June 2009 Archives

A new study in the journal Psychological Science musters the evidence for a curious psychological phenomenon called the N-effect.

In a nutshell, the N-effect is the idea that the more competitors you have, the less motivated you are to do your best. In their article, researchers Stephen M. Garcia and Avishalom Tor show, for instance, that average test scores on the SAT and other tests go down as the number of test-takers increases. In fact, the researchers find, the test-takers don't even have to see their competition. Just knowing they're out there seems to be enough to depress the motivation to compete.

This is especially true, the authors find, if you are the kind of person who takes some satisfaction in measuring your own performance against those of your friends and neighbors.

There are some obvious implications in the findings for education. Academic effort is likely to decrease, the authors say, as the number of students in the classroom rises. Also, they wonder whether recent decreases in average SAT scores could have something to do with growing crowds at the venues where students sit for the exam? Perhaps the authors will do a follow-up study and let us know.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:39 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

A report out this morning from the Consortium on Chicago School Research documents teacher-turnover rates in Chicago's public schools. It finds that on average 51 percent of the teachers working in the city's elementary schools in 2002 had left four years later. In the typical Chicago high school, the study found that 54 percent had left by 2006.

These turnover rates are not any worse than they are in the rest of Illinois or across the nation. Likewise, a lot of those teachers were just moving to other city schools and not leaving the profession altogether.

But they give pause, nonetheless. When teachers leave their jobs in such high numbers, principals have to spend a lot of time and energy recruiting and breaking in their replacements and students' learning can suffer.

What's more, at least 100 of the 656 elementary and high schools that the researchers studied suffer from chronically high turnover rates, which means they lose a quarter or more of their teaching staff each year. Unfortunately, these tend to be the same schools that struggle the most with low student achievement, according to the authors.

In keeping with some other studies on teacher turnover, the researchers report that particularly high turnover rates in Chicago seemed to be linked to poorer workplace conditions. In the schools with the best workplace conditions, an average of only 10 percent of teachers leave each year.

The vast differences in teacher mobility across the city's schools, the authors say, perpetuate inequities in hard-to-staff schools. They write:

Many schools are likely stuck in a cycle of teacher loss that is hard to break—teachers leave because of poor school climate and low achievement, but these are hard to improve when there is a constant turnover of teachers each year.

So how do you know good workplace conditions when you see them? In Chicago, the consortium researchers say, the key characteristics seem to be a strong sense of collective responsibility and innovation. Teachers in those schools are also more likely to report that they trust their principal and view him or her as an instructional leader.

In contrast, high rates of student misbehavior, for example, correspond to higher teacher-exodus rates in high schools. Curiously, the small schools also had higher teacher-mobility rates than the city's larger schools.

There's lot more to chew over in the findings. The full study, called "The Schools Teachers Leave: Teacher Mobility Rates in Chicago Public Schools," was posted online today on the consortium's Web site. The lead author is Elaine Allensworth, who is now the consortium's interim executive director.

PERSONNEL POSTSCRIPT: Were you wondering whether former consortium director John Q. Easton would be taking any of the CCSR staff with him to his new gig at the federal Institute of Education Sciences? It turns out he is. Tracy Dell'Angela, the consortium's senior manager of outreach and publications, will be joining IES in late July as director of outreach and communications. A former Chicago Tribune reporter, Tracy has been with the University of Chicago-based consortium since 2007.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:54 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Researchers at the WestEd research group have apparently discovered a new species of schools in California: independent-study high schools.

According to BethAnn Berliner, a senior research associate at WestEd, independent-study high schools are schools in which 75 percent or more of students in grades 9-12 are earning most of their course credits through independent projects.

After stumbling across some of these schools in the Golden State, Berliner and her colleagues approached state school officials with the idea of studying the schools in greater depth. What they learned was that, while state administrators were aware of the schools, no codes in state law seemed to define them—primarily because independent study was considered more of an instructional strategy than a type of school. Likewise, a review of the research literature produced no relevant studies. The researchers also checked with other states and found no information on independent-study entities other than virtual schools.

"We were like, `Wow, this is a unique thing,' " Berliner says. "States honestly don't know if they have this kind of school type."

But in California, at least, such schools appear to be alive and doing well. The researchers from WestEd, which is one of the federal regional education laboratories, learned that nearly 4 percent of the state's 2 million high school students—84,348 students—were enrolled full-time in independent study. Most of those students attended 231 independent-study high schools spread across the state.

What's more, the population of students pursuing independent study had grown 44 percent since the 2001-02 school year, rising from 66,000 to 84,348 in 2006-07, the most recent year for which researchers had data.

"I think these schools were largely created out of a need to respond to a wide range of student learning needs," says Berliner. "Some are for kids who are passionate about something, whether it's motocross or ballet, or the stage." Even surfing, she says.

"We also talked with principals and they said a lot of kids didn't feel safe or comfortable in big traditional high schools," she adds. "Some of it is flight from bullying, drugs, alcohol, or gangs. There are also kids who want to accelerate and kids who failed every other public school option." The schools also serve kids who need a more flexible schedule so they can earn money to support their families or who have care-taking responsibilities.

In form, they run the gamut from expanded home-study operations to for-profit charters.

The researchers also found that 44.4 percent of the independent-study high school students were white, compared with 32.9 percent of the students in traditional schools and 25.3 percent of other nontraditional schools. More than half of the students were female, a higher percentage than is found in California's traditional public schools.

And, somewhat surprisingly, the percentage of teachers who held a bachelor's degree and a teaching credential—at 94.3 percent for independent-study high schools—is higher than it is for traditional schools or other kinds of alternative schools. Nearly half of the independent-study high school teachers, though, have multiple-subject or elementary credentials, reflecting the fact that many of the schools also serve lower grades.

As Berliner points out, there's still lots more to learn about these schools. For instance, why do they exist in some California communities but not others? Are students graduating on time and going on to college? The researchers hope to find out.

In the meantime, you can read a newly published foundational study on the schools by Berliner and her colleague Vanessa X. Barrat on the WestEd Web site.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

More than 3,500 schools—around 4 percent of the nation's schools—are classified as "chronically low performing" under the federal No Child Left Behind law. And 12 percent of the nation's high schools are considered "dropout factories," where students stand a chance of graduating of only 50 percent—or less.

Yet, when it comes to finding evidence-based strategies for turning around all these struggling schools, principals have a pretty limited arsenal from which to choose.

In an effort to strengthen that arsenal, the Institute of Education Sciences yesterday unveiled a five-year research program designed to encourage researchers to develop some promising practices to address the seemingly intractable problems facing persistently low-performing schools. The feds are not after a comprehensive school reform package like Success for All or High Schools That Work for this competition, though. The aim instead is to provide grants of $250,000 to $650,000 a year so that researchers can develop some fairly specific practices that principals can implement with a little bit of support from their districts. The hope is to accumulate enough of those strategies over time so that school leaders have a decent-sized menu from which to select practices that best fit their needs.

One example of the kind of intervention the institute has in mind: The on-track indicator developed for use in the Chicago school district. It's a data-collection tool that lets high school educators know, by the time students reach 9th grade, which students are at risk of dropping out, so that they can intervene early. (For more on how Chicago's high schools are using the indicator, see this EdWeek article by my colleague Catherine Gewertz.) Is it a coincidence that this indicator was developed by researchers from the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the independent research group once headed by John Q. Easton, the IES's new director? I think not.

In fact, I think this request for proposals departs from previous practices at the IES in several ways. For one, program administrators are clear in that they do not intend to use the program to fund any "efficacy studies using group designs" (read randomized controlled studies). Scholars may, however, evaluate their strategies using single-subject experiments, much like those used in special education research.

The proposal also stipulates that researchers will have to demonstrate that they plan to use an iterative process of developing, testing, and refining—and then doing it all over again. From the start, scholars will also have to collaborate closely with districts and low-performing schools in forming their intervention strategies.

The emphasis, in this request for proposals at least, is clearly on the D in R&D. Will this be the M.O. for the IES's research programs for the next six years? Time will tell, but this proposal, in some respects, echoes the "Reading for Understanding" proposal request that the research agency posted in May. (You can read my blog entry on that here.)

In the meantime, interested researchers have until Aug. 3 to submit a letter of intent for the competition. Applications are due Oct. 1. The total amount of funding for the program will depend on how many "high-quality" applications the IES receives.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:56 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Merit pay for teachers is an idea that seems to be getting increasingly popular these days with politicians on both sides of the aisle. But if performance-pay plans are going to succeed, they require an evaluation system that is widely seen to be fair and accurate.

A lot of policy makers are pinning their hopes on "value-added" measures of student achievement to fill that bill. The thinking is that value-added models provide a fairer measure of teacher effectiveness because they track students' year-to-year learning gains, rather than their absolute levels of achievement. That way, teachers are not getting undeserved blame for the learning deficits that students bring with them to the classroom or undue rewards for being blessed with a classroom of high achievers.

A forthcoming study, however, suggests policy makers might want to think twice before embracing value-added measures of teacher effectiveness. In a paper due to be published in February in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Princeton University economist Jesse Rothstein uses some sophisticated modeling techniques to suggest that such techniques could be based on shaky assumptions.

Using student-testing data from North Carolina, Rothstein makes his case by developing a "falsification" test for value-added models. For example, he wondered, would the model show that 5th grade teachers have effects on their students' test scores in 3rd and 4th grades? Since it's impossible for students' future teachers to cause their previous achievement outcomes, Rothstein reasons, there should be no such effects.

But in fact there were—and they were quite large. Rothstein says this happens because students are not randomly sorted into classrooms. A principal, for example, might assign a large number of students with behavior problems to a teacher who is known to have a way with problem students or parents of high achievers might lobby to get their child in a class with the "best" teacher. When that happens, though, it biases the results of value-added calculations.

If this study sounds familiar, it's because it's been circulating a while and gathering lots of buzz. I'm not yet sure why the finding that a 5th grade teacher seems to cause students' 3rd and 4th grade achievement automatically implies that students were not randomly sorted, but I hope to figure that out. Look for a more detailed story from me soon in Education Week.

In the meantime, you should know about two other studies that offer some counterpoint to Rothstein's findings. Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger, for one, conducted a small experiment in Los Angeles public schools to see if value-added calculations would match the experimental results. They did. See their paper, "Are Teacher-Level Value-Added Estimates Biased?: An Experimental Validation of Non-Experimental Estimates."

A second study, a working paper by Cory Koedel and Julian R. Betts, suggests that the kinds of biases that Rothstein highlights in his paper can be overcome with more complex value-added models.

You can find a summary of Rothstein's paper and the full text on Princeton's Website, where they were posted yesterday.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:02 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Julia Gillard, Australia's deputy prime minister, was gadding about Washington late last week to talk about her government's education agenda. After meeting with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and her American counterpart, Vice President Joe Biden, Gillard spent a morning at the Brookings Institution with some education thinkers, federal government officials, and members of the media. (Yes, they let me come, too.)

Gillard, a member of the Australian Labor Party, outlined a program that includes developing a national curriculum, making school-by-school data on student achievement and funding more "transparent" to the public, decreasing high school dropout rates by beefing up career and vocational education programs, and improving teacher quality through Teach For America-like initiatives.

Sound familiar? It should. Gillard said her governmen's "transparency agenda" borrows heavily on NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's ideas on that topic. The Australian government is also working with Teach For All, a global version of Teach For America, to develop its own Teach For Australia initiative.

But what really interested participants at this meeting was Australia's work on a national curriculum. The power to determine what gets taught in schools in Australia rests firmly with the states and territories, as it does in the U.S. Yet the Aussies are plunging ahead, well on their way to having draft curricula in every subject completed by year's end.

The U.S., meanwhile, is proceeding more cautiously along the same track. Duncan, you'll recall, called for common standards for groups of states. While 46 states and three territories have signed on to the idea, standards are not quite the same thing as a national curriculum, as one meeting-goer noted.

So the burning question for attendees at Friday's meeting was: Given the inevitable controversies over states' rights and the politics of what gets taught to children, how are the Aussies pulling it off?

"It's a public curriculum-development process and the papers are available on the Web," explained Gillard. "And whilst it's sometimes been scary... our posture is basically that this is an evidence-based process and I'm not a teacher and I'm not a curriculum developer."

Tom Bentley, Gillard's deputy chief of staff, said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's government was "quick off the mark" in setting up a national group, made up of a wide range of stakeholders, to oversee the curriculum-development process in Australia. It also helps, he said, that the group is being headed by Barry McGaw, an internationally known Australian researcher, with the demeanor of "everybody's favorite uncle."

Wise politicking hasn't entirely staved off political controversy over the process, though. Questions arose in Australia over whether one of the commission members had Communist inclinations, the Australian officials said, and Gillard herself was asked at the start whether she believed Australia was invaded or settled.

"But we hope by the time the content appears, 80 percent of the people will treat this as a foregone conclusion," Bentley added.

UPDATE: Looking for more details? The full text of the deputy prime minister's prepared remarks is now available online at the Brookings Website.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:08 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Michigan State University in East Lansing has just gotten word that it has won a $5 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences to establish a doctoral program to train budding researchers on applying research techniques from the field of economics to critical policy questions in education.

In a press release on the grant that was posted on Thursday, Robert Floden, one of the co-directors of the new program, noted that "the quantitative approaches that economists have developed to explore a wide range of problems are now being applied to education more and more.”

"The problem is there is a national shortage of people who are well trained to use these methods,” he added.

Economist Jeffrey Woolridge is the other co-director of the program, which is being run jointly by the education school and the university's economics department.

One important thing these program grads will be able to do: Put to use the mountains of longitudinal data on students that states will amass as they use federal stimulus funds to build new data systems.

The new program starts this fall and applications are due July 10.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In case you missed it, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an excellent package of articles last week dissecting the downfall of Robert D. Felner, the former education school dean at the University of Louisville.

Felner is facing federal charges of mail fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion in connection with a $694,000 grant he got from the U.S. Department of Education to establish a research center to help Kentucky's public schools. Prosecutors say that most of the money, as well as $1.7 million in payments from three urban school districts, ended up in the pockets of Felner and a former co-worker.

In his articles, though, writer David Glenn also raises questions about the Education Department's oversight of Felner's project. He writes:

But what about the U.S. Department of Education, which was responsible for overseeing the grant on taxpayers' behalf? Should it, too, be doing some soul-searching in the aftermath of Mr. Felner's indictiment?

Good question. Glenn writes that the project was twice given "no cost extensions" on the basis of "extraordinarily vague statements" about the status of the work.

Over at The Quick and the Ed, though, Kevin Carey lays the blame for this fiasco on the Congressional pork-barrel process, which gave birth to this earmarked project. He says:

This is what happens with pork. The U.S. Department was exercising minimal oversight because, hey, it's not really their project, is it? They'd rather decide how to disburse FIPSE money but Congress won't let them. ... But Congress—in this case, Representative Anne M. Northrup (R-Kentucky), who wangled the money—isn't set up to monitor grants. Nor do they have any incentive to root out corruption and incompetence for their own earmarks ... . Colleges, meanwhile, are culpable as they've increasingly decided to play the game along with everyone else by hiring special pork lobbyists etc. etc

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Just in time for Father's Day, a new survey suggests that the fathers of America are playing a more active role in children's schooling than they did 10 years ago.

Released this morning, the report was sponsored by the National Center for Fathering and the National Parent Teacher Association. (Coincidentally, the PTA's leader, Byron V. Garrett, is a dad himself—the first African-American male to head the group.) The findings are based on May telephone surveys of 1,000 homes across the country.

Compared to 1999, the results show, more dads are taking their children to school, visiting their child's classroom, volunteering at school, helping their child with homework, and attending parent-teacher conferences and other school-based parent meetings. The biggest gains have come in the percentage of fathers who say they meet with other dads for support, a figure that has grown by 20 percentage points, from 17 percent in 1999 to 37 percent this year.

The increases are important because research shows that children fare better academically when their fathers are actively involved in their education. But note that, in many of these cases, we're still talking about a minority of fathers here. The number of dads visiting the classroom, for instance, grew a substantial 11 percentage points, but it's still represents 41 percent of the fathers surveyed. The number of fathers volunteering or attending class events in 2009 was 28 percent and 35 percent, respectively—possibly because those kinds of activities tend to occur during normal work hours.

On the other hand, a clear majority of fathers—77 percent—are now turning up for parent-teacher conferences and 59 percent are attending school-based parent meetings.

The big disappointment for me, though, was the statistic for reading, which is arguably the most direct way in which a father can contribute to his child's learning. Fifty-five percent of fathers said they read to their child once or twice a month—the same percentage as in 1999. Sadly, 39 percent of the respondents said the father in their household never reads to his child at all.

There were socioeconomic differences in these statistics as well, but they weren't always predictable. Nearly 40 percent of the "never readers," for instance, were in families earning more than $75,000 a year.

You can read the executive summary on the National Fathering Center's Web site. Parenting resources are also available on the Web sites for both groups. My advice to moms: Print out a copy of the study and leave it on top of dad's TV remote.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:23 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Forget all those stories from the 1980s and 1990s about super-hero principals like Marva Collins or Joe Clark, says Peter Gronn, a leadership expert from across the pond.

In a thought-provoking lecture due to be delivered today at the University of Cambridge in London, Gronn says one person can't possibly expect to do it all. And "a lingering culture of heroism" does more harm than good by putting pressure on principals and other school leaders to feel they have to live up to "grossly inflated expectations placed on them by other people."

In practice, leadership traits, duties, and responsibilities in schools are shared by many people, from assistant principals to mentor teachers. Scholars in the U.S. and elsewhere have come to call that idea "distributed leadership," but Gronn says he is uncomfortable with that characterization, too. He makes a case for revising scholarly thinking on how to build effective leadership in schools.

The problem with distributed leadership, he says, is that people tend to equate the concept with democratic leadership.

"While it may facilitate voice," he writes, "distributed leadership does not necessarily guarantee a veto."

A better idea, he said, is to think of school leadership as a configuration, a network of relationships that might shift in response to changing tasks and pressures. For instance, during World War II, war efforts in the U.K. were guided by a five-man leadership collective over which the prime minister was first among equals, but could not override group decisions. Likewise, in Washington, decisionmaking power is shared by Congress and the President, but their efforts are also guided by a web of key advisers and cabinet heads.

Seen in that light, he says, leadership is all about building an organization's capabilities for leading effectively.

"Capability-building offers the most constructive means of de-mystifying leadership," he writes. "A focus on the mastery of individual and collective capabilities ought to be sufficient to stifle any upstart pretensions by leaders who might want to play the hero."

A more extensive summary of the professor's remarks can be found here. Let's hear what you think. Is this a more constructive way of thinking about how to lead schools?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

THIS JUST IN: The Harvard Graduate School of Education announced today that its faculty has voted "overwhelmingly" to join the burgeoning "open access" movement in academia.

According to the press release, the ed school is the fourth of Harvard's 10 schools to agree to make faculty members' scholarly articles freely available online. The faculties at the law school, the school of arts and sciences, and the Kennedy School of Government all voted in recent months to do the same.

For the education field, the move is significant. That's because, outside of a handful of electronic journals, most education studies can only be accessed by subscribers of pricey academic journals.

But, as influential as Harvard's new policy is bound to be, the ed school isn't the first to jump feet first into "open access" publishing. Stanford University's ed school broke that ground in July. For details on Stanford's plans, and on the advantages and disadvantages of making academic content available to the public for free, see this EdWeek article I wrote last year.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 4:27 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

It's probably a safe bet to say that every district in the nation has offered its teachers some form of professional development at one time or another. Yet there is little research to show whether such programs work or what might make them successful.

In an effort to provide some answers on that score for its members, the Council of Chief State School Officers recently conducted its own review of the research on professional development programs in science and mathematics. Borrowing a method used by researchers at the American Institutes of Research, CCSSO researchers reviewed 400-plus reports on the topic, eventually settling on 16 studies that had been shown, though fairly rigorous scientific methods, to yield positive results.

So what did the successful programs have in common? For one, they tended to focus on specific subject-matter content, as well as on how to teach it. They included multiple activities to reinforce teachers' learning long after the professional development sessions ended, such as employing mentors and coaches. And 14 of the programs continued for six months or more.

Rolf K. Blank, who led the project, said a second aim of the review was to see if this type of metaanalysis could yield useful information for policymakers and practitioners. You can judge for yourself. The Washington-based group has posted the study on its Web site.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 3:09 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

The unexpected ringing of a cellphone—especially the ones that play a snippet of a popular song—can be more harmful to learning than you might think.

That's what a team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis claim in a study due to be published in a forthcoming issue of Journal of Environmental Psychology.

For the study, postdoctoral fellow Jill Shelton went undercover in university lecture classes. She programmed her cellphone to go off at an agreed-upon time and let it ring at least 30 seconds before silencing it.

The researchers tested Shelton's classmates later on the information the instructor was imparting when the cellphone rang and compared the results with those of students who had been in uninterrupted classes. They found that the students who had been subjected to the annoying cellphone ring tones were 25 percent less likely to recall the target information—even when the lecturer was just repeating something that had already been covered when the cellphone went off.

Shelton also did a lab experiment in which college-student volunteers were subjected to a variety of ring tones, from the standard sounds that come with the phones to the Louisiana State University fight song. (This earlier experiment was done at LSU, where the fight song has become a popular choice of ring tones.) The ring tone that had the longest-lasting detrimental impact on learning—you guessed it—was the LSU fight song. In repeated trials, though, participants were able to improve their performance even with the fight song playing in their ears.

Shelton thinks the song's familiarity or its personal significance to listeners may have been what enhanced its impact, which means that other popular songs might be just as distracting to learning.

So think twice before programming "Boom Boom Pow" into your cellphone. The study is not

yet published, but you can read a more detailed article about it on Washington University's Web site.

UPDATE: I now have a link for the full study, "The Distracting Effects of a Ringing Cell Phone: An Investigation of the Laboratory and the Classroom Setting." Enjoy.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:08 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

If you thought the federal government's push for evidence-based practices was going to go away in the Obama administration, think again.

In his blog over at the Office of Management and Budget, director Peter R. Orszag writes about his commitment to rigorous evaluations of the programs that the federal government funds. He describes his "two-tier" approach to promoting evidence-based practice below:

First, we’re providing more money to programs that generate results backed up by strong evidence. That’s the top tier. Then, for an additional group of programs, with some supportive evidence but not as much, we’ve said: Let’s try those too, but rigorously evaluate them and see whether they work. Over time, we hope that some of those programs will move into the top tier—but, if not, we’ll redirect their funds to other, more promising efforts.

If you read through the blog entry, you'll see that OMB borrows some of its thinking on this topic from the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, a Washington group that promotes the use of rigorous evaluations of what works, and randomized controlled studies in particular, in government decision-making.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Have you ever noticed how some of the most experienced teachers seem to have eyes in the back of their heads? That perception is no surprise to Kevin F. Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

With financial support from the federal Institute of Education Sciences, Miller is using

sophisticated mobile eye-tracking technology to look at classrooms through teachers' eyes. With the devices, which teachers wear like eyeglasses, Miller can record each time a teacher's gaze lingers on a single student and when it scans across the classroom.

Miller and his research partner Christopher A. Correa have used the devices so far with 20 pairs of teachers. Their analysis of that video footage suggests that novice and experienced teachers look at the world differently.

The newcomers, for instance, tend to engage more often in "cognitive tunneling." That is, they focus longer and more often on a single student. The veterans, in contrast, tend to take in the entire room most of the time. In one such pair of expert-novice teachers, the younger teacher spent 20 percent of her time focusing on one of the 27 children in the class. The more experienced teacher, in comparison, never focused on a single student more than 9 percent of the time.

That kind of behavior pattern is not unique to education, according to Miller. Studies have documented the same distinctions among expert and novice airplane pilots, chess players, and athletes.

The problem, Miller says, is that when people engage in "cognitive tunneling" they may miss out on important things happening around them. His ultimate goal is to find a way to train would-be teachers to take a broader view of their classrooms—a skill that in some professions is known as "situational awareness"—so that they're better able to teach the first day they set foot in their classrooms.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:55 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

The best part of the research conference that the federal Institute of Education Sciences holds each year is the poster sessions. If you've never been to one, poster sessions are like science fairs for grown-ups. Scholars post neat, readable summaries of their work on display boards, and visitors stroll up and down the aisles, browsing and asking questions.

In this case, though, the presenters—more than 100 in all—were all researchers whose studies are being financed by the institute. One of the first projects to catch my eye this year was a study that tries to puzzle out how to schedule quizzes for maximum learning power. In 2006, I wrote about an earlier iteration of this project, which found that taking a test can improve students' learning retention. That's probably not a welcome message for the anti-testing crowd, but you can read more about it in this EdWeek article.

This time around, the research team from Washington University in St. Louis is trying to determine how many and what kind of quizzes produce the best results. To find out, the researchers tested eight possible combinations of pre-tests, post-tests, reviews, and no tests at all on students in four 8th grade science classrooms in Illinois.

What they learned was that the more quizzes students took, the more information they retained. The most successful regimen was for teachers to give one test before the teacher's lesson, a second quiz immediately after the lesson or the next day, and a review quiz the day before students were scheduled to take the unit exam. Under that approach, students answered an average of 85 percent of the items correctly. When students were given no tests at all prior to the unit exam, they got the right answers only 64 percent of the time, on average.

The researchers aren't done yet, though. Pooja K. Agarwal, a graduate student working on the project, said the plan is to design an "ideal" instructional combination, which would include tests with open-ended response questions, quick feedback to students on the right answers, and frequent quizzes. The researchers will test that routine in middle schools in the fall.

For more on these results, contact the lead researcher, Henry L. Roediger III, at Washington University.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:21 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

John Q. Easton, the new director of the Ed Department's Institute of Education Sciences, used his first major public appearance yesterday to broadly outline some of his plans for the research agency over the next six years.

Easton, who began his term as IES director on June 1, is the former director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, an independent research group that studies school reforms in Chicago. And, as might be predicted, he said he expects to bring some of the principles that guided the consortium to his new gig at the department.

"We know IES sponsors top-notch research," he told participants at the annual IES research conference. "I think our greater challenge is in working better with practitioners and policymakers to make schools places where students learn more and have greater opportunities for success in life."

Easton said the IES, like the consortium, plans to work toward building the capacity of practitioners and policymakers to use data and research and to make the agency's work transparent and openly available.

He also made a pitch for integrating results from studies across fields to "provide the guidance the field wants to hear" and synthesizing the "major learnings" from the studies the IES has funded over the past several years.

Easton wasn't the only Ed Department official to make a policy address at the June 7-9 conference. His boss, Arne Duncan, talked about building better longitudinal data systems, which, he says, are the first of four "assurances" that are built into the federal economic-stimulus law. For more on what he had to say, see the description of the speech by my colleague Michele McNeil in Politics K-12.

Conference-goers also heard from Jon Baron, the vice chairman of the National Board for Education Sciences, which advises Easton's agency. As executive director of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, which promotes the use of rigorous experiments, Baron represents a bit of the old guard at the IES. But he used his time in the pulpit to put forth a new idea as to why so many of the randomized controlled trials that the agency funded failed to turn up findings of positive effects.

"Perhaps the process does not give sufficient attention to innovative, practitioner-generated ideas," he said, noting that, in welfare reform, the models that yielded the most promising outcomes in experimental studies were those that came from the field.

I bet there are more than a few teachers out there who would say "amen" to that—or perhaps "I told you so."

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:49 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and John Q. Easton, the Ed Department's brand-new research chief, are scheduled to say a few words this morning at the Institute of Education Science's fourth annual research conference here in Washington.

The conference, begun by Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, the department's last IES head, provides an opportunity for the institute's grantees to meet, discuss common problems, and share their work. Princeton University economist Cecelia Rouse, a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, is also on the agenda.

This may be the first major public appearance for Easton, who's been on the job exactly one week, and may provide an opportunity for him and Duncan to drop a few details about what's in store for IES under the Obama administration.

Yours truly will be there, too. Come back to this space tomorrow for a report on the goings-on.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

If you thought merit pay was controversial, here's an idea that will really rock your socks: How about a school finance system that is entirely performance-based?

That's what authors Eric A. Hanushek and Alfred A. Lindseth propose in their new book, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America's Public Schools.

Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is best known for having sparked a national debate over whether money matters in education. (He suggested more money didn't boost student achievement all that much.) A senior partner in the law firm of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan, Lindseth speaks from experience. He represented states such as New York, Florida, and North Dakota in important school finance cases.

In their new book, Hanushek and Lindseth trace the history of school finance as far back as the 1950s and make the case that all of the legislative and court-imposed remedies tried so far haven't led to any real improvements in schooling. What they propose instead is creating an entire school-funding system linked to increases in student achievement.

Here are some facets of their plan:

• Offering bonuses or merit pay to principals and administrators for boosting student test scores;


• Providing group rewards for teachers in schools that improve student achievement and financial incentives for good teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools;


• Basing decisions on hiring and firing teachers on their effectiveness in the classroom;


• Continuous evaluation of new programs for the purpose of continuing to fund those that work and zeroing out funds for those proven to be ineffective;


• A modified weighted-student-funding system that would provide districts with more money for students who cost more to educate, but also make adjustments for differences in local contexts; and,


• Using block grants or vouchers to pay for special education students.

You can hear the authors outline their ideas for yourself on Tuesday at a forum sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, will offer a response. Look for information about the book on the Princeton University Press Web site.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:33 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Anthony J. Bryk, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has drawn a lot of attention in Washington policy circles over the past year with his call for a "design-educational engineering-development'" approach to research and development. The basic idea, one that a number of experts echo, is to design educational solutions, test them, tinker, test them again more widely and in different contexts, scale up, and continue to test. A good analogy might be the process that software engineers use to solve problems and develop new versions of their products. (To read more about the growing interest in this approach to research, see this EdWeek article I wrote in January. This article by my colleague,
Catherine Gewertz, describes some of the counterpoint to that movement.)

This idea differs from the approach to education research that's been in vogue among policymakers over the past eight years or so. The push up until now has been on transforming education research into an "evidence-based" field much like medicine and it involved testing specific interventions through rigorous experiments designed to answer a single question: Does it work? If it didn't—and most didn't seem to— researchers went on to the next project or program.

But, beyond the fundamental engineering orientation, the details of Bryk's ideas were sketchy. The foundation helped to fill in some of the blanks yesterday when it unveiled plans for the first of its projects to reflect the new approach, which it calls D-EE-D for short.

Along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Carnegie is investing $2.5 million to form a research network focused around a single educational problem. The problem the foundation wants to solve is how to improve the success rates of community college students in remedial, or developmental, math courses. Taken by 60 percent of community college students, the noncredit courses are designed for students whose academic skills are not up to par. Students have to take and pass them before they can enroll in the courses that count toward their degrees. The problem is that many students get stuck there, with some taking as many as four or five courses before giving up on college altogether.

For the alpha phase of the project, which will take place over the next year and a half, Carnegie has enlisted some big research guns from around the country to map out the terrain, develop some promising practices, and begin to test them in one or two community colleges. (To find out who's involved, check out this press release posted online yesterday.)

The researchers will work from the beginning with designers, practitioners, and institutional leaders and the design teams will use technology developed through the open educational resources movement to share data among themselves, and eventually make their products available to the general public for free.

By the third year of the project, Mr. Bryk hopes to be testing and refining promising innovations in 20 to 30 community colleges in two states. The goal is to eventually extract theories from all the data on how the innovations work, when, and in what contexts, so that they can be reliably used, or adapted for use, in a varying array of settings.

Don't rely on my description, though. Mr. Bryk outlines the basic principles for his approach in a new"Message from the President" on the foundation's Web site.

Over time, Mr. Bryk said, the foundation hopes to seed other research networks focused around single, "high leverage" educational problems. I have a suggestion for one: How about designing a name that rolls off the tongue a little more smoothly than "design-educational engineering-development?"
.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:07 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Babson, Bennington, and Mount Holyoke colleges have a lot in common. All located in New England, the three schools enroll students with similar academic profiles and charge nearly the same tuition.

But only 60 percent of the freshmen who set foot on campus at Bennington graduate within six years. The graduation rates for Babson and Mount Holyoke—at 89 percent each—are 30 percent higher.

Where would you want your child to go to school?

That's the sort of information that researchers at the American Enterprise Institute want parents, students, and guidance counselors to keep in mind as students navigate the college decisionmaking process. To help guide them, the Washington-based think tank is putting out a report today that gathers and compares graduation-rate data for more than 1,000 colleges and universities, from small private liberal arts schools to prestigious public research universities to regional colleges with open admissions.

What the statistics show is that graduation rates vary dramatically from school to school, going from a low of 8 percent at Colorado Christian University to 100 percent at Arkansas Baptist College.

As you might expect, the most selective schools tend to have the highest six-year graduation rates. Harvard, Amherst, Yale, Brown, Princeton, and Stanford all graduate 95 percent or more of students within six years. But they also get the pick of the litter, so to speak.

To make for fairer comparisons, the researchers used ratings developed by the Barron's college guides to group schools into six categories, from "noncompetitive" to "most competitive," based on their student-selectivity status. Even among schools in the same category, you can find a considerable range of graduation rates. The Babson-Bennington-Mount Holyoke example shows that.

"When two colleges that enroll similar students have a graduation rate gap of 20 or 30 percentage points or more," the report says, "it is fair to ask why."

It is. The researchers conclude that, while it's true that some students are more motivated than others, colleges have to shoulder some of the blame, too.

The American Council on Education, the Washington group that speaks for the nation's colleges and universities, will give its response to the report at a forum this morning at AEI. Geri Malandra, a senior vice president for that group, told me yesterday that one point she plans to make is that graduation rates, while distressingly low for some colleges, are "just a piece of the picture" that students need to put together as they weigh which college to attend.

The report, "Diplomas and Dropouts," was written by the ever-prolific Rick Hess; former National Center for Education Statistics commissioner Mark Schneider, now an AEI fellow and a vice president at the American Institutes for Research; Kevin Carey, a policy director and blogger at Education Sector, and Andrew P. Kelly, an AEI research fellow. Look for the report to be posted today at AEI's Web site.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:03 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Here's yet one more reason to turn those televisions off: A new study has found that both infants and their caregivers talk or vocalize less often when a television is playing audibly in the background.

Thanks to Science Daily for picking up on this report from the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It describes a two-year study by a research team led by Dimitri A. Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior, and Development at Seattle Children's Research Institute and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington's medical school.

To track sounds in the home, Dr. Christakis and his colleagues equipped 329 children between the ages of 2 months and 4 years with specially designed vests that held recorders in their chest pockets. The infants wore the vests on random days for up to two years, for 12 to 16 hours at a stretch.

Whether they were actively watching the television or not, adults spoke an average of 770 fewer words for every hour the television was playing. The children also made fewer utterances during those times.

The implications are obvious. Research has long shown that the more words that children hear, the better they are at speaking and reading when they get to elementary school. Here's what the researchers advise: Talk with your child while you're watching TV, turn off the set during meals, set "media-free" days, or, better yet, keep the TV off altogether when children under 2 are in the house.

You can read the report on the Science Daily Web site or go here for the full study.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One of the few findings in education research on which everyone seems to agree is that when it comes to teacher quality, experience counts. Teachers who've been on the job at least three years tend, on average, to spur bigger learning gains among students than their colleagues fresh out of education school.

But, as blogger Aaron Pallas points out in a post last Friday for Gotham Schools, there's a difference between years of experience in the classroom and experience teaching a particular grade or subject. To illustrate his point, Pallas breaks down data on 2,800 5th grade teachers in New York City's public schools. He shows that although only 7 percent of those teachers are in their first year of teaching, 27 percent are teaching 1st grade for the first time.

I'm curious about the implications here. Most of the research that I've seen on teacher effectiveness focuses on how many years teachers have been on the job and not on how long they've been teaching math or Chinese or 1st grade. Does anyone know of any studies that look at teachers' performance in their first year of teaching a new grade level or content area? And how does it compare with the effectiveness of teachers who are completely new to the profession? If you've got an inkling, let me know, and we can share the results here with readers.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:54 AM | Permalink | 10 Comments | Recommend