From guest blogger Dakarai I. Aarons:

A new study released today raises concerns that states are collecting more information than needed in a quest to build education-data warehouses and are not doing enough to protect students' personal information, including Social Security and health data.

The study's author told The Washington Post that he's concerned about the future implications for students.

"Ten, 15 years later, these kids are adults, and information from their elementary, middle, and high school years will easily be exposed by hackers and others who put it to misuse," said Fordham University law professor Joel R. Reidenberg, who oversaw the study. States, he said, "are trampling the privacy interests of those students."

Some states, the Fordham University Center on Law and Information Policy's study found, are regularly passing information from local to state agencies without following federal privacy laws. Others are outsourcing the data-warehouse development without any explicit privacy restrictions put on the vendors.

Most states began building data warehouses as a way to keep track of the disaggregated student-achievement data they are required to report annually under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which was enacted in 2002. In the intervening years, states have begun to look at more uses for the data, including measuring college-readiness outcomes. The economic-stimulus law provides $250 million in competitive grant funding to help states build better data systems.

State education departments in states such as Tennessee plan to collaborate with other state agencies to develop better understandings of populations of young people who end up in the juvenile justice system or need some sort of social-service assistance.

Florida, as I wrote in our Diplomas Count 2009 report, is seen as a leader among states in data use. Like other states, it has moved from using Social Security numbers as a primary identifier.

According to Jeff Sellers, Florida's deputy education commissioner for accountability, research, and measurement, 17 "identifiers" are used to confirm a student's identity before he or she is assigned a random, alphanumeric identification for use in the data warehouse. This allows state officials to use the data to run analyses of student performance without running afoul of student-privacy laws.

"It gives us a lot more flexibility as we do our analysis," Sellers told me this spring. "We can look at programs and policies and impacts on education while we have another layer of protection as far as confidentiality goes."

The study recommends that states hire a chief privacy officer to manage privacy issues and collect data only that is being used for a clearly articulated purpose.

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"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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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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Have you ever wondered what research has to say about what happens to traditional public schools when new schools of choice open nearby? How much does it cost to start up and maintain a charter school? Do other countries have public-private forms of schooling similar to U.S. charter schools?

These are among the questions addressed in the new Handbook of Research on School Choice. The hefty, 630-page tome is a first-of-its-kind compilation of research syntheses on a wide variety of forms of school choice, including home schools, charters, private schools, magnets, and virtual schools.

It was pulled together by the National Center on School Choice, a consortium based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The center is one of the 10 national research centers that the federal Institute of Education Sciences underwrites.

Center scholars enlisted leading academics with a range of perspective on school-choice issues to pen the book's 34 chapters. Where else would you find Amy Stuart Wells, a Teachers College, Columbia University, researcher who has long written on inherent social inequities in school-choice initiatives, writing alongside Paul Peterson, a Harvard University scholar known for his support of private-school vouchers?

Mark Berends, one of the volume's editors, said his hope is that the range of scholarly opinion will give the book "an independent kind of voice" on some of the most prickly debates in education.

In next week's print edition of EdWeek, I'll have an article on one chapter in the book that describes international versions of charter-style schooling. (See an earlier post I wrote on this same research here.) But, if you want to go straight to the source, you can find ordering information for the $114 volume here.

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