July 2009 Archives

I wrote a bit in June about a program of studies pointing to a "testing effect" in learning. That is, students seem to retain more of what they're learning when teachers give them practice tests to help them review the material. This kind of testing, it turns out, seems to yield better results than simply having students restudy the material on their own.

A pair of psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wondered whether the "testing effect" still holds true when the original lesson comes via multimedia. And would it work, they also wondered, with "transfer" test questions—in other words, the kinds of questions that require students to use what they learned to solve a new problem?

To find out, researchers Cheryl I. Johnson and Richard E. Mayer showed 282 university students a computer animation teaching how lightning works. The students were randomly assigned afterward to groups in which they either:
1) Watched the video again;
2) Took a short practice test in which they were asked to write a description of how lightning works; or
3) Took a transfer test in which they answered questions such as "What could you do to decrease the intensity of lightning? "

The students who wrote about lightning—the condition that researchers refer to as the "practice-retention" test group—did better than the restudy group on a retention test taken a week later. The same general pattern holds for the kids who took the transfer test: They outperformed the restudy group on a transfer test the following week.

That the testing effect carries over to multimedia lessons doesn't strike me as surprising. What's interesting about this experiment, to my way of thinking, is the inclusion of test questions exploring whether students can transfer their new knowledge to other kinds of problems. That's an element that's been missing from some of the previous studies on the "testing effect." When interviewed afterward, students who took the transfer test also rated their task to be more difficult than did students in the other two conditions.

The obvious next question is: Which kind of practice test gives more bang for the buck? The UCSB researchers tried to get at that, too, by comparing learning more directly across the different groups. They found that the students who took the practice-retention test did better than the takers of practice-transfer tests when the final test explored basic recall of the facts. The opposite was true, though, when the final test focused on asking to use what they learned to solve new problems. The authors' conclusion: "The type of questions used on practice tests should correspond to the type of question that the teacher wants students to solve on the final test and beyond."

I say, why don't we give students practice tests that include both types of questions?

Read the full study, "A Testing Effect With Multimedia Learning," in the August issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

It's Thursday! Let's dance!

No, I mean it about the dancing. That's because I've got a great dance video clip for you today that was produced by the researchers at the Education Development Center in Newton, Mass. It features a song and dance developed to help Indonesian schoolchildren remember what to do when an earthquake hits. Check it out:

There's an even better back story on this video clip: Following the Indian Ocean earthquake in 2004, many of the people who lived on the Indonesian island of Simeulue sought higher ground and survived the impending tsunami. They knew what to do when they saw the waters start to recede because their ancestors had passed down songs and stories about earthquake preparedness.

There were no such traditions, though, in the Indonesian province of Aceh, where 230,000 people lost their lives in the tsunami.

The dance featured here is only part of a DVD designed to teach earthquake preparedness to schoolchildren in 1st through 3rd grades. It employs a traditional Indonesian form of dance called Saman to get the message across.

The full-length DVD, developed with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, is now being distributed to 143 schools across Aceh, according to EDC.

UPDATE: We need to give credit where credit is due. EDC informs me that the song and dance itself was actually created, with the research group's support, by a group of young people from Aceh province.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:59 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

The folks at the federal regional education laboratory that serves the southeastern United States have done us all a favor: They reviewed studies on "stereotype threat" and distilled a few nuggets of practical wisdom for the classroom.

You probably already know that "stereotype threat" refers to the idea that people's performance suffers when they feel they are at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about the racial, ethnic, or gender group to which they belong. Typically, these studies involve African-American college students taking tests purported to measure their intellectual abilities. But studies show that even white men can feel the sting of "stereotype threat." They perform less well on math tests when they're tested in a room full of Asian-American men.

For their study, researchers at the southeast lab (the one based at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) looked at 289 studies or reports on the phenomena, identifying three that qualified as strict experiments. They said the combined results from those studies point to three practices that teachers can undertake to counter the effects of "stereotype threat" and make a positive impact on black students' achievement. According to the review, teachers can:

• Reinforce the idea that intelligence is malleable and that it grows stronger when it's worked harder, just as a muscle does,


• Teach students that their difficulties with school may be part of a normal learning curve or adjustment process; and


• Lead students to reflect on values that may be important to them outside of school.

To read more about the research on "stereotype threat," you might also want to check out a Web site called ReducingStereotypeThreat.org, which is maintained by two social psychologists in New York City.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:30 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

The mood was contemplative and the talk was candid at yesterday's meeting of the National Board for Education Sciences. The board meets three times a year, as you know, to share its collected wisdom with the Institute of Education Sciences, which is the U.S. Department of Education's key research arm.

At board Chairman Eric Hanushek's invitation, members mused on what's going right—or wrong—with the 7-year-old agency. While members agreed that the institute has made enormous strides in improving the quality of the education research that the department underwrites, they also seemed to think that more could be done to get the word out on the fruits on that research.

"Many of the reports done by IES never get out there," said member Sally E. Shaywitz, a noted Yale University researcher on reading disabilities. "People aren't aware of them."

The long string of "no effects" studies coming out of IES was on board Vice Chairman Jon Baron's mind. (See my story on this topic in EdWeek.)

"If all IES produces is null findings from here on out, the enterprise is not going to be long for this world," warned Baron, who, ironically, is also the executive director of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, a Washington-based group that has promoted randomized controlled studies.

He suggested the agency might get better results by being more strategic in choosing the interventions it evaluates and focusing on those with stronger research bases.

That assertion drew a rise from Hanushek, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute. "Do you think IES has purposely chosen to evaluate policies they know are going to fail?" he said. "Directing them to do good doesn't seem to provide any guidance."

Newcomer David C. Geary, a psychologist from the University of Missouri in Columbia, suggested that closer analysis of the "null findings themselves" may also be in order to find out why some interventions worked on a small scale but not in the larger IES evaluations.

But John Q. Easton, who is nine weeks into the job as IES director, offered yet another perspective. "The school-improvement process isn't always intervention-based," he said. "Achievement is affected by multiple factors...so the question might be what is it about schools that allow them to self-evaluate, monitor, and make improvements?"

Agreed, said Hanushek, "But is that researchable?"

It sounds like the times they are a' changing at the agency. If you're interested in reading more of this interesting conversation, keep checking IES's Web site for minutes of the July 27 board meeting.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:23 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

The research that makes its way onto the front page of the newspaper or the evening news comes from a variety of sources, including universities, the federal government, and think tanks. That last group, though, causes the most concerns for a lot of thinkers in education. That's because think tank-generated studies, many of which bear a tinge of ideology, don't always undergo the same type of peer-review processes that academics go through in order for their work to appear in scholarly journals. Yet, the findings get the same kind of play in the media as other, more heavily scrutinized research.

To find out just how influential think tanks are becoming, a study out today compares research citations in 2007 and in the first six months of 2008 in Education Week, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. The news is mixed.

Researcher Holly Yettick, a grad student at the University of Colorado, reviewed 864 articles and found that think tanks were the third most common source of articles about education research after universities and government agencies. EdWeek most often cited university-based research in its articles, while The NYT and The Post cited research by government agencies more of the time. (Go EdWeek!)

But, when you take into account the fact that universities produce many more studies, the influence of think tanks begins to look a little more disproportionate, according to Yettick. She notes, for instance, that university-based studies were cited just twice as often as think tank reports, even though universities produced 14 to 16 times more studies.

Not all think tank research is bad, though. Some such studies yield information that's quite useful; others, not so much. And advocacy-oriented think tanks operate, of course, on both the right and the left. So which end of the political spectrum seems to be having the most sway? In all three newspapers, Yettick says, it's the right, followed by the center.

You should know that this paper is being released by the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University, both frequent critics of education reforms favored by the right.

The findings provide a good opportunity for self-reflection, though. Personally, I've been criticized over the years by both the left and the right, which means I must be doing something right—at least that's what I like to think. But I wonder what careful readers of education research see. Do you feel that EdWeek and mainstream newspapers are inundating you with research articles from right-wing think tanks? Do I really want to know?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:10 PM | Permalink | 10 Comments | Recommend

In all of the hoopla over the new draft guidelines for "Race to the Top" funds, you may have missed the request for proposals posted today for the U.S. Department of Education's statewide longitudinal data system grants program.

The department is offering a fourth round of grants of up to $9 million each to help states build data systems that allow them to track students' academic progress over time, and as they move from school.

And the department should have plenty of money to give out. Remember, this program got a $250 million boost in the federal stimulus package. And see my colleague Michele McNeil's story today on the importance the Obama administration is placing on state's data-gathering efforts.

All states and districts are eligible. Twenty-seven states won grants in the last round of funding, which took place in March, up from 12 states and the District of Columbia the time before, almost two years earlier.

You can find the full RFP on the Web site for the Institute of Education Sciences. The deadline for applying to November 19.

UPDATE: Actually, the awards range from $2 million to $20 million over three years, according to the RFP. It also says that IES expects the average award to states to be about $10 million---not the—not the $9 million figure that I took off the IES Web site.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 4:16 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

I, like many wonks, am a big fan of educational of educational data. But, in today's blog entry at GothamSchools, blogger Aaron Pallas does a masterful job of showing just how misleading educational data can sometimes be.

Pallas' beef is with the burgeoning number of data-based Web sites that allow users to compare schools. The problem with such comparisons, he says, is that they don't tell parents much about how their children will fare in a particular school.

For one reason: Achievement-wise, there is far more variability from classroom to classroom within the same school than there is from school to school. A school's overall proficiency score will mask those differences.

Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, also notes that the Web ratings typically don't account for differences in the demographics of the student populations that schools serve. He writes:

Since we know that there is a powerful association between family economic status and student achievement, schools serving high concentrations of poor children will, on average, rank lower than schools that service a predominantly middle- or upper-class population. Stating this is not, I believe, a case of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Rather, it's an acknowledgement that a school's context matters in judging how well the school is serving its students.

Researchers, of course, already know this stuff. Home buyers and real estate agents, on the other hand, might want to take note.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 2:41 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

How much more would you pay to buy a home near a school where test scores are higher than those in other neighborhoods? Perhaps $3,917? How about a house near a school with fewer minority students?

Researchers from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., explore these questions in a study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Education. The researchers analyzed data collected from 1996 to 2005 for similar suburban neighborhoods in West Hartford, Conn. They calculate that a 12 percentage-point increase in the number of 4th graders meeting state testing standards is worth an additional $3,917 on the average sale price of a home. A house in a district with 14 percent fewer minority students than its neighbors sold for an average of $547 more over the same period.

But the relationships between home prices and school characteristics appeared to shift somewhat in the second half of the study period. From 2001 to 2005, the researchers found, the premium on high test scores shrank and the value of a home near a school with lower minority enrollment skyrocketed, rising to as much as $7,468 above that of homes near less-integrated schools.

This is just one stretch of suburbia, of course. But, to the researchers' way of thinking, the shifting pattern of home prices does not bode well for the school-choice movement. "If suburban home buyers are becoming more motivated by racial preferences than by higher test scores," they conclude, "then it may call into question the underlying premise for expanding school choice." After all, the school-choice movement is founded on the idea that low-income and minority families ought to have the same options that middle-class families already enjoy when they decide where to buy a home.

The study is one of four on school choice appearing in this month's special issue of the journal. Another intriguing article—this one by researchers from the University of Illinois and Brown University—uses geospatial analysis to study the location of private schools and charter schools in three educational markets where schools of choice are flourishing: Detroit, the District of Columbia, and post-Katrina New Orleans. In all three markets, they find, at least some schools or groups of schools seemed to position themselves in areas that would help them attract a more advantaged clientele. A school might, for example, set up shop on the edge of the poorest neighborhood rather than in the heart of that neighborhood, where the need for high-quality schooling is presumably the greatest.

There's no way to tell, of course, what founders were thinking when they staked out their schools' locations. But the findings are worth pondering, nonetheless.

American Journal of Education articles are usually only available to paying customers, but you can read these for free. Click on "School Choice in Suburbia" for the Trinity College piece or "School Choice and Competitive Incentives" for the article by the University of Illinois/Brown University research team.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences has been cranking out those practice guides lately. The institute's 10th and latest guide, posted online today, focuses on how to structure out-of-school programs to maximize academic achievement.

The advice is timely. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools that continually fail to meet their academic targets are required to offer supplemental education services to students. And that list of schools grows longer each year.

The problem is that researchers haven't yet hit on proven strategies for delivering programs that consistently yield learning gains. As regular readers of this blog may recall, studies so far on the effectiveness of tutoring programs are a pretty mixed bag, with a few studies showing that students can benefit from the after-school programs and others showing no difference at all.

That's where the new practice guide comes in. The idea behind the guides is to offer practitioners best-bet strategies they can use when the research base comes up short. The institute's What Works Clearinghouse develops the guides with help from an ad hoc panel of experts who analyze the existing literature and make recommendations accordingly. The panel also evaluates the research for every recommendation it makes, characterizing the evidence as either "strong," "moderate," or "low."

In the case of out-of-school programs, the guide lists five recommendations, none of which cross into "strong" evidence territory.

The first one calls for aligning the out-of-school program academically with the school day. (That may sound like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised how rarely it occurs.)

The guide also calls for: maximizing student participation and attendance, tailoring instruction to individual and small group needs, providing engaging learning experiences, and assessing program performance with an eye toward making improvements.

You can download Structuring Out-of-School Time to Improve Academic Achievement for free on the IES/What Works Web site.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In case you missed it, the full House appropriations committee voted late last week to keep mostly intact a healthy increase for federal education research and development in the Labor-HHS spending bill. In her blog, Politics K-12, my colleague Alyson Klein notes that the committee boosted research and development for education to $199.2 million for the coming fiscal year. "That's a $32 million increase over fiscal year 2009," she writes, "but not quite as high as the $224.2 million the Obama administration wanted."

A good source for all the nitty-gritty details on the committee's actions with regard to federal education research programs is the KNOWLEDGE-able Source, a weekly blog published by the Knowledge Alliance, a Washington-based group that lobbies on behalf of a wide range of research organizations. Here's a link to the alliance's handy chart, which shows current funding levels, the President's budget request, and the committee mark-up levels for the programs that are its priorities.

Politics K-12 will also be reporting more details on the mark-up later today. Next stop for the spending bill: the House floor.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The big research news this morning is a study being reported by the Associated Press that offers some strong evidence to suggest that smog can have a harmful effect on the developing brain.

The new findings come from a study of 249 children of New York City mothers that is being published this morning in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics.

As part of the study, mothers wore backpack air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy. By age 5, the children who had been exposed in utero to the highest levels of air pollution—most of it from car, bus and truck exhaust—scored an average of four to five points lower on IQ tests than children with less exposure. That's a big enough difference, researchers say, to affect classroom performance.

These moms, all non-smokers, lived mostly in low-income neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx, but the researchers say that air pollution levels in those communities are typical of those for many large cities. Keep in mind, too, that the researchers adjusted for differences in children's exposure to air pollutants in the years after they were born.

Are we looking at another possible cause of achievement gaps? More studies are needed to know for sure, but the researchers, in the meantime, will continue to track this group of children as they progress through school.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This one goes in the category of research that I wish I didn't have to report. According to a study out earlier this week, disparities in cognitive development begin to show up among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds as young as nine months of age.

Even before babies begin to walk or toddlers enter preschool, this research shows, children from poor families are trailing behind their more-advantaged peers on measures rating their behavior and cognitive abilities. The same pattern holds for minority children vis-a-vis white children, children of mothers with a high school diploma or less compared to those whose mothers are more educated, and children growing up in Spanish-speaking homes vs. those from English-speaking households. And those differences, the report adds, only grow over time.

Child Trends put together this study for the Council of Chief State School Officers. The researchers based the findings on data from a federal study that is tracking a nationally representative set of infants born in 2001.

They say the results speak to the need to intervene even earlier in children's development. Forget universal preschool, these findings seem to suggest. Zero-to-five programs and efforts aimed at engaging and supporting parents could be an even better starting point for closing those persistent achievement gaps that bedevil K-12 educators.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Two new multimillion-dollar research centers were unveiled yesterday by the federal Institute of Education Sciences.

The centers—one on teacher effectiveness and the other on rural education—each received a five-year grant of almost $10 million to carry out their work.

The National Center on Teacher Effectiveness will be housed at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and headed by Tom Kane and Heather Hill. (Kane, by the way, is apparently a very busy man these days. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also named him deputy director of their U.S. education program last year.)

Zeroing in on math teaching, that center has two broad aims: identify the practices and characteristics that distinguish successful teachers from less-successful ones, and develop and test some tools that principals can use to figure out which teachers are which.

Yes, that means center researchers will make some of those determinations using "value-added" measures, which measure the gains students make from fall to spring. But, according to Lynn Okagaki, who oversees the work of all of IES's research centers, the plan also calls for researchers to spend time making detailed observations in classrooms in an attempt to identify the kinds of instructional practices that make successful teachers so effective.

Potentially the most interesting part of the center's work, though, is an experiment in which teachers with high "value-added" scores are randomly assigned entire classrooms of students the following year. It's an attempt to test the idea that "value-added" models are flawed because students, in real life, are not randomly assigned to teachers. Veteran teachers, for instance, might get first crack at the high achievers, or parents might lobby to get their children placed in particular classes. (See my story on this topic in EdWeek.) But the case for the validity of "value-added" measures would be strengthened if the teachers in this experiment produce the same magnitude of student gains under both conditions. I'd call that research to watch.

The mission of the National Center for Research on Rural Education, based at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, is to investigate differences between professional development practices in rural and more-populated settings. As part of that center's work plan, principal investigator Susan Sheridan and her research partners will do an experiment comparing two types of coaching—on-site or distance-learning— in a professional development program focused on helping teachers use response-to-intervention approaches in reading.

"The idea is how you figure out models of professional development that can be used in rural areas where you might not have a master teacher in every school or where the district is so widespread that you can’t have on-site coaching or mentoring," Okagaki said.

The two new centers bring the number of IES's research centers to 15. Three of those centers, though, are due to wrap up their work next year.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 2:33 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The board that advises the federal Institute of Education Sciences—or at least what's left of it—has announced plans to meet on July 27.

You'll recall that the board, which is more properly called the National Board on Education Sciences, had to cancel its May meeting when it failed to muster a quorum. Rallying enough members to meet has been difficult for the 15-member board because it has undergone a dramatic downsizing. Nine members left the board as their terms expired; only six remain. But the Federal Register announcement on the upcoming meeting says a majority of the remaining six is all that's needed to carry on with the meeting.

Among the items on the agenda? The federal stimulus, of course. In a closed session, the board will also discuss potential commissioners for the research centers that fall under the IES umbrella.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:43 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Science Daily reports this morning on a new study that documents how noisy classrooms can make it hard for children, especially those who struggle at distinguishing sounds such as "ba," "da," and "ga," to learn to read.

"The 'b,' 'd,' and 'g' consonants have rapidly changing acoustic information that the nervous system has to resolve to eventually match up sounds with letters on the page," Nina Kraus, the director of Northwestern University's auditory neuroscience laboratory, told Science Daily. "What your ear hears and what your brain interprets are not the same thing."

In the Northwestern study, the children who had the most trouble distinguishing those sounds tended to be poorer readers. Increasing levels of classroom noise, such as scraping chairs, chattering, and rustling papers, just made that task all the more difficult.

The researchers measured the accuracy of students' sound perception in two ways: through electrodes that picked up their brain-stem activity and by asking students to repeat sentences they heard.

I know this sounds like one of those research findings that fall under the category of common sense. But if common sense guided instructional practice, the "open classroom" movement might never have flourished. Remember how much noisier those classrooms were once the classroom partitions were rolled back?

According to Northwestern, the full study was scheduled to be published today on the Web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. At this writing, though, it hadn't been posted yet.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

It's one thing to choose a private school or a charter school for your child that is outside your neighborhood attendance zone; it's quite another matter to figure out how to get the kid there and back each day.

According to a new survey report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington in Seattle, transportation problems prevent as many as one quarter of families from enrolling their children in schools of choice. The findings are drawn from a random survey of 600 parents in Washington, D.C., and Denver, Colo. (That's 300 in each city.)

The results suggest that transportation is especially challenging for low-income families, 45 percent of whom do not own cars, or who own vehicles that are unreliable. According to the survey, one third of those families said they did not enroll their child in the school they preferred due to transportation difficulties.

The report's authors—Paul Teske, Jody Fitzpatrick, and Tracey O'Brien—said they did not come across much innovative thinking in the communities they surveyed on how to remove transportation barriers to school-choice programs. So they proposed an idea of their own: If districts spend an average of $700 per student on bus transportation each year, why not give families a transportation voucher for that amount instead? Families might spend it, for instance, on public transportation, maintaining a car, buying bicycles, or organizing van pools, the authors write.

"Choice itself is designed to give parents a decentralized approach to schooling," they write. "A more decentralized transportation function might also provide parents with more tools to make school choices that work better for them." Is the big yellow school bus on its way to junk heap?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 3:47 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Over at Empirical Education yesterday, blogger Denis Newman made a case for replacing big, national experiments to find out what works in education with dozens of smaller—and less expensive—local experiments.

Newman, who is the president of the Palo Alto, Calif., consulting firm that hosts his blog, pitches the small-experiment idea in response to a blog post last month by Office of Management and Budget director Peter R. Orszag. If you're a regular reader of Inside School Research, you'll recall that Orszag shared some of this thinking in that post on the need for more evidence-based policymaking in government. (See my write-up from last month for details.)

The problem with Orszag's plans, Newman says, is that he has "bought into the idea that a single, national experiment" will yield useful information on whether a government policy or program is effective. Borrowing from Donald Campbell's concept of an "experimenting society," Newman says 100 or more local experiments might be a better way to go. He writes:

First, the education domain is extremely diverse and, without the '100 locally interpretable experiments,' it is unlikely that educators would have an opportunity to see a program at work in a sufficient number of contexts to begin to build up generalizations. ... Second, the information value of local experiments is much higher for the decision-maker who will always be concerned with performance in his or her school or district. National experiments generate average impact estimates, while giving little information about any particular locale.

He also contends that local experiments are faster than national studies at as little as one-tenth the price.

This is no idle chit-chat. Newman and his colleagues recently completed a study on the feasibility of local experiments for the federal Institute of Education Sciences. You can request a copy of the study here.

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Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

RESEARCH TO WATCH: Studies by Stanford University researcher Carol Dweck and others have been suggesting for some time now that students' motivation to succeed in school may be linked to how they think about intelligence. Students who believe you have to be born smart in order to do well in school are less motivated to study hard than those who think intelligence can be developed and that it comes from hard work.

The challenge for teachers is: How do you change the mindset of the students who fall in the first group? With a brand-new $1.4 million grant from the federal Institute of Education Sciences, Josh Aronson, a researcher at New York University, hopes to find out.

Aronson and his co-investigators—Jennifer Mangels of Baruch College and Matthew McGlone of the University of Texas at Austin—are developing and testing programs aimed at using scientific evidence on brain development to persuade students that intelligence is malleable.

The study focuses on 8th and 9th graders, who are arguably among the most motivationally challenged of all age groups when it comes to schoolwork. What Aronson and his colleagues hope to do is expose the students to two interventions—one that uses a narrative story presented through interactive media and another that uses computer simulation to involve students in a cognitive-science experiment. The researchers will measure the impact of both interventions on students' theories about intelligence and their levels of motivation. Then they plan to make adjustments to maximize any positive effects they find.

Eventually, the research team hopes to determine what effect, if any, the interventions will have on improving the bottom line, which is students' actual classroom performance. The plan is to compare any classroom effects they get to those for students who learn about the brain's neuroplasticity through less engaging instructional methods. Look for these results in a couple of years. In the meantime, NYU posted a press release on the grant award on its Web site today.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

When times are hard, families move in search of employment or less-expensive housing. That means that one invisible fallout from the economic recession could be an increase in the number of children who switch schools.

If you couple that with the growing number of charter schools popping up across the country, it seems clear that moving from school to school may well become a commonplace occurrence for many schoolchildren.

Research produced for a conference last month on school mobility suggests, however, that we don't know as much about the academic effects of changing schools as we should. Organized by the Board on Children, Youth and Families at the National Academies, the conference focused on two papers: a review of the research on mobility in K-12 schools and a closer analysis of national data on children's mobility between kindergarten and 3rd grade.

In keeping with previous studies in this area, the first paper finds that frequent school moves are generally a bad thing: Students who moved three or more times over the course of their school careers are significantly more likely to drop out in high school than those with more stable school lives.

The second paper, however, suggests more mixed effects—at least in the early years. Changing schools once between kindergarten and 3rd grade was not linked to lower academic performance, the authors found, but moving twice was another matter. The study also found that children from poorer families experience larger cognitive deficits than their better-off counterparts when they move during the kindergarten year. Moving appears to be uniformly harmful, though, for special education children.

Yet, by the same token, the study finds that children who repeat kindergarten as a result of a move tend to experience cognitive benefits. The authors write:

The complexity of our results makes any simple statement about the cognitive impact of school mobility impossible

A summary report on the conference is due to be published this coming winter. In the meantime, what I'm wondering is why don't we hear more about how switching schools affects students in national discussions on charter schools?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:37 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Remember Learnfare? Created in Wisconsin in the 1980s, the program sought to boost school attendance by reducing families' welfare checks when their teenage children missed too many days of school. Though controversial, the program put Wisconsin in the vanguard of the welfare-reform movement and spread to a number of other states. But at least two research evaluations of the Wisconsin program turned up little or no evidence that it actually improved school attendance.

In a new paper, however, Swarthmore College researcher Thomas S. Dee (shown below) revisits the most scientifically rigorous of those studies and reaches a different conclusion. He focuses on a

If you remove that county from the mix, he concludes, the program had a positive effect on students' attendance, particularly for students who were already classified as dropouts when the study began. Their enrollment increased by 25 percent as a result of the program, according to Dee.

So why revisit all of this now, more than 20 years after the start of the program? Because Dee thinks Learnfare offers lessons for experimental programs going on today that offer students cash incentives for improved academic performance.

To Dee's way of thinking, Learnfare is more in sync with the psychological research for a few reasons:
1) It rewards behavior rather than outcomes such as test scores.
2) Instead of offering a reward, it imposes sanctions on an endowment, thereby tapping into the psychological phenomenon known as "loss aversion." (That refers to people's preference for avoiding losses over acquiring gains.)
3) It involves a student's entire family, much as the successful Progresa anti-poverty program does in Mexico. (See my story on this line of research in EdWeek.)

So here's his idea:

An alternative way to exploit these design features would be to create an endowment for students at a chronically low-performing high school (e.g., a fixed cash scholarship) and then sanction that scholarship for attendance failures.

Dee figures that arrangement might mitigate some of Learnfare's more harmful consequences for poor families, while staying true to the program's goals. With scholarships, even the families of students who eventually dropped out would be at least a little better off than they might have been had the program not existed at all.

Provocative thought, isn't it? Let's hear what you have to say. Dee has posted the full study on his Web site. The working paper is also due to be posted in the next week or two on the Web site for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:21 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

In case you missed it, BoardBuzz last week highlighted an article from the St. Petersburg Times describing some ho-hum academic results coming out of Florida's school voucher program.

As part of the state-ordered study, researcher David Figlio analyzed changes in standardized test scores from the 2006-07 to 2007-08 school year for more than 9,000 students taking part in the program. He found that the program students, for the most part, were doing no better and no worse than their counterparts in public schools.

BoardBuzz sees the findings as further evidence of vouchers' ineffectiveness. That may well turn out to be the case, but Figlio notes in his study that it's "inappropriate" to draw any conclusions about the efficacy of the program now.

That's because the standardized tests were not a required part of the state's program until 2007-08. Researchers had to gather test results from private schools after the fact for the 2006-07 school year, which was difficult to do and resulted in incomplete data.

The researchers will really need at least one more year of testing data in order to decide whether the program is working, Figlio says. His evidence also suggests program participants were more likely to be disadvantaged and low-performing at baseline than non-participants.

So we'll wait and see. In the meantime, you can read Figlio's interim study and decide for yourself.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I wrote in this space last week about the Harvard Graduate School of Education's decision to make the research that its faculty members produce openly available to the public.

Well, here's another resource that you can credit to the growing "open access" movement. It's a Web site called IssueLab. Based in Chicago, IssueLab offers an open repository for social science research produced by foundations, charitable groups, and other nonprofits.

Here's what it accepts: policy analysis reports, white papers, case studies, data sets, fact sheets, and legislative testimony. Here's what it doesn't: newspaper articles, editorials, and organization brochures.

The site this week features a collection of evaluations and case studies for arts education programs. Thanks to Claire Reeder, an editorial intern at IssueLab, for cluing me in to the site.

And happy July 4th, too!

Posted by Debra Viadero at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Eight years after the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, studies on the law's provision on supplemental educational services are dribbling out. Under the law, you'll recall, students from low-income families can qualify for free tutoring if they're stuck in a school that fails to reach its achievement targets for three years in a row. (The district, of course, picks up the tab for the services, which are often given by outside providers.)

I wrote a year ago about some new studies—and the lack of research—on whether these programs translated to learning improvements for students. (See my articles here and here.)

Now you can add a few more studies to the mix. The first, by a team of researchers at the University of Memphis' Center for Research on Education Policy, uses two different techniques to analyze the latest data from two of the five Tennessee school districts that offered tutoring to students over the 2007-08 school year. While parents raved about the services, both analyses showed that students made only small or insignificant gains on standardized tests, compared to peers who did not participate.

The second study, focusing on schools in Jefferson County, Ky., told a similar story. Although parents were highly supportive of the services, they produced no overall achievement advantages in either reading or math for the participating students. (A few of the commercial providers did, however, manage to produce better-than-average gains in their pupils.) Both studies were posted last month on the Web site for the National Center for Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Tutored students made more consistent learning gains over the 2007-08 school year in Chicago, which was once a reluctant participant in the federal SES program. A new evaluation by that city's school system shows that students who completed their after-school programs got bigger test-score increases in both math and reading than non-tutored students did. The only problem: 20 percent of registered students never receive services and another 16 percent dropped out.

What to make of the findings? That's hard to say, according to Steven M. Ross, a researcher who has helped evaluate SES programs in districts across the nation, including the Tennessee and Kentucky studies mentioned here. Overall, most seem to show that students are benefiting, but not by much.

"My personal view is that I don't think these studies are necessarily fair to the SES program," he told me. "It's a tall assumption to think that 20 or 30 hours a year of tutoring is going to make a big difference with everything else going on in schools." Evaluators might ask students in risky urban neighborhoods, for example, how grateful they are to be occupied and off the streets during after-school hours.

The more important question, though, is what will Congress make of the findings? Will supplemental education services continue to be part of the law when federal lawmakers get around to the reauthorization process? That, too, is not entirely clear.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:04 PM | Permalink | 8 Comments | Recommend

If you had to guess, would you say that most school principals are men or women? Judging by historical pattern, most people would say the answer is men. But a report released yesterday by the National Center for Education Statistics suggests that, when it comes to the principalship, women are now on par with men.

Looking at data for the 2007-08 school year, the report shows that 50 percent of public school principals and 53 percent of private school principals were female that year. That's a sea change from 20 years earlier, when more than three quarters of all principals, both private and public, were male. But it caps a long-running trend of stair-step increases in the percentage of women who hold the job.

Some other statistical gems in this report:

• Public school principals earn an average of $85,700 a year, compared to $57,500 for private school principals.


• Among public school principals, 61 percent held a master's degree; 29 percent held an education specialist or professional diploma; 1 percent held a bachelor's degree and 8 percent held doctorates.


• And, as has long been the case, an overwhelming majority of principals—81 percent—were white.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:23 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend