Author: gnowosad

In this Te@chThought article written on September 21, 2014 by the legendary Terry Heick, Terry suggests that traditional grades “work” for students who come to school for any reason other than intellectual curiosity, literacy, or understanding; and that we need to design systems to communicate progress and performance to students, parents, and communities.

Posted by Ian Jukes

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Yesterday, Justin Tarte shared a thought about grading that’s indicative of a growing dissatisfaction with grading in education. So let’s take a look at what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it, shall we?

Great point. Mark Barnes also recently started a facebook group for throwing out letter grades altogether. Clearly this is an issue, even if it’s not new.

Should grades support, report, or punish?

If to support, support who?

If to report, report what, and to whom?

If to punish–to “hold students accountable like in the real world,” does it work like that? Does this work for the students?

Who Do Letter Grades “Work” For?

Our current system of letter grades works well for many kinds of students. These are the students who learn to play the game. Form relationships with teachers. Can see the rules and parts of the games–which assignments matter, what the teacher values, how to format responses, how to use a rubric, how to study, and so on.

They also probably read and write fairly well. They value their own academic image–how people see them as a student. Their grades, GPA, and assortment of certificates and achievements are a source of intense pride for these students. The grades function as an extrinsic reward that push them to wade through whatever you put in front of them because they see themselves as “smart” and successful, and that’s what smart and successful students do.

Letter grades may help students that “hate school,” and come just for extracurricular activities. If they get the grades, they play; if not, they don’t. Grades simplify it all for them. In short, grades “work” for students who come to school for any reason other than intellectual curiosity, literacy, or understanding.

Which means they don’t work for anyone.

What Should Grades “Do”?

We’ve talked in the past about alternatives to the letter grade, but this is something slightly different–looking at the mistakes we make in grading so that we can better design systems to communicate progress and performance to students, parents, and communities. And that’s what we want “grades” to do, right? Historically, grading has been expected to do two things:

1. First and foremost, give students some kind of idea how they’re doing, because–in our system of teaching and learning–we’re the content experts and how else would they know? (Hopefully it’s clear how crazy this is.)

2. Secondly, work as a living, breathing document of their academic travels–what they’ve studied and how they performed therein? (And hopefully here, it’s obvious how woefully grades perform in this role.)

What about “begin to communicate the nuance of the habits, character, knowledge, and critical thinking ability of the student right here in front of you”? To not reflect failures, but affection? Potential? Creativity? There is a much larger conversation here about curriculum design, instructional design, literacy, learning models, and even technology. But if we isolate letter grades as they are used now in the system we have now with the thinking we use now, we are left with the following.

7 Grading Mistakes That Haunt Students

1. Grading too much

Or worse, grading everything. What sort of masochism makes us think this is a good idea? It’s an incredible workload for you, and doesn’t do them any favors. An alternative? Be very selective about what you grade. Choose assignments that aren’t threatening, or confusing in exactly what it is that you’re measuring. In short, don’t grade “practice,” grade landmark assignments.

Or have no landmark assignments at all–use a “climate” of assessment that adjusts for the day-to-day drudgery of a classroom, and simply uses tests, quizzes, exams, projects, and the like as part-and-parcel to the process of learning.

2. Highlighting weaknesses

As used, grades highlight weakness, deficiency, and mistakes, which only motivates the most well-balanced, dedicated, and supported students.

Offer corrections to performance rather than mechanisms to help students reflect.

3. Use letters and numbers

They’re reductive–artifacts from an old way of teaching and learning that valued the institutions and the flags they fly over the students themselves. There’s got to be a better way. (See gamification in learning and alternatives to the letter grade to get the conversation started.)

4. Equate grades with understanding

Most teachers worth their salt don’t make this mistake, but everyone else in education–from university admissions to parents to businesses to the students and their peers–do. Grades are, at best, a reflection of how well the teacher designed an assessment to reflect the language of a particular academic standard. At worst, they’re subjective conjurings that mislead.

5. Averaging numbers

See Justin Tarte’s tweet above. The learning process isn’t gas mileage.

6. Waiting too long to grade

After a certain point, it’s less about feedback or reporting, and more about students “wanting credit” and teachers “needing to get grades in.”

7. Making them fixed

Rather than flexible. (See below.)

8. Not using the data

That’s the point, yes–using data to revise planned instruction. Not using that data-and those corresponding grades–to make key adjustments that keeps learning in their “ZPD” is a problem, no?

Students:Letter Grades::You:Credit Rating

The closest analogue I can think of for adults is the credit score. It acts as a record of what you’ve borrowed and what you repaid and have not repaid in an effort to predict–for someone that doesn’t know you well enough to make an evaluation of their own–the likelihood that you’ll repay. This predictor is reduced down to a number, arrived it by some combination of both accurate and mistaken reporting on behalf of the companies you’ve borrowed money from.

Within this number there is a lot going on–how frequently you borrow, how much you borrow, errors that claim you still owe money you paid, open accounts you forgot about years ago, and so on. And the next time you apply for credit somewhere–to buy a car, a house, even a cell phone–this is the number lenders go by, with cut scores of their own .

But even credit scores have multiple reporting agencies, mistakes drop off after a certain amount of time, and there are ways to get mistakes fixed, and strategies to reestablish credit after years of less-than-perfect decision-making.

As flawed a system as credit rating is–and it’s awful–it’s downright brilliant compared to letter grades. So how can we design that kid of flexibility in our grading system? Or better yet, something light years better? Parts of gamification in learning may help–especially badges, unlocks, and achievements–but that’s not it either.

As it exists, our current system for grading sets up the students that need it the most to fail. It provides a laundry lists of weaknesses and failures that often haunt students the rest of their lives–paint them as this or not that. More often than not, they lock students out of possibility by offering inaccurate and subjective evaluations of performance without letting anyone in on the joke.

That’s the dirty little secret about grades–and the public doesn’t know. If we admit grades are exactly that–best guesses that summon an alphanumeric character to reflect a student’s performance in “our” class, then they’re probably fine. But if we want something more–something student-centered that to “begins to communicate the nuance of the habits, character, knowledge, and critical thinking ability of the student right here in front of you“?

Well then, we’ve got some work to do. And the answer may lie in a combination of learning models and technology.

The Kinds Of Grading Mistakes That Haunt Students

This is a fantastic article written by Anya Kamenetz for Mindshift and published on September 23, 2014. In it she writes about the $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE, which is being billed as the largest-ever technology competition in the private sector, to “revolutionize global education.” XPRIZE is a nonprofit organization led by tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis. Previous XPRIZE contests produced the world’s first private space flight, a new method for cleaning up oil spills in the ocean, and a hyperefficient 100- mile-per-gallon car.

Posted by Ian Jukes

Original Source

A boy plays with a solar-powered computer tablet on Mount Wenchi, Mirab Shewa Zone of the Oromia Region of Ethiopia. (Courtesy of Tim Freccia/Xprize)

A rural tribe is living peacefully in the Kalahari desert, free of contact with the modern world. One day, a Coke bottle drops from the sky, falling from a passing airplane.

The villagers find many uses for this unfamiliar new technology: a fire starter, a musical instrument, a stamp for printing on cloth. But because of its very uniqueness, they start to fight over it, and one of the villagers decides that to preserve harmony, it’s best to return this “gift” to the gods.

The Gods Must Be Crazy, a South African comedy, was a global smash hit in the early 1980s. It’s only in the past decade, though, that its plot — or at least, the setup — has been adapted as a playbook for transforming education.

The idea: Some previously unknown technology could, all by itself, catalyze a revolution in children’s learning, especially in the developing world.

‘We don’t know if this is going to work, but if it does, it’s transformative, and why not try?’

The latest incarnation of this idea was announced this week. The $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE is being billed as the largest-ever technology competition in the private sector, to “revolutionize global education.”

XPRIZE is a nonprofit organization led by tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis. Previous XPRIZE contests produced the world’s first private space flight, a new method for cleaning up oil spills in the ocean, and a hyperefficient 100- mile-per-gallon car.

The winning team of the Global Learning XPRIZE, organizers say, will “develop a free, open-source and scalable software solution in 18 months that can enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic.” The software, says the challenge’s director, Matt Keller, will be designed to be deployed on very low cost Android tablet computers.

THE READING PROJECT

Keller explains that the idea emerged from his previous work with the One Laptop Per Child project. Announced in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, One Laptop Per Child has distributed over 2.4 million of its specially designed “XO” laptops and tablets around the world.

While the majority of these have gone to school systems, Negroponte and Keller ran a side experiment called The Reading Project, where solar-powered computers with literacy apps were distributed directly to children in remote areas of Ethiopia. The children were given no instruction in how to use them.

The initial experimental sites chosen were villages with no schools, no libraries, no printed material, even without road signs. “We tested the supposition that kids could teach each other how to read,” Keller says. “The theory was, if you had the right kind of application and design for self-learning, you could conceivably see a breakthrough.”

Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, has been researching the outcomes of the project, now called the Global Literacy Project, with sites in Uganda and the rural American South. She says that while the children haven’t learned to read, they have learned the English alphabet from the tablets alone. “Our data serves as a kind of germinating first round of evidence that this approach can really help many children,” she says.

The Global Learning XPRIZE grows from this seed. According to the press release for the XPRIZE, it aims to prove “that through technology a child can learn autonomously.”

Keller says this is important because an estimated 250 million children around the world lack basic literacy, and 58 million are not in school. Schools are overcrowded and teachers are undertrained.

“I did a lot of work in Afghanistan,” he says. “Teachers there are often just one grade more educated than the kids, and sometimes they’re not literate at all.”

But why not just spend the money to train teachers or build schools?

“Even just to get the kids that are out of school into school, you need to train 3 million more teachers and build 1.1 million more schools, which is going to take a really long time,” Keller says. “You can say you’re looking at a model that has arguably failed many, many, many kids. We’re not in the business of looking back.”

He says the time is ripe to gamble on new approaches.

NO GIRLS ALLOWED

Payal Arora is not so sure. A media and communication professor at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication in the Netherlands, she has studied a similar attempt at technologically driven self-learning, the Hole in the Wall project in India.

Started by Sugata Mitra, Hole in the Wall simply places computers with an Internet connection in locations where they will be accessible by children. Mitra’s concept of “minimally invasive education” won the 2013 TED Prize, given to a “visionary leader” with a “high-impact wish for the world.”

Most of the positive research on Hole in the Wall comes from Mitra himself and his collaborators. There are reports of children acquiring basic computer literacy and researching topics like genetics.

Arora visited a few such sites in the Himalayas and found very different results. “The two most popular things are porn and video games,” she says. “The boys download them and take over. It becomes a male domain, and daughters don’t want to go there.”

Mitra has responded publicly to Arora’s claims, calling them “armchair debate.”

Arora says the Global X Prize, like Hole in the Wall and One Laptop Per Child, represent not an evidence-based approach but an ideology: the belief that “Human resources are so deeply flawed that investments in technological resources will be much more effective.”

But in reality, she argues, “learning is never 100 percent self-directed. Of course we want children to be agents of their own learning, but no one in their right mind would say let’s get rid of human input, from parents, schools, or communities.”

Arora says that before we continue to sway resources toward a quick technological fix, she’d like to see “substantive evidence that self-directed learning autonomous from human mediators can be a stand-alone tool.”

Keller says his prize, if it works as designed, will generate exactly that evidence.

Unlike previous XPRIZE challenges, the final phase will be a controlled trial. Applications developed by the five finalist teams will be distributed to a few thousand children in West Africa, and the program deemed most effective at raising the kids’ basic literacy and math scores from a baseline will be called the winner.

“We don’t know if this is going to work,” he says. “But if it does, it’s transformative, and why not try?”

Khan Academy is on a mission to unlock the world’s potential. Most people think their intelligence is fixed. The science says it’s not. It starts with knowing you can learn anything. Join the movement at http://khanacademy.org/youcanlearnanything.

Posted by Delia Jenkins

Every child has the potential to be anything they set their minds to, and that includes kids who don’t think they’re smart. The Khan Academy believes in this, and they think kids only need to hear four magical words to get them started on the right path.

WASHINGTON — Twenty-two percent of workers laid off in the past five years are still unemployed, according to a new survey.

Posted by Sherwen Mohan

Original Source

The John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University surveyed more than 1,100 workers, including nearly 400 who are unemployed. A slim majority of laid-off workers in the survey, or 54 percent, said they received unemployment insurance when they lost their jobs. However, 83 percent of those who received benefits said the compensation ran out before they found jobs.

Congress dropped extended unemployment benefits at the end of last year, despite complaints from Democrats and a few Republicans. Last week House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who refused to allow a House vote reauthorizing the benefits, said that some unemployed people want to “just sit around” instead of trying to work.

The number of long-term unemployed in the country has fallen to 3 million, down from a high of 6.6 million in 2010. While some are finding jobs, others are no longer counted as unemployed because they’ve given up looking for work. Economists are unsure how much the decline in long-term joblessness owes to people finding jobs.

The Rutgers findings are consistent with a recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report on displaced workers, which found that among the 9.5 million workers laid off from January 2011 through December 2013, nearly a quarter remained unemployed in January of this year.

The BLS survey is a bit more positive than the Rutgers report because it shows some progress in recent years. Compared with its previous displaced workers survey in 2012, the government’s latest data show that more laid-off workers had gotten new jobs at the time of the survey. Among displaced workers who had lost jobs they’d held for more than three years, a majority of the re-employed were earning more money than in their previous positions — up from 46 percent in the previous survey.

HuffPost has been telling our readers’ stories about unemployment and bad pay. Have a story you’d like to share? Email us at workingpoor@huffingtonpost.com or give us a call at (408) 508-4833, and you can record your story in your own words. Please be sure to include your name and phone number.

Bob Marzano is known for, above all else, identifying “what works,” and doing so by reviewing and distilling research, then packaging it for schools and districts to use. Among his most frequently quoted “products” is the “Marzano 9?–9 instructional strategies that have been proven by research to “work” by yielding gains in student achievement. This September 18, 2014 article by  Dr. Kimberley Tyson and Te@chThought staff  turns the nine instructional strategies into infographic form.

Posted by Ian Jukes

Original Source

In education, louder than the call for innovation, engagement, thought, or self-direction is the call to be research-based.

In fact, being research-based may even trump being data-based, the two twins of modern ed reform. The former stems, in part, from deserved skepticism of trends that have little evidence of performance, and the latter comes from a similar place. The big idea behind the both is “proof”–having some kind of confidence that what we’re doing now works, and that because of both data and research, we can more or less nail down what exactly it is that we’re doing that works or doesn’t work, and why.

To be clear, being data or research-based isn’t anywhere close to fool-proof. So many of the modern trends and innovations that are “not grounded in research,” or don’t “have the data to support them” suffer here not because of a lack of possibility, potential, or design, but because of research and data itself being sluggish in their own study and performance.

But this is all way, way beside the point–a long-winded contextualizing for Robert Marzano’s work. Marzano is known for, above all else, identifying “what works,” and doing so by reviewing and distilling research, then packaging it for schools and districts to use. Among his most frequently quoted “products” is the “Marzano 9?–9 instructional strategies that have been proven by research to “work” by yielding gains in student achievement.

And so Dr. Kimberly Tyson thought to gather these nine instructional strategies into infographic form because like moths to a flame, teachers to infographics.

Marzano’s 9 Instructional Strategies  

1. Identifying similarities and differences
2. Summarizing and note taking
3. Reinforcing effort and providing recognition
4. Homework and practice
5. Non-linguistic representations
6. Cooperative learning
7. Setting objectives and providing feedback
8. Generating and testing hypotheses
9. Cues, questions, and advance organizers