Columbia University marine geologist, tried out these sorts of spatial-skills questions on more than 600 college students, separating them into groups based on how well they did. Then the researchers gave the students, who were all studying geology, a "strike and dip" task.

Typically the sort of thing that geology students do on their first field trip, the task entailed mapping a rock outcropping and drawing the "strike" line, the horizontal line in the surface of the rock. Students were also asked to map the location of a dowel rod in the ground.

Sure enough, the students who had trouble with the tipping-bottle question also struggled with the geology task.

"If they're having trouble then, they are likely to have trouble later on or just drop the course," Liben said. "I would argue that you could make the same analysis for chemistry and physics."

Liben, who has been studying these issues with support from the National Science Foundation, believes schools can help students avoid such difficulties by teaching spatial skills to children in the early grades.

"These are basic concepts and skills that people typically think develop naturally, but they don't for everyone," she says. "And, for many years in the education community, spatial skills have been ignored."

To read more about the importance of teaching spatial skills, check out this 2006 book, called Learning to Think Spatially. It's published by the National Academies, the Congressionally chartered organization that advises the federal government on science.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Flypaper appears to have the scoop on who will be the Obama administration's choice to head the Institute of Education Sciences. It's another Chicagoan: John Q. Easton, the executive director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research. You can read his biographical information here.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I have a story in today's online edition of Education Week that describes a spate of disappointing findings coming out of the large-scale, randomized studies that the Institute of Education Sciences has been underwriting in recent years.

Experts contend that randomized studies—in other words. experiments in which participants are randomly assigned to either treatment or control groups—are the "gold standard" for determining what works in education and in many other fields. So there was much hope that this new generation of studies would point to some strong programs that practitioners would feel confident about using in their own schools.

But, of the eight such study reports posting results this year, six offer a mix of findings that can be characterized as showing mostly no effects for the programs tested.

But "no effects" are in the eye of the beholder, I guess. As one reader pointed out to me, four of the eight studies contain at least one positive finding. For example, one study tested 10 different commercial software programs, finding one that consistently worked better than what teachers were already doing in their classrooms. Well, that's certainly positive for that particular program but not so much so for the other nine.

Still, this reader notes, a "hit rate" of 50 percent is high compared to some other fields that have embraced randomized controlled trials, or RCTs. In the pharmaceutical industry, it's estimated that only 10 percent to 12 percent of studies of new drugs produce positive effects in clinical trials.

What do you think? Is the high rate of "no effects" coming out of these federal education studies cause for concern or for celebration?

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