August 2009 Archives

A public-opinion poll being published this morning by the journal Education Next suggests that President Obama can be an influential opinion maker—but so can researchers.

For the survey, pollsters asked the public for their opinions about charter schools in three different ways. The first question read:

Many states permit the formation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but are not managed by the local school board. These schools are expected to meet promised objectives, but are exempt from many state regulations. Do you support or oppose the formation of charter schools?

In response, 39 percent of those polled said they would "somewhat" or "completely" support such a proposal; 17 percent said they were "somewhat" or "completely" opposed to it.

When asked the same question and being told, in addition, that President Obama supported the idea, respondents' favorability ratings increased by 11 percentage points.

Being told that "a recent study presents evidence that students learn more in charter schools," proved almost as influential, though. When pollsters added that tidbit of information to the basic question, public support for charters grew by 14 percentage points. (Note to readers: Research is actually mixed on this topic.) The survey also found that research evidence was particularly persuasive, according to the poll, with white people and public school teachers.

The president and research evidence also appeared to carry some sway on the question of vouchers.

When you consider that the poll was taken in March, when President Obama's approval ratings were above 60 percent, the findings look pretty darn good for researchers. Scholar often complain, though, about their lack of influence on public policy. Maybe Education Next should do the same survey with state legislators and members of Congress?

The survey was drawn from a nationally representative sample of 3,200 Americans, including 709 public school teachers. It provides useful information on what Americans think about a range of hot-button education topics, including merit pay for teachers, single-sex schools, national standards, virtual schools, and the federal No Child Left Behind Act. You can find the complete results at Education Next's Web site. In the video clip below, Ed Next publisher Paul Peterson and researcher Martin West, both Harvard scholars, discuss the findings on President Obama's and research's opinionmaking power.

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

"Experts" are always backtracking on the advice they give to the rest of us. Remember Scared Straight, the program that sent hardened convicts into schools and youth programs to "scare" errant teenagers into cleaning up their act? When the program was subjected to rigorous study, researchers discovered that it actually worsened kids' delinquent behaviors. The teenagers apparently thought the prisoners, with their tough demeanor and bulging muscles, were pretty cool.

When it comes to raising and teaching children, science is littered with tales of good-advice-gone-bad. Now a new book, NurtureShock, gathers up all that soured wisdom in one place and offers some new scientific evidence to take its place.

The book attempts to debunk all that focus in the 1970s and 1980s on building children's self esteem, skewers the benefits of teaching tolerance and promoting diversity in classrooms, trashes once-popular drug-prevention programs, such as DARE or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, and questions schools' use of IQ tests to predict children's achievement. Some of this debunking is not news; some appears to be based on just a few studies.

But the book and its authors, Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman, are attracting a lot of media attention this week. To find out more, check out this book review in the online version of The Wall Street Journal and this interview with Bronson on National Public Radio. Look for a column from the authors in the Aug. 31 edition of Newsweek, too.

AUG. 31 UPDATE: In case you missed today's debut of Newsweek's new NurtureShock column, you can find it here. While I'm at it, the authors of the new book also want you to know that they read over 100,000 pages of journal articles for the book, interviewed hundreds of scientists, cite over 700 sources, and list over 7000 words of footnotes in their book. This is in reply to my smart-alecky comment above that some of the findings "appear to be based on just a few studies." I got my copy of the book today so now I can assure you firsthand that it offers some engaging, cutting-edge scientific reading.

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A growing number of studies have begun to suggest that teens and young adults engage in risky behavior because the frontal portions of their brains—the parts that control executive function—aren't yet mature. That doesn't happen until young people reach their mid-20s.

Well, experts might want to rethink that theory, according to a study described today in Science Daily. In the study, researchers from Emory University and the Emory University School of Medicine used a new imaging technique to track the growth of white matter over a period of three years in the brains of 91 adolescents. Up until now, most such studies have focused on the brain's gray matter, which is where the neurons are located. The white matter is what connects the neurons and it becomes denser and more organized as the brain matures.

What the researchers found was that teens who were more prone to engage in dangerous, thrill-seeking, or rebellious activities tended to have more mature-looking white matter than their more risk-aversive peers.

That was a surprise to researchers. Reflecting on the findings, the lead researcher, Dr. Gregory Berns, suggests that such activities may actually require the sophistication of a more adult-like brain:

"Society is a lot different now than it was 100 years ago when teens were expected to go to work and raise a family," says Berns. "You could make the case that in this country, biological capacity shows up long before the wisdom that comes with time is fully developed."

Amen to that.

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Unfortunately, there's no shortage of jargon in the field of education. But here's a bit of it that you might actually want to add to your vocabulary of eduspeak: "neo-differentiated staffing."

"Neo-differentiated staffing" refers to an intriguing model of school staffing advanced in a new "thought" paper being circulated by Learning Point Associates, an Illinois-based education research group. Under Learning Points' vision, educators could assume a wide range of roles based on their individual skills or the demands of the curriculum. Don't confuse this concept with some other alternate staffing proposals out there, which call for differentiating the roles of more experienced master teachers from classroom-based novices.

What Learning Points seems to have in mind is creating an army of specialists trained to handle specific aspects of learning. A "learning clinician," for instance, might diagnose a student's competency levels, educational needs, and learning styles. The clinician then assembles a team of "content facilitators" who deliver the subject-matter content to students, possibly with the help of the "technology coordinator" down the hall or the "community liason" who is responsible for coordinating mentors or learning experiences that take students outside the confines of the classroom.

A "competency expert," likewise, could also work with the content teacher to design and implement various kinds of assessments to gauge students' learning progress. Teachers would also be paid more as they took on added responsibilities, and rewarded for performances that meet or exceed state expectations.

It all sounds very futuristic but, as the authors of this paper point out, the state of New Hampshire, with its new "extended learning opportunities" initiative for high school students, is already heading down that sort of road. (You can read more about it in this story from EdWeek.) The plan allows students to get academic credit for a wide range of outside-the-classroom opportunities, including private instruction, community service, apprenticeships, and online classes. That leaves teachers to take on the role of facilitators, brokering relationships between experts in the community and the academic requirements of the school system.

Check out the full Learning Points paper for yourself: "Toward the Structural Transformation of Schools: Innovations in Staffng" by researchers Jane Coggshall, Molly Lasagna, and Sabrina Lane.

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

When teachers are given the opportunity to design their own performance-pay programs, they tend to choose relatively modest bonuses and spread them around more widely.

That's what researchers from Nashville's Vanderbilt University are discovering as they evaluate a performance-pay program that was piloted in Texas between the 2005-06 and the 2008-09 school years. Over those years, the Governor's Educator Excellence Grants program distributed more than $10 million a year in federal grants to 99 schools that managed to turn in high scores on state tests despite enrolling large numbers of students from low-income families.

What made the program different from some other merit-pay schemes, though, was that it required schools to involve teachers in designing the performance-incentive plans for their own schools.

Most of the plans they developed called for individual staff bonuses that were, on average, less than the $3,000 minimum that state education officials recommended—and less than most such bonuses in the private sector. (Think Wall Street.) In fact, 80 percent of the teachers who received a bonus under the program got less than $3,000.

The teacher-designed plans also turned out to be highly egalitarian: 78 percent of the teachers in the bonus-eligible schools got an award. That percentage even included some teachers who had not worked at the same school the year before.

Even a modest $3,000 bonus was enough of an incentive to dramatically reduce teacher turnover at the schools involved, the researchers found. Still, there's no clear evidence on whether the program is having an impact on student achievement, according to the report, and that, of course, is the bottom line.

But stay tuned. The final report on the program has yet to be issued, and sources tell me that it's just weeks away. In the meantime, you can read the newly released second-year report at the Web site for Vanderbilt's National Center on Performance Incentives.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 5:15 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Dear readers,

Like the rest of Washington, D.C., I'm taking a little time off this month for some much-needed vacation. That means that "Inside School Research" will be on hiatus until Aug. 24. In the meantime, you might see some guest blog entries in this space from some of my colleagues here at EdWeek. Or you might not. Either way, we'll meet again in a week and a half.

Debbie

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The federal What Works Clearinghouse posted a couple of new reports yesterday: one on a preschool program called the Creative Curriculum and another updating the research on Success for All.

Let's start with the good news. Success for All, as most of you probably know, is a widely used schoolwide improvement program aimed at students in prekindergarten through 8th grade. Clearinghouse analysts reviewed the evidence for Success for All once before, in 2006, but this newer report incorporates findings from studies completed since then, as well as a reanalysis of one earlier study. Based on that research, the report concludes, SFA has "positive" effects for teaching beginning readers alphabetics, "mixed" effects for its effectiveness at teaching comprehension, and "potentially positive" effects for improving students' general reading achievement. That rating is not much different from the evaluation that Success for All got the last time around but, by What Works' tough standards, it's practically glowing.

The news was not so good, though, for the Creative Curriculum for Preschool, a project-based program that aims to nurture the development of the "whole child." Based on the three studies involving 844 kids, the clearinghouse concluded that the program yields "no discernible effects" for improving young children's oral language, print knowledge, processing of phonemes (the sounds that make up words), or math skills. The report offered no judgments on the nonacademic skills that whole-child programs are also meant to nurture.

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There's apparently a revolution brewing at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association meeting in San Francisco this week. Some unofficial blog posts from members of the 14,000-member group are highlighting a schism among education sociologists over how much academics ought to be doing "in the real world"—especially if they haven't earned tenure yet.

Should they be doing more studies intended to solve the practical problems of everyday educators? And, if so, should that kind of applied research count towards tenure? What about op-eds or—perish the thought—blogging?

Over at "Thoughts on Education Policy," blogger Corey Bunje Bower, a graduate student, made this impassioned pitch upon hearing a senior scholar say, "you're not going to get tenure by blogging:"

What purpose, exactly, do faculty serve? I always thought they were there to do two main things: 1.) learn about the world, and 2.) teach others about the world. Why the heck would we interpret "others" to mean only the couple dozen people who read your article in a highly specialized academic journal? When a professor helps educate a wider audience they often provide a greater service to society at large than they do when they publish an academic article. And that should be taken into account. Professors should be encouraged to write op-eds, talk to reporters, write policy memos, and even blog. If all knowledge is concentrated in the hands of but a few professors, what's the point?

Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor, offers a more neutral response to the debate at "The Education Optimists," a blog she shares with her husband, Liam Goldrick.

She notes that the tenure question will indeed dictate the path that sociologists choose. Most sociologists now make "their academic work the center of their agenda, and do the more applied stuff on the side—like a hobby:"

But is it time for this to change? Can, and should, more applied sociological research on education be rewarded in the tenure and promotion processes? I can report there’s very little consensus among my colleagues in this regard, and that differences of opinion are not entirely explained by professional or generational status. However, what’s most remarkable is how impassioned grad students, assistant profs, and tenured professors all are about this issue.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:46 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Everyone admires the "Orphan Annies" of the world—those resilient kids who keep on smiling, forging ahead in the face of adversity. But can you actually teach someone to be resilient and positive?

Apparently so, according to Martin E. P. Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Speaking at the American Psychological Association's annual convention in Toronto this past weekend, Seligman shared findings from several studies suggesting that injecting some life lessons into the curriculum can improve students' outlook on life, curb depression, and boost grades.

In one such unpublished study, 240 9th graders were randomly assigned to literature courses with and without a dose of positive psychology. The kids in the positive psychology group read "Romeo and Juliet," The Scarlet Letter, and all the other literary works taught in the control-group class but with added attention to the strengths of the main characters. Students in the experimental group were also required to do three "loving" things for another person, according to the APA Convention blog, which carried an account of Seligman's talk on Saturday.

The researchers followed the students through high school. Later on, they found, the students who had taken the enhanced literature class improved their social skills and had a greater love of learning and higher grades than those who had taken the straight-up literature class.

Seligman is now getting ready to teach resilience lessons to U.S. Army soldiers before they are deployed. The hope, he said, is to ward off—or at least lessen the effects of—post-traumatic stress disorder.

You can read more about what Seligman had to say in Science Daily.

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Accusations of a "politicization" of science in federal regulatory policy are a continual refrain in Washington. Now, an independent, bipartisan panel has some recommendations on how President Obama and his successors can avoid those debates in the future.

In a report this week, the 13 members of the Science for Policy project contend that many such disputes arise from a failure to distinguish scientific questions from policy questions.

"Science can inform some policy choices, but it can't determine them," says the group, which was headed by Sherwood Boehlert, a retired Republican congressman from New York, and Donald Kennedy, a former editor-in-chief of the journal Science. To avoid any suggestion of political bias, the report contends, federal agencies and lawmakers ought to promulgate guidelines to differentiate between questions that involve scientific judgment and those that involve judgments about economics, ethics, and other matters of policy.

"The first impulse of those concerned with regulatory policy should not be to claim `the science made me do it' or to dismiss or discount scientific results, but rather to publicly discuss the policies and values that legitimately affect how science gets applied in decisionmaking," the report says.

If you haven't heard of this group, don't feel bad. I only just heard about it via a tweet from Greg Toppo of USA Today, which carried a story on the report on Wednesday. The panel is diverse, though, and includes people from industry, universities, and national organizations, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, that give a lot of thought to these kinds of questions. There's no one from education land, but the group's advice easily applies to the education sciences, too. The group was pulled together by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a group formed by four retired senators to provide a forum for developing nonpartisan solutions to national problems.

Among its other recommendations, the panel calls for federal guidelines on when to consult scientific advisory panels and who can be on them, more transparency on how panelists filter and evaluate the studies they use in their deliberations, stronger peer-review procedures, and improvement in setting and enforcing clear standards governing conflicts of interest.

That last topic appeared to be the most controversial for the group. The panel specifically recommends that, when considering whether a conflict exists for a potential advisory committee appointee, officials should look back two years rather than just looking at the expert's current relationships. Two panel members disagreed. Here's why: Suppose a scientist was paid 18 months ago to provide expert testimony in a court case. If the proceedings are finished, the dissenters reasoned, the scientist should no longer feel compromised.

This is a readable report, with lots of good specifics and illustrative hypotheticals. Whether the group's advice will get adopted by federal agencies, including the Department of Education, is another question.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:52 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

My colleague Sean Cavanagh, over at Curriculum Matters, yesterday highlighted an interesting working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research on links between the choice of a college major and one's religiousness. One finding that caught my eye: Very religious people tend to choose education as a major, stick with it, and become more religious over time. In comparison, students who major in the physical sciences or social sciences become less religious.
I'm not surprised. I suspect that many teachers feel the need to turn to prayer quite often in the course of a day. What's the old saying about "no atheists in foxholes"?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:50 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Remember the 1984 Civil War film Glory with Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington? It told the true story of the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, a fighting unit made up entirely of African-Americans. What a great way to make history come alive for students! Right?

Yes and no, according to researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. In a small study due to be published soon in the journal Psychological Science, graduate psychology student Andrew C. Butler and his colleagues find that teaching history with popular films can be a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, the researchers found, students really do recall more factual information (50 percent more, in fact) when they read text and watch a movie than they do when they read the text alone. But when the information in the movie conflicts with the historical facts in the text, students are more likely to remember the film version, regardless of whether it's correct.

And Hollywood movies are apparently rife with such historical inaccuracies, according to the study. The movie, Glory, for example, depicts the soldiers in the 54th as recently freed slaves from the South when, in fact, they were Northern freemen. (For a heads up on other historical errors in commercial films, check out this slide show at the Wash U Website.)

It turns out that such mistaken notions, once formed, are tough to shake: Students held on to the movie misinformation even when told beforehand that the film clips they were about to see were fictional! Fewer students retained misinformation, though, when their teachers were more specific about the inaccuracies they would see, saying, for instance, that "the film presented it this way but it really happened like this..."

This study was conducted with 54 undergraduate psychology students whose factual recall was measured on tests taken a week later. It's not unreasonable to think, though, that the dynamics would be different for high school and middle school students.

So, teachers, carefully screen those popular films for misinformation before you show them in class. But you were probably doing that already, weren't you?

Though not yet published, the full study, "Using Popular Films to Enhance Classroom Learning" is already posted online and can be accessed for a fee at Psychological Science.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:28 PM | Permalink | 37 Comments | Recommend

Long, long ago, in the time before video and computer games, young children whiled away many an hour playing board games like Chutes and Ladders. Little did we know then that we were sharpening our math skills at the same time.

At least that's what a pair of psychologists are claiming in a study published this month in the Journal of Educational Psychology. For their study, researchers Robert S.
Siegler of Carnegie Mellon University and Geetha B. Ramani of the University of Maryland divided 88 preschoolers from Head Start classrooms into three groups. One group of

The children took pretests to gauge their baseline math abilities. Then everyone was tested again three weeks later. What the researchers found at the second testing was that the linear-board-game group outperformed similarly-skilled students from the other two groups on a wide range of tasks designed to gauge their understanding of numbers and numerical magnitude. Even more striking, though, was that this group also did best later on at "learning to learn" new arithmetic tasks.

The researchers said their findings may partly explain why disadvantaged children come to school with weaker numerical skills than children from middle-class homes. Most middle-class homes have a Chutes and Ladders game stashed on a shelf somewhere—or at least they used to. But studies show that such activities take place less often in low-income households.

Yet that's a disparity that may be relatively easy to address. That's because the new findings also showed that the children with the weakest math skills at pretest rapidly caught up with their peers after a few game-playing sessions. And anyone can make a board game with paper, a pair of dice, and a cardboard spinner.

A word of caution, though: Previous studies by this same research team suggest that the design of the game matters. A cardboard game modeled after Candyland, another popular linear board game, did not prove to be as effective as the Chutes and Ladders model.

Personally, I predict a resurgence in sales of Chutes and Ladders.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:08 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Looking for a way to cut school-district costs without laying off teachers or reducing class sizes? The University of Washington's Marguerite Roza has an idea for you: roll back teacher salaries.

In a policy brief published last week, Roza notes that 93 percent of school districts across the country use a fixed salary schedule, plus a step increase, to calculate teachers' wages. When you put the two increases together, Roza calculates, the total will bump up average teacher salaries in those districts by an average of 6.03 percent this year. That's a good chunk of money at a time when many employees in the public and private sector are losing their jobs or swallowing pay cuts and benefit reductions.

Suppose, for instance, that a district had to make a 5 percent reduction in teacher expenditures. One way it could achieve that kind of reduction might be through laying off an average of 143 of every 1,000 teachers, which would lead to an average 17-percent increase in class sizes. But, if school officials let the annual step increase go forward and then rolled back the entire salary schedule for teachers by 8.16 percent, Roza calculates, they might be able to meet the 5 percent target without laying off teachers or boosting class sizes.

Roza's strategy won't work everywhere, but it's worth a look. Her brief, "The Tradeoff Between Teachers Wages and Layoffs to Meet Budget Cuts," was posted online last week by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University's Bothell campus.

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