June 2011 Archives

The National Board for Education Sciences, the advisory board for the Education Department's research agency, met today to plan next steps for the department's recently approved education research agenda.

Back in November, the board approved new priorities for the Institute of Education Sciences, such as a focus on ways to measure and promote effective teaching.

Jon Baron, the board chairman, urged IES to focus on finding and scaling up studies that show a significant effect in improving student achievement, even if they are "not at all scientifically interesting interventions, like book fairs or volunteer tutoring."

Yet NBES members Adam Gamoran and Deborah Ball argued that many promising interventions fail to be scaled up because there is not appropriate support to implement them in a new school site. They and other members suggested IES go beyond studying the implementation of particular interventions to look at the systems that must be in place for a new intervention to be implemented faithfully and integrated into the school or district.

"Not all interventions work in all contexts and for all participants," Mr. Gamoran said. "We need studies with reference to context, more nuances. I think we need to be more thoughtful, to give more scientific scrutiny to organizational conditions that support or impede implementation in the studies themselves."

Member Robert A. Underwood said he envisioned one day being able to identify specific interventions that would be most effective and culturally relevant for specific student groups. "If you can push a button and see 'what works'," he said, referring to the search tool on the What Works Clearinghouse site, "you should be able to push another button that says who will this work with."

Yet IES staff cautioned that the education field is still developing capacity to conduct highly nuanced research studies. Sean P. "Jack" Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said it has been very difficult to find the "active ingredients" that lead to better student achievement in a complex intervention such as a successful charter school model.

"We have 21st-century expectations of science and the answers it can provide, but education science is kind of behind," said Lynn Okagaki, commissioner for education research at IES, noting that many large-scale data sets and studies have only begun to be used in the last decade. "That's the reality. Like it or not, science takes time; we're getting there."

In related news, the final deadline for applications for the next round of regional educational labs was today, and while IES Director John Q. Easton said the shortened time frame for proposals, caused by the budget debate this spring over the labs' future, "had some people scurrying around," he said, "We're glad we survived and have some healthy competition out there."

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'm Tweeting live from the National Board of Education Sciences meeting this morning, and there's already some interesting news coming out.

I'll be blogging it later today, but you can get the updates in real time on my Twitter feed: @sarahdsparks.

So far:

SarahDSparks: NCES' Buckley: new FERPA rules out in next few months, end of year tops. Clarity on #privacy, student education research.

SarahDSparks: IES' John Easton in final negotiations for new Special Ed. research commissioner. Long overdue for leadership.

SarahDSparks: IES down $50 million in #budget, cuts to #specialed research, labs, state data systems may be most problematic.

SarahDSparks: NCES' Buckley: "We have never studied the full trajectory of middle school." He wants to align longitudinal studies to fill the gap.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Educators looking to eliminate the school readiness gap for children in poverty can look to how parents play with and encourage their youngest children, according to a study published in an online preview this month in Child Development.

By the age of 2, differences in a low-income child's home-learning environment can make the difference between whether he or she will be considered ready for school or labeled at risk at the start of kindergarten two years later.

New York University researchers Eileen Rodriguez Bandel and Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda studied 1,852 children whose families participated at 17 sites where the federal Early Head Start Evaluation Study was taking place. Only about half the families received services through the program, which provides educational training and support for parents in poverty. The researchers analyzed the home environments, including tapes of mother-child interactions, parent surveys, and videos of the home, around the children's first, second, and third birthdays and again at age 5, just before they started kindergarten.

At each age, Ms. Bandel and Ms. Tamis-LeMonda looked at three measures of the home environment which had been previously associated with later school readiness: literacy activities, such as the frequency at which parents and toddlers read books, told stories, and sang nursery rhymes together; maternal engagement, including how well mothers responded to their child's needs and cues and tried to stimulate the child's cognitive and language development; and the availability of educational toys, such as books, role-playing toys like dolls and stuffed animals, musical instruments, blocks, and art supplies. Those areas were coded and combined into a single composite measure of home enrichment.

"There was an enormous amount of variability [of home environment], even within this low-income sample," said Ms. Bandel, now a survey researcher at Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, N.J.

She found that 70 percent of children whose parents created and maintained a high-quality home environment performed at or above national norms on two tests of early school readiness, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the Woodcock-Johnson Revised Tests of Achievement. These children performed a full standard deviation higher on average than children with low-quality home environments—the difference between being considered on-level and at risk in kindergarten.

Moreover, researchers found that many children whose parents started out with very supportive home environments decreased over time, usually around age 3—the year when children often start to explore more complex educational games and toys. Ms. Bandel told me that the quality of the home environment continued to be important throughout a child's early years, but it proved critical to different skills at different times. Children with rich learning environments in the first few years had higher receptive language skills, while later enriched environments were associated with better letter-word identification.

Moreover, Ms. Bandel said many families provided very similar environments throughout a child's early years, with younger and less-experienced mothers tending to provide less enrichment. She said the study suggests potential to narrow the school readiness gap for students in poverty by providing more training and learning materials, particularly for young parents.

"You can never begin too early," she said. "I think it's invaluable to begin providing this information, particularly to low-income, high-risk families," she said.

The researchers plan to continue to follow the cohort of students to gauge whether early home environments have an effect on academic achievement of students in 5th grade.

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As a group, Asian American and Pacific islander students often perform at the top of all student groups on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and other assessments, yet the perception of these students as a "model minority" has led to less nuanced research on one of the most diverse racial groups in America, according to leaders of the new Asian American Pacific Islander Association of Colleges and Universities.

"Research has largely failed to adequately represent the needs, success, and challenges of AAPI students," said Neil Horikoshi, the president and executive director of the Asian and Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund. "There's simply a dearth of knowledge about the populations of API students, the trajectory of their academic achievement and their college success."

At a briefing this morning, Robert Teranishi, the principal investigator for the New York City-based National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education, released preliminary findings from a report due out later this summer, "Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, the College Completion Agenda, and America's Commitment to Equity and Diversity," which analyzes American Community Survey data on these students, particularly their barriers to college enrollment and completion.

The report finds that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders increased at a faster rate in the past decade than any other major racial group, 43 percent, to 18.5 million people in 2010. However, the group remains one of the most diverse in the country, including 48 different ethnic groups who speak 380 different languages, Mr. Teranishi said, and many of these students do struggle academically but can be overlooked in racial averages.

Mark Mitsui, the president of the North Seattle Community College, said educators and researchers often buy into a "model-minority myth that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are not struggling and that they all go on to Ivy League Colleges," but data shows achievement levels differ dramatically among students from different backgrounds.

For example, more than four of five students from East Asian backgrounds, such as China, Japan and Korea, or South Asian backgrounds such as India and Pakistan earn at least a bachelor's degree, 51 percent of Pacific Islander students and 41 percent of students from Southeast Asian backgrounds, such as Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, do not go on to higher education.

"Half of Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander students leave college without a degree, three to five times higher than East and South Asians," Mr. Teranishi said. "We need to target these populations in the institutions they attend."

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In the education world, the quality of the data underpins the quality of the research, and if there was ever an example of that, it's in the National Center for Education Statistics' report released this morning, looking at achievement gaps between white and Hispanic students.

NCES's analysis of trend data in the National Assessment of Educational Progress presents a pretty grim picture of stubborn academic gaps between white and Hispanic students, who now make up one in five students in American classrooms (and a majority in many classrooms in the West and South.) I'm already waiting for the slew of secondary research, from the Institute of Education Sciences and others, to parse out why, after decades of interventions and a federal law primarily focused on closing the achievement gap, we have made so little progress.

Yet the report itself is an interesting look at what progress has been made in the data on Hispanic students, and particularly Hispanic English-language learners. For much of NAEP's history, English-language learners were not automatically disaggregated in student subgroup reporting, and in the years after No Child Left Behind was passed, the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the tests, developed new working groups to revisit how NAEP looked at ELLs. In the process, the group specifically split those with low English proficiency from students with disabilities, according to Kathleen Leos, the former director of the U.S. Department of Education's office of English-language acquisition, who consulted in those early discussions.

"This laser-like focus from NAEP on the subgroups is extraordinary, and a long time coming," said Kathleen Leos, now the president and chief executive officer of the Washington-based Global Institute for Language and Literacy Development.

In 2009, NAGB started a serious review of how states include English-language learners in their NAEP testing, finding widely disparate practices that led to anywhere from 6 percent to 70 percent of ELLs and students with disabilities left out of the exams, depending on the state. In 2010, the advisory group approved new policies intended to ensure the "nation's report card" included a bigger and more representative sample of ELLs.

Yet in a briefing with reporters prior to the Hispanic-student report's release, NCES Commissioner Sean P. "Jack" Buckley said the ELL data in the report is still hard to compare across states because of continued variation in the ways states provide accommodations for English-language learners taking the NAEP.

Ms. Leos told me the Education Department and NAGB still has a lot of work to do for ELL data quality within different student groups, particularly since state-level NAEP data must be included in NCLB accountability report cards and is so frequently used for research.

"The districts still get to cherry-pick the students they think will do well," she said. "We really want to move beyond that to a really good solid sampling of the students in the school system who can take the assessment. We need to find out how to get the broadest range of student participation and the most valid scores possible, so you really understand the snapshot of student achievement for all student groups."

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From guest blogger Debra Viadero

The competitive pressures being placed on U.S. high school students to get into top colleges are "damaging many otherwise promising lives," writes Deborah Stipek, dean of Stanford University's school of education, in a high-profile editorial published today in Science.

Stipek takes issue with the competitive culture that surrounds young people in some high schools across the country, especially those that serve high concentrations of students from well-educated, middle-to-upper-middle class families. Drawing on 35 years of research on academic motivation, she says such pressure can lead to "debilitating anxiety," cheating, and "take the joy out of learning," as well as exacerbate achievement gaps between have- and have-not students.

"For the most part, high school has become for many of our students not preparation for life or college but preparation for the college application," Stipek said in a telephone conference call with reporters this week.

Today's editorial doesn't mark the first time that Stipek, an expert on student motivation, has spoken out on this topic. She was featured in "The Race to Nowhere," the independent documentary released last year on student stress due to test-heavy school demands and the competition for slots in top colleges. Stanford's education school launched Challenge Success in 2007, a project that seeks to combat the culture of competition by enlisting experts from a range of academic disciplines to create "a coordinated approach to helping schools, parents and youth develop alternative success models to align with what is known about healthy child development."

Stipek says there are steps that educators can take to alleviate some of the stress on students and better engage them in learning. These include involving students in lessons that connect to their personal lives, collaborative studies, experimenting and debating the implications of findings, and solving multidimensional problems and teaching them to value learning skills over nailing high scores.

Schools can also help by using a master calender to space out testing so that diligent students aren't pulling all-nighters, giving students multiple opportunities to earn a good grade (such as by rewriting papers or retaking tests), and creating advisory periods during which an adult is available to monitor students' homework and offer extra help. Some schools are also surveying students to find out how stressed they really feel and how long they are actually spending on their homework, Stipek says.

"We have gone into schools where they say this is not a problem and then they do a survey of the students and they are just blown away by what they get back," says Stipek, who will be stepping down as dean later this year.

Her editorial concludes by saying, "A valuable science of teaching and learning exists that should guide efforts to improve students' interest, engagement, and intellectual skills, as well as reduce the debilitating stress that is becoming epidemic."

The word "epidemic" could be a stretch. Certainly, there are plenty of low-performing and middling schools where teachers complain of students lacking ambition. But, in lots of relatively well-off communities around the country, a culture of competition certainly is pervasive. My question is: Is there a middle ground somewhere that everyone can occupy?

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There's little more than a week left for applications for the next round of regional education labs, and there have been five updates to the competition In the last week.

The contracts for the RELs got off to a pretty rocky start this spring, as Congress threatened to eliminate the program entirely, and for a while it looked as though the current labs might not receive the money to complete their existing work. The Institute for Education Sciences released the final, official request for proposals after the Senate secured a last-minute budget reprieve for the program.

The contract proposal says that IES now expects to provide $345 million for the labs from fiscal years 2012 to 2017, with each region taking the following portions:

• Appalachia, 8.2 percent
• Central, 8.5 percent
• Mid-Atlantic, 8.9 percent
• Midwest, 13.1 percent
• Northeast and Islands, 10.4 percent
• Northwest, 8.4 percent
• Pacific, 7 percent
• Southeast, 11.2 percent
• Southwest, 11.7 percent
• West, 12 percent

One of the 10 labs would be chosen to receive the remaining .6 percent to coordinate and disseminate research from the lab network as a whole.

Many of the tweaks to the competition clarify how the labs should prove their prior success in running education research centers and flesh out the new research alliances they are expected to develop with states and districts. IES also conducted recent Webinars giving more details on what it hopes to see in the next iteration of the lab network (and a hat-tip to Jim Kohlmoos of the Knowledge Alliance for pointing these out).

The final deadline for the new RELs is June 29 at 2 p.m.

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The child who rises from a background of poverty to become a highly successful adult has been inextricably woven into the fabric of the American story. A new study from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development gives a glimpse into what factors contribute to the success of that bootstrap approach, but also shows that disadvantaged children in the United States may be less likely to rise above those early troubles than children in some other countries.

The study finds that across 66 OECD and partner countries who participate in the Program for International Student Assessment, just under one in three students in poverty still performs in the top quarter of all students of their demographics internationally in reading, math, and science. These students, identified as "resilient," tend to devote more time to class, and they tend to report feeling more motivated and confident in their ability to succeed than less-resilient students.

For example, resilient students were 10 to 20 percent more likely than less resilient students to say they understood science concepts easily and quickly and were confident of their ability to answer correctly on tests.

Moreover, OECD's findings back up a flurry of recent reports on the importance of time in school, particularly for disadvantaged students. OECD found that for students in poverty, time in school was among the strongest predictors of whether a student would outperform peers. In nearly all the countries studied, resilient students spent more hours per week studying science than comparable less resilient students, even though poor students overall spent less time in class than wealthier students.

In the United States in particular, requiring a science class is associated with a 15-point improvement in the PISA science score for students overall, but a more than 40-point jump—the equivalent of a year of academic progress—for poor students.

However, as the chart below shows, the United States ranks uncomfortably below the OECD average in the percentage of poor children who are resilient to their situation. While more than 70 percent of children born in poverty in Shanghai and Hong Kong are winning upward academic mobility, fewer than 30 percent of American children are on track to achieve that traditionally American dream.

To dig into this data, check out the OECD resilience data table.xls

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Education research is not always the funniest beat, and I've always had a soft spot for those who can lighten up the academic discussion while still making their point.

Faithful readers will know my enthusiasm for the real-but-bizarre research honored in the annual Improbable Research awards. Likewise, The Onion is a favorite for its cutting-edge fake education research through the years, covering everything from an Education Department "study" of high schools to the latest debate on an evidence-based science class.

Now, may I introduce NothingWorksInEd, the self-styled "Official fake Twitter feed of the US DOE's What Works Clearing House." Since November the feed has been popping up from time to time with snarky references to real research, like "New Study finds research has caveats!!!!" and fake-but-could-have-been entries like, "Director of Faith-based research to deliver key-note on relationship between faith and uncovering policy-relevant findings."

Ironically, the real What Works Clearinghouse doesn't have a Twitter feed, so NothingWorksInEd has the final word on the subject for now. I'm trying to track down the diligent researcher responsible for the feed, if anyone has any tips.

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Research in education seems particularly vulnerable to developing camps arguing one side or another of hot-button topics like teacher pay or charter schools, even as most researchers stress that the details of when, how and for whom an intervention is put out can be more important in the long run.

That's why I was interested in a special research section of the June Child Development Perspectives on the cognitive effects of video games. (For more information on the special section as a whole, check out my colleague Ian Quillen's blog post.) It highlights how researchers can take a more nuanced approach to a heated education debate.

"Whenever a study comes out demonstrating any effect of games, it immediately gets put into a two-sided argument. What happens generally when we get to parents, educators, policymakers is, they want it to be summed up into one short sentence: Games are good or bad," said Douglas A. Gentile, who runs the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University in Ames and wrote one of the studies. "If we want games to have maximum impact, particularly educational games ... then we should not just put our blinders on and focus on one aspect of games that we are interested in, but look at all of these aspects at once."

His research showed that most research looks at the effects of games holistically, but does not break out individual characteristics that might change the effect, such as the time a student plays the game, whether they play alone or in a team, and the game's specific content, structure and mechanics. For example, a single-player shooting game like Halo requires players to notice and respond to small changes in the environment; its violent content might increase aggressiveness while also increasing users' spatial attention. Moreover, whether the child plays alone or in a team match could change how he approaches the violent content. Yet there have been very few studies so far on how different aspects of games interact, and how educators or parents should balance those pros and cons, Mr. Gentile told me.

"The next step for the field is to really start understanding, not only the effect size but, do all of these effects occur naturally, or do they only occur in special situations, or with this one type of game?" he said. "All of those are questions the field hasn't answered yet."

Future research digging into these nuances could one day help educators take the best parts of even violent video games to improve instruction.

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State longitudinal data systems are finally starting to come of age, thanks in part to intense federal investment in the past few years. The systems are intended to allow educators and researchers to track a student's academic career from kindergarten through college, and in some cases beyond.

For researchers and educators who want to learn more about how to dig into these data sets while avoiding student privacy pitfalls, the Data Quality Campaign plans to hold a free online seminar at the end of the month, "Leveraging the Power of SLDS: Building Capacity to Turn Data into Useful Information."

The Webinar, to be held June 29 from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. EST, will include a discussion with Neal Gibson, the data system project manager for the Arkansas education department, and Kathleen Barfield, the chief administrative in information officer for the San Antonio, Texas-based Edvance Research, Inc.

Arkansas and the Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest, which is housed at Edvance, partnered this spring to create the Arkansas Consortium on School Research. The group's "community of practice" trains superintendents, principals and teacher-coaches to use data to come up with new tools to improve students' college and career readiness. For example, the partnership has been training school leaders on how to use "on-track" indicators to identify the students at risk of dropping out of school and develop tailored programs to help them.

Rebecca Shah, a senior associate at the Data Quality Campaign, and Nancy Smith, a consultant for DataSmith Solutions, a Vienna, Va. company that helps school districts work with data, will also join the discussion.

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Gifted education has never been a major focus of federal education research, but since this spring, when Congress eliminated the decades-old Jacob K. Javits grants for research on gifted and talented education in the fiscal 2011 budget agreement, experts say it's been looking pretty grim for the field.

"Gifted education is not done brilliantly everywhere; it doesn't always have trained teachers or tests properly aligned to demonstrate students' knowledge," said Jane Clarenbach the director of public education for the Washington-based nonprofit National Association for Gifted Children. She argued that without a dedicated source of research funding and accountability, schools will have little incentive to find best practices for advanced learners, who may struggle in a mainstream class but typically don't score low enough to trigger red flags under the No Child Left Behind Act. "Until there's a little bit more involvement of accountability--which is usually tied to funding--states won't audit how they are doing" in gifted education.

"A lot of local school districts have already cut back on gifted," programs because of state and local budget cuts, said Joseph S. Renzulli, the director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented at the University of Connecticut, which has been supported by the Javits grants for 21 years. "It's one of those kinds of things where we don't know what we will pay for this in future years. If we're going to look at the value of any [gifted education] program, I think that we need to think about improving society's reservoir of talent and creativity."

Kim Hymes, the director of policy and advocacy Council for Exceptional Children, told me she is pinning her hopes in part on the Talent Act, sponsored by Sen. Charles E. "Chuck" Grassley, R-Iowa as S.857 and by Rep. Elton W. Gallegly, R.-Calif. as H.R.1674. The bill has put forth a set of changes to incorporate more gifted education in the next authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It would:
• Overhaul the Javits research grants;
• Require assessments capable of measuring growth among high-performing students;
• Include gifted education in federal professional development grants for teachers; and
• Call for schools to include plans to serve high-performing students in poverty in their Title I or school improvement plans. Schools already have to detail how they will serve other special student groups, such as special education students, in these plans.

Advocates have been tossing around $50 million for an initial appropriation for the changes, which may seem like small change compared to, say, the $650 million federal Investing in Innovation research grants, but it's far more than the $7.5 million Javits had before it was killed. (For more details on the bill, check out this Talent Act presentation.ppt delivered at the Senate.)

Sen. Grassley said he considers the bill "a marker for the upcoming reauthorization debate" for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

"The current state accountability systems designed to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act effectively ignore high-ability students. Assessments designed to measure only grade-level content tell teachers and parents little or nothing about whether gifted students are being sufficiently challenged and are making appropriate progress," he said in an e-mail. "The initiative is about making the most of the potential in the next generation of Americans."

At a time of increasing concern about American competitiveness abroad and the effectiveness of existing gifted education programs here, I'll be interested to see whether the bill gains any traction in the larger reauthorization discussion.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Philadelphia, Pa.

The third annual national Education Business Plan Competition, held here last week by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the Milken Family Foundation, offered some interesting insights into how the next generation of education entrepreneurs are thinking about research and data in education. There were a flurry of mostly Web-based tools and programs for educators and students, but in the end, the most interesting presentation was for an education intervention that never got off the ground.

Alexandre Scialom, 32, of San Francisco, swept the awards with theCourseBook (not to be confused with Facebook), an online city-by-city compendium of local and online classes, rated by students just as sites like Yelp! review restaurants or services. Mr. Scialom's site design, now in beta testing for the San Francisco area, won both the $25,000 grand prize and an additional $25,000 prize from the Hewlett Foundation's Startl Prize for the best open-source education business.

As he explains it, if you're spending the night in a new city and want to find a good spot for dinner, it's relatively easy to hop online and use one of the many local review sites like Yelp! to identify the best local hamburger joint. If you're a high school student trying to find a GED program or a principal trying to add an online French class, "63 percent have trouble."

Several of the nine nonprofit and for-profit finalists used extensive data collection and sharing to approach education problems, from taping teacher classes to provide online mentoring to allowing school staff to automatically upload attendance, grade and other data via a bar code scanner. For example, Mr. Scialom said he would provide feedback reports to schools on what worked for students in a online photography class, or which teachers had the best instruction ratings.

"There was a lot of stuff around technology ... around trying to figure out ways to capture information and analyze it, and use it. There was a lot of stuff about data this year that I found interesting," said Douglas Lynch, the vice dean at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and co-creator of the competition.

Yet at the end of the competition the presentation that struck me most was fellow San Franciscan Matt Pasternack's story of GoalPost, a seemingly popular reading intervention that never got off the ground. Mr. Pasternack, a former teacher in Harlem and developer in New York City's School of One, developed GoalPost, a social networking platform to allow students to log their reading lists online, reviewing and recommending books to friends while also allowing teachers to track how quickly students moved from book to book. The program would also analyze the data in the same way sites like Amazon.com do, to recommend available books that students might also enjoy.

Very quickly, Mr. Pasternack received a merger offer from a children's book publisher and started to see interest from school districts. "When we took the tool out to schools, administrators absolutely loved it and we had dozens of principals who wanted this in their schools as quickly as possible," he recalled.

Yet when he started to test the tool in classrooms, he found teachers liked the program—but they didn't use it. "It wasn't embedded into the daily structure of the classroom the way we though that it would be."

Why? According to Mr. Pasternack, while all of the classes he tested the reading program in had access to computers, either in the classroom or in a computer lab, they simply weren't ubiquitous enough to integrate computer-based programs into instruction. For example, while students previously had logged their books and opinions about them in paper journals, after the computer program was implemented, a student had to "check out a computer mouse from the teacher, go to the computer, log into the computer, navigate to our Web site, log into our Web site, navigate through the system to get to where they needed to do journaling, and they probably got about 50 percent as much work done on our system, our 'optimized' system, as just using pencil and paper."

Teachers either had to send students to log books a few at a time, or schedule class time to the school's computer lab every time students needed to log books. Moreover, Mr. Pasternack found that even in the wealthiest schools in Silicon Valley, there was always at least one child who did not have a computer at home and had difficulty handling daily homework assignments online.

The field test was a wake-up call, he said. "The platform of the classroom is paper. The daily transactions between teachers and students are all paper," he said, and while classes might be less efficient when compared to technology-rich environments, "adding small incremental increases to technology actually decreases productivity. Until we make that big jump up to better design, we need to be very, very careful about how we introduce these little bits of technology into classrooms."

He has since put the GoalPost project on indefinite hold and is now working on a separate project on analyzing student data.

At a competition in which many judges and contestants alike voiced concern about the time and money required to research implementation and effectiveness of interventions before putting them to market, Mr. Pasternack's experience proved a cautionary tale of the difference between an idea on paper and in the classroom.

"He could have sold it to every school district in the country, because
it says a lot about his moral fortitude that he said I'm not going to do this just to make a buck if it's not going to add value," Mr. Lynch told me.

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You might think that a child being harassed at school would end up at the school nurse's office more often—and you'd be right, but a new study suggests bullies are less healthy, too.

A new study published in the May issue of Pediatrics shows both bullies and their victims are more likely to show up in the nurse's office more often than other students, not just for bruises, but for somatic illnesses like headaches, joint pain, stomach aches, and chronic fatigue.

Researchers led by Eric Vernberg, a professor of clinical child psychology and director of the Child and Family Services Clinic at the University of Kansas, compared school nurses' logs with reports from 590 children in grades 3 through 5 about bullying they faced in school, including identifying aggressive children. The researchers found that the more often a child was tagged as an aggressor, the more frequent his or her visits to the nurse's office.

In a statement on the study, Mr. Vernberg suggested that repeated episodes of bullying can be highly emotionally charged and stressful for both sides; over time, these can lead to chronic stress and a reduced immune system.

"It's upsetting for the person involved in that kind of encounter," Mr. Vernberg said. "It's probably going to have some residual feelings such as, 'This was unpleasant. I got in trouble for this. I have a problem with this person that may come up again in the future.' It involves negative emotions."

The results suggest a new way school officials may be able to spot underlying harassment that might not result in outright fighting or trips to the principal's office, and may be more effective to identify relational bullying, such as ostracism and gossip, which school officials have found notoriously difficult to spot.

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