Category Archives: curriculum

Straight out of the box: Testing ‘cognitively demanding’ tasks

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Last post on these PISA results, I promise. As I mentioned last week. US students are not great at applying math to real world problems. But, according to the OECD’s report, students in the US are good at “reading data directly from tables and diagrams – requiring students only to understand a short text and read single values directly from a representation provided such as a table or bar diagram.”

PISA, OECD, United States

Standardized tests attempt to assess more complicated thinking.

Wow. Seems US students are good at reading charts. They are also good at taking information directly from tables and inserting numbers into formulas already given to them. In other words, the super boring stuff. They are less good at applying any of those numbers and formulas to real world problems; that outside the box type of stuff.

This makes one wonder, or at least makes me wonder, if our strength on easy stuff and difficulty with hard stuff might ironically result from our emphasis on standardized tests. The teach-to-the-test approach seems like it would offer students a whole bunch of opportunities to read from charts and plug stuff into formulas without necessarily connecting any of that to real world situations. In other words, maybe we’ve been going for the low hanging fruit by banging these simple processes into students’ heads.

The US does seem to test more often than other countries. In the US, 80% of students attend schools where student data is posted publically and virtually all students in the US attend schools that track achievement data over time. Those numbers compare with OECD averages of 45% and 72%, respectively. For a country with weak math skills, we do seem to love our data.

Does having all that data mean we are testing more? Maybe not, but probably it does. The report also notes that the US is one of the only countries that relies not only on testing at the national level, but at regional and other levels also.

The Common Core was designed to help us improve our scores. I hope it does. Well, I hope it helps us improve our analytical skills, thus improving our scores. The OECD seems to think it will help and mentions the new standards multiple times throughout the report. A shift from plugging numbers into formulas to more “cognitively demanding” tasks should clearly be a welcome one.

Still, I wonder if any standardized test can really capture the important skills involved in “outside of the box” thinking.  And if not, then how do we determine whether our educational policies are really working? Any opinions on this from our readers?

The Common Core and Its Many Colors

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Henry Ford once said that any customer could have a car painted any color he liked as long as it was black. Many opponents of the Common Core standards see policymakers giving teachers a similar offer. Teach whatever you want as long as it is the Common Core. Proponents say the standards set broad goals and give freedom to teachers to employ their own methods toward reaching those goals.  Critics say they box teachers in, preventing them from adjusting their class material to the needs of their students.

Common Core

How much freedom does Common Core give for teachers to teach?

The basic idea behind the Common Core is that students around the country should study similar topics at similar times.  For example, all students should study subtraction in the second grade and past tense verbs in fourth.—Disclaimer: I am making these up for the sake of illustration. I am already too far behind schedule to read through all the standards. Anyway, the point is, all the teachers have the same goals and can use various methods to reach those goals.

Proponents of the standards see them as key to equalizing educational experiences and educational opportunities around the country.  It doesn’t seem fair that students in rural Kentucky wouldn’t get opportunities to study the same material as the students in New York City. Or vice versa. Common Core material also prepares students for SAT and ACT college entrance exams. By making sure all students cover the same material, Common Core proponents are hoping to level the playing field.

That approach may ignore circumstances, however, which require teachers to slow down and make sure students understand the material. Students in low income areas, for example, or whose first language is not English, may not be ready to study the same topics as students in an upper class suburban neighborhood.

Further complicating things, the combination of the Common Core and the No Child Left Behind policy produces a whole lot of tests. Those test results significantly influence a teacher’s future. Weighing those test results too heavily would reward a teacher for effectively teaching test-taking skills, but not necessarily being good teachers. In this sense, like Henry Ford’s offer, teachers can teach anything they want as long as it is the stuff on the tests.

Let me throw out a hypothetical here: What if a teacher has to spend extra time helping students learn to play well together? Seriously, I’m not joking. Students from rough backgrounds often need time to learn to get along better with each other. That is a valuable, life-long skill. And hats off to a teacher that can actually teach that. But will it help on those dang test scores? Probably not. And if so, maybe not until a few more years down the road.

I mean, surely it is not bad to have some general direction on what to teach in class and occasional measures of effectiveness in teaching that material. The problem is, it is tough to properly measure all the many roles that teachers perform. The most profound ways in which teachers influenced me were only loosely related to coursework. So how can we measure the importance of a teacher that inspires children to travel, to help others, to be good friends and neighbors?

I don’t have the answer for that, but I am very interested to know what our readers think. How can you judge the effectiveness of teachers when they are expected to perform so many different roles?  And how much flexibility should teachers have in determining the academic material covered in class?

Educational Data and its Discontents

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Part 1: Personalize it.

Imagine this. Students fill a classroom, each one sitting at his or her desk with a tablet or small laptop, working away at the particular topic of the hour, whether it be mathematics or history. The computer gauges each of the student’s responses, recording their performance and re-calibrating the lesson to focus on the student’s weak points. The teacher walks around, monitoring progress, identifying difficult topics, answering questions.

A few students smile, enjoying the game-like qualities of the educational programs, more fun than the lectures and quizzes of past classes. Everyone wins. The students have more fun while working at their own pace, and teachers still serve in essential roles. With all that winning, why does that image make me uncomfortable then?

Date in education helps personalize education

Technology allows teachers to better understand the individualized needs of their students.

Much of the excitement surrounding technology and education centers on accessibility. Students in rural India can now take classes from Harvard professors by simply saving enough money for a few hours a week in an internet café. That is exciting stuff, and at Rukuku, we hope to further facilitate the opening of new educational channels around the globe. At the other end of the spectrum, though, technology is creating new opportunities to understand the specific strengths, weaknesses, and educational needs of individual students. In other words, technology is not only making education more global, but more personal as well.

The value of this should be clear for any student that’s gotten hung up on one aspect of the lesson and fallen behind on the rest of the material as a result. That value should also be clear to any student that’s daydreamed away a class period while the teacher reviewed and rehashed old material for the sake of a few students that are still struggling to understand.

Picturing it, though, is a little discomforting. I see a room full of kids absorbed in their computer screens in the same way many kids are absorbed in computer or TV screens once they get home. Automated programs sit on the other side of those screens, rather than real people. Teachers serve as facilitators and tutors, not as the foci of attention. Few educators are fully comfortable with that picture either, and most pilot programs utilizing such technology limit daily use and offer that information to help teachers in their traditional classrooms as well.

To me, using computers and limiting computer use are both great ideas, but it will be difficult to maintain the proper balance, especially if it turns out that letting the students work on the computer a little longer might be a little lighter on the teachers’ work load and a little better for the test scores. I know, I know. All the teachers reading this are gasping. I used to be a teacher, though, and I know the pleasure of making it a video day now and then. And yes, we still used videos when I was teaching. It was not that long ago.

The point is, these computer programmers are smart. And they will eventually figure out how to consistently make test scores higher through these programs, even if it takes five or ten years. Does that mean students should be interacting with automated computer programs all day? Some of time, yes. All of the time, no. Reaching the right balance will be the challenge.

I work for a tech company and obviously see computer screens as potentially positive in many, many aspects of education and of life. At Rukuku, we are trying to connect people all over the world to fully develop that potential. At the same time, the social aspect is an important element in education, especially for children. We do our best to maintain that aspect by using old-fashioned data collectors, also known as teachers, while still taking advantage of technology to expand the reach of those teachers.

Individualized student data can and should be an important tool for teachers, and we are always exploring ways in which we can offer more highly personalized options for our users. At the end of the day, though, nothing replaces the personal interactions that students have with their teachers and each other, even if those interactions take place across electronic networks stretching from Silicon Valley to Himalayan mountaintops.

Discovery and decline

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Photo Credit: (NASA/Robert Markowitz)

The space shuttle Discovery’s final voyage over the Washington, DC area (and over my head) Tuesday morning was a spectacular sight. Unfortunately, it was also a spectacular reminder of the declining emphasis on science and mathematics in the American education system.

Yes, the space shuttle program had many faults. Its fatality rate was alarmingly high. It probably even deserved to be ended – but its end serves as a powerful symbol of our muddled priorities. Over the years, the space program inspired many people to become science, engineering and mathematics professionals. So whatever your views on federal spending happen to be, it is telling when there is about eighty times more money allocated for military spending (most of it to support our increasingly bizarre nation-building and intervention in the Middle East) than for NASA.

This attitude trickles down to the school system. American students’ science and math scores have remained very stagnant compared to those of other developed, and even developing, nations around the world. The problem starts with teachers: we have fewer and fewer qualified and passionate professionals teaching science and math because the inspiration and the incentives just aren’t there. The few who do exist are not sufficiently rewarded by the system.

Granted, the United States continues to have a good environment for encouraging tech innovation – private sector technology titans like the late Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are ample proof of this. Sadly, we’re not doing a good job inspiring the next generation of innovators.

Pulling the education system out of the past

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How will online learning help to update our antiquated attitudes towards education?

Following directions vs. taking initiative. The very act of taking a class online is a major step forward in demonstrating an initiative to learn. A student who willingly takes a class that interests him/her is much more likely to succeed than one who feels he/she is doing so at someone else’s behest. The teacher-student relationship changes from a hierarchical one to a mutually beneficial partnership. Such an environment is far more conducive to taking responsibility for one’s own education.

Tolerance of discussion and questioning. With a varied market of services, educators, and classes, those who want to learn will be able to shop around and choose how they want to learn. Informed consumers who don’t wish to be handed a boilerplate no-questions-asked version of a subject – and we think most people who take the initiative to take a class are such consumers – will be able to select the type of instruction they want.

Allowing students, parents, and stakeholders to have a say in what should be taught. Because the student (and other involved stakeholders such as the parents) becomes the consumer, education providers have a serious incentive to offer the classes that are most relevant to the student’s needs. This simple market mechanism – the desire to benefit the consumer – is a serious deficit in public education.

Online technology is changing the conversation about how we ought to learn. We think this is great – every system requires occasional questioning and updating. Our education system needs it more than anything else.