Op-Ed Contributor - The Test Passes, Colleges Fail - NYTimes.com
Huuuuuuuge holeS. I mean huge. And also so what.
Tags: new_york, education, testing, SAT, college, admission, binghamton about 11 hours ago and saved by2 people -All Annotations (2) -About
in list: watch for responses
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Most revealingly, graduation rates actually declined at the seven SUNY campuses that did not raise their cutoffs and whose entering students’ SAT scores from 1997 to 2001 were stable or rose only modestly. Even at Binghamton, always the most selective of SUNY’s research universities, the graduation rate declined by 2.8 percent.
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by comparing graduation rates at SUNY campuses that raised the SAT admissions bar with those that didn’t, we have a controlled experiment of sorts that can fairly conclusively tell us whether SAT scores were accurate predictors of whether a student would get a degree.
The short answer is: yes, they were.
College Board Will Offer a New Test Next Fall - NYTimes.com
Tags: education, testing, high_school on 2008-10-23 -All Annotations (2) -About
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It will cost less than $10 per student, College Board officials said, and schools and districts will pay for it. College Board officials described the test as voluntary and “low-stakes,” and said the results would be shared only with teachers, parents, students and schools.
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Officials offered to provide the names of educators from interested schools and districts, and subsequently made available two people: Susan Rusk, the coordinator of counseling for the Washoe County School District in Reno, Nev., and James R. Choike, a professor of mathematics at Oklahoma State University.
Mrs. Rusk is on the College Board’s board of trustees, and Dr. Choike helped develop ReadiStep.
America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree - Chronicle.com
Many of Marty Nemko's proposed solutions are in fact more of the same, and arguably caused this mess.
Tags: academia, education, college, testing on 2008-10-20 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (4) -About
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Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later.
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most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education.
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You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.
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Value added. A national test, which could be developed by the major testing companies, should measure skills important for responsible citizenship and career success. Some of the test should be in career contexts: the ability to draft a persuasive memo, analyze an employer's financial report, or use online research tools to develop content for a report.
Study of Standardized Admissions Tests Is Big Draw at College Conference - NYTimes.com
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he report raised key questions for every college and university: “Are you using the tests in a responsible manner and in the way they were intended? Is your use of the test relevant to your particular institution’s mission? Are there alternatives?”
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“There are kids who walk into the test who don’t have calculators,” she said. “Forget about things we can’t control — like having to take two buses to the test, and it’s cold. I’ve got kids in the Chicago projects who go to some free test prep place, and their scores might go up a point.”
College Panel Calls for Less Focus on SATs
growing concerns that the frenzy over standardized college admissions tests is misshaping secondary education and feeding a billion-dollar test-prep industry that encourages students to try to game the tests.
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what is needed is a new achievement test, pitched to a broad group of students, that would predict college grades as well as or better than available tests.
Using such an achievement test in admissions would “encourage high schools to broaden and improve curricula,”
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test preparation and coaching results in an increase of 20 to 30 points on the SAT, which it calls “a modest gain (on the old 1600 scale)
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“It would be much better for the country,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said in an interview, “to have students focusing on high school courses that, based on evidence, will prepare them well for college and also prepare them well for the real world beyond college, instead of their spending enormous amounts of time trying to game the SAT.”
Reforming the Requirement-Free Curriculum
Some prominent institutions, such as Columbia University or the University of Chicago, are famous for what they require of all undergraduates. Brown University has for the last 40 years been much loved in some circles, and disdained in others, for what it doesn’t require.
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Brown was potentially playing a key role in the way it is calling on every department to consider its general education role and not just its role in training majors.
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two and a half pages and addressed to students, urging them to do specific things that the curriculum doesn’t force on them (The statement, already sent to new students, is at the end of the plan).
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In endorsing the e-portfolio idea, the Brown plan explicitly considers and rejects the alternative way to judge progress of undergraduates — the use of standardized tests such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment that have been endorsed as a key part of assessment by the Spellings Commission and others. “Such tests not only run counter to Brown’s educational philosophy, they also fail to capture the full range of our students’ educational experiences,”
Digital Natives » Technology and collaboration: can DN manage their own learning activities?
Andre Valle posts on Fridays. His intro: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/digitalnatives/2008/09/05/digital-natives-around-the-world-introduction/
Tags: collaboration, education, teaching, learning, social_network, digital_native, testing, brazil on 2008-09-13 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (4) -About
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brazilian students are themselves using tools such as instant messaging, e-mail, and Orkut (the Google Networking Tool that is most popular here, such as Facebook in North America) to create clusters of students who intend to reach a common goal
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technology is actually empowering these students to find their own paths, their own way to practice whatever they are learning in their own ways
The Reality Club: Responses to WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt
Tags: psychology, religion, morality, voting, republican, democrat, genome-environment_interaction, computer, model, neuro, serotonin, dopamine, parenting, evolution, science_is_a_method, testing, social_network, jonathan_haidt on 2008-09-11 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (31) -About
in list: religion
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His research, if he is to use lofty adjectives (largely meaningless in my experience) such as 'innate' to describe social structures and desires, must encompass a wider range of societies.
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Happiness ratings are highest in the socialist societies, while lowest in right wing authoritarian societies. This list could be extended.
Why, then, do right wing partisans ignore this evidence and continue to support policies that are patently dysfunctional? I believe it is because, having stated a position, based on either their own family values or those dictated by their religion, they are loathe to change their minds and declare that they have been wrong.
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Right wing positions are more frequently associated with Protestant evangelicals and with traditional (Reagan) Catholics. Often the leaders of these groups (e.g. television evangelists, sinning priests) epitomize the opposite of the stated values. But both of these groups embrace forgiveness, absolution, being born again. Other groups—atheists, non-fundamentalist Jews and non-fundamentalist Protestants—do not have the option of absolution; they make firmer demands on themselves
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Once you set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it's easy to collect the data to support them. The flaw is in the characterization process itself.
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Only some professional philosophers, jurists, scientists and academics believe that the principal point of political argument (or most any argument) is, or ought to be, truth rather than persuasion, and that an argument's principal appeal should be reason rather than passion.
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Like other biological systems, moral intuition consists of an imperfect community of jerry-rigged faculties. Societies further combine these universal ingredients in creatively different ways.
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a rational analysis of voting suggests that the core act of modern democratic government makes absolutely no sense. Economists would literally call voting "irrational" because it violates the preferences of the people who engage in it. For some reason, people decide to vote even though they would not buy a lottery ticket with identical odds, cost, and payoff. Economists typically think that people who vote are making a mistake, or there are other benefits to voting that we have not considered. For example, early scholars noted that people might vote in order to fulfill a sense of civic duty or to preserve the right to vote. Later scholars have also pointed out that people might vote because they enjoy expressing themselves in the same way they enjoy expressing themselves when they cheer for their favorite team at a ballgame. But these explanations beg the question, "Why?" It is a tautology to say that people vote because they feel like voting.
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the rational analysis of voting overlooks important psychological features of human social networks that we have known about for some time.
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the media does not reach the masses directly. Instead, a group of "opinion leaders"—a coinage they may have invented—usually acts as intermediary,
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the more polarized we become by befriending only people with similar ideologies, the greater incentive we have to participate in politics.
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cascades are primarily local phenomena, occurring in a smaller part of the population closely connected to an individual. As it turns out, this is exactly what we have been finding in our other studies of the spread of obesity, smoking, and happiness. These phenomena can spread to our friends (1 degree of separation), our friends' friends (2 degrees), and our friends' friends' friends (3 degrees), but not much further. This "3 Degree Rule" suggests that the power of one individual to influence many is limited by the effect of competing waves of influence that emanate from everyone else in the network.
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In other words, one very important reason why people vote Republican is because their parents did. However, other studies have shown that the decision to affiliate with any political party and the strength of this attachment are significantly influenced by genes.
These initial twin studies suggested political ideas are heritable, but they said little about political behavior. That changed this year when we published a new study in the American Political Science Review that examined the heritability of voter participation.
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research to link specific genes to political phenotypes, we established a direct association between voter turnout and monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) and a gene-environment interaction between turnout and the serotonin transporter (5HTT) gene among those who frequently participated in religious activities. In other research we have also found an association between voter turnout and a dopamine receptor (DRD2) gene that is mediated by a significant association between that gene and the tendency to affiliate with a political party. Thus we are beginning to find specific genes that can help us to predict who will vote and who won't.
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The philosophical framework of liberalism makes it hard for Democrats to articulate the intuitions that most people share. Caring for a particular, individual baby, even a "special needs" baby, and being part of a particular, individual family, even a complex, messy family, are intrinsic human goods. Politics should help people achieve them successfully.
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belief make tacit claims about normativity: claims not merely about how we human beings think and behave, but about how we should think and behave. Factual beliefs like "water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen" and ethical beliefs like "cruelty is wrong" are not expressions of mere preference. To really believe a proposition (whether about facts or values) is also to believe that one has accepted it for legitimate reasons.
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Despite the remonstrations of people like Jonathan Haidt and Richard Shweder, science has long been in the values business. Scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; it is the result of scientists making their best effort to value principles of reasoning that reliably link their beliefs to reality, through valid chains of evidence and argument.
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This reliable failure of human reasoning is just that—a failure of reasoning. It does not suggest that there isn't a single correct answer to the Monty Hall problem. While it might seem the height of arrogance to say it, the people who actually understand the Monty Hall problem really do hold the "logical high ground."
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Haidt appears to consider it an intellectual virtue to adopt, uncritically, the moral categories of his subjects. But where is it written that everything that people do or decide in the name of "morality" deserves to be considered part its subject matter?
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counties of
the US that produce the wealth and innovation voted overwhelmingly
Democratic and the counties of the US that depend on government
subsidy or that simply underperform economically voted overwhelmingly
Republican. -
the Republican success of the last
generation, since Nixon and Reagan cracked the code, has been to
exploit irrelevant (to national policy) anxieties. We are at the
point where the national maneuvering for office has nothing to do with
argument (so much for folks who say that "the economy should be
Obama's best argument") and everything to do with positioning a
message between now and election day so that pulling the lever or
pushing the button or punching the chad for one candidate makes you
feel morally satisfied, which is to say, less anxious and guilty and
ashamed. -
the
humanistic culture of the orator from Demosthenes to Martin Luther
King Jr. is decisively gone. We don't fully understand what's
replacing it, but it's happening all around us—you might even call
it a third culture...
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It is common to make the assumption that people are thinking when they vote and they are making reasoned choices. I harbor no such illusion. No argument I have ever gotten into with these people, (despite avoiding talking to them, I sometimes can't resist saying something true) has ever convinced anyone of anything. They are not reasoning, nor do they want to try. They simply believe what they believe.
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It is all very nice to come up with complex analyses of what is going on. As is often the case, the real answer is quite simple. Most people can't think very well. They were taught not to think by religion and by a school system that teaches that knowledge of state capitals and quadratic equations is what education is all about and that well reasoned argument and original ideas will not help on a multiple choice test.
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they are not equipped to think about politics and, in my mind, they are not equipped to vote. The fact that we let them vote while failing to encourage them to think for themselves is a real problem for our society.
Jonathan Drori on what we think we know | Video on TED.com
"children do worse after they're taught"
Tags: reference, education, video, teaching, model, theory, testing, earth_science, physics, biology on 2008-09-10 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Obama on Education - Ezra Klein
lot of lame argument, but better toward the end
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chance to fulfill their God-given potential
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children here in Dayton are growing up competing with children not only in Detroit, but in Delhi as well.
What matters, then, isn’t what you do or where you live, but what you know
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Without a good pre-school education, our children are less likely to keep up with their peers. Without a high school diploma, you’re likely to make about three times less than a college graduate. And without a college degree or industry certification, it’s harder and harder to find a job that can help you support your family and keep up with rising costs.
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an education agenda that moves beyond party and ideology and focuses instead on what will make the most difference in a child’s life. My plan calls for giving every child a world-class education from the day they’re born until the day they graduate from college. It’s a plan that starts with investing in early-childhood education because we know that children in these programs are more likely to score higher in reading and math, more likely to graduate high school and attend college, more likely to hold a job and earn more in that job. And it’s a plan that will finally put a college degree within reach for anyone who wants one by providing a $4,000 tax credit to any middle class student who’s willing to serve their community or their country.
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We need assessments that can improve achievement by including the kinds of research, scientific investigation, and problem-solving that our children will need to compete in a 21st century knowledge economy.
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Service Scholarship program that will recruit top talent into the profession, and place these new teachers in overcrowded districts and struggling rural towns, or hard-to-staff subjects like special education in schools across the nation. To prepare these new teachers, I’ll create more Teacher Residency Programs that will build on a law I recently passed and train 30,000 high-quality teachers a year, especially in math and science. To support our teachers, we’ll expand mentoring programs that pair experienced, successful teachers with new recruits.
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when our teachers succeed in making a real difference in our children’s lives, we should reward them for it by finding new ways to increase teacher pay
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we can increase the number of students taking college-level courses; expand innovation and school choice; invest in the schools of tomorrow; and put a quality teacher in every classroom – all for the cost of just a few days in Iraq
Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading?
Tags: reading, education, literature, fiction, testing, teaching on 2008-07-27 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”Add Sticky Note
- the problem is the curriculum will inevitably become outdated, and probably very quickly.posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-27
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“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”Add Sticky Note
- what's onineposted by taryn930 on 2008-07-27
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Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.
“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”
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Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.”
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Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages.
Study Finds Little Benefit in Revamped SAT
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The revised SAT costs $45
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Since the new SAT was introduced, Mr. Schaeffer said, 41 colleges and universities have dropped their requirements that applicants submit standardized test scores to be admitted. The College Board reports found that for black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian students — and for girls — SAT scores are slightly more predictive of college success than are high school grades. They also found that scores on the new writing section predict students’ college grades slightly better than scores on the other sections, reading and math.
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“The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test is of first-year college performance,” the studies said.
College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success.
How to Unleash Your Creativity
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There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.
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giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.
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take an adventure once a week
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walk out the door for 20 minutes or so and see what happens to your thinking. When people walk, they often begin to integrate the insights and intuitions
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When children are very young, they all express creativity, but by the end of the first grade, very few do so. This is because of socialization. They learn in school to stay on task and to stop daydreaming and asking silly questions. As a result, the expression of new ideas is largely shut down. We end up leaving creative expression to the misfits—the people who can’t be socialized.
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we have a mythology about artistry that tends to be very daunting
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In the laboratory, failure also produces a phenomenon called resurgence—the emergence of behaviors that used to be effective in that situation—that leads to a competition among behaviors and to new interconnections. In other words, failure actually stimulates creativity directly.
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groups inhibit a lot of creative expression. Dominant people tend to do most of the talking, for one thing. But when people shift, everyone ends up working on the problem.
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hypnagogic state. Think about how deliberate Dalí and Edison were or about how deliberate Julia’s techniques are. You don’t need to leave creativity to chance.
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many people make the mistake of believing that there’s just no time to be creative, even to do something simple like paying attention to your thoughts and capturing them.
Epstein: Well, high tech is making this easier, fortunately. These days all you have to do to capture an idea is to pick up your PDA or memo recorder or even just to leave a message for yourself on your voice mail. You can even capture new melodies that way. -
I see our society moving in the wrong direction—toward an obsession with raising scores on standardized tests.
Cameron: I think that creativity is contagious and that the best thing we can do for children is to model for them what it’s like to be a creative individual.
Are we too clever for our own good?
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'The answer is to grow up,' he says, 'follow the evidence wherever it leads, and acknowledge that reality never extracts as heavy a price as ignorance of reality.'
A Do-It-Yourself SAT Class, With No Whining, or Parents, Allowed
- 90 minutes three times a week since January. Seven motivated kids. Think of the possibilities.post by taryn930 on 2008-03-28
The Best Way to Study: Practice Tests
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These results clearly show that the key aspect in high performance is repeated testing of the material, not repeated studying of the material. To rephrase that sentence in neuroscience speak, repeated retrieval of the memory improves performance, not repeated encoding.
Books: None of the Above: Books: The New Yorker
What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race.
by Malcolm Gladwell
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“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
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It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
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“As far as I can determine, no clinical or school psychologists using the WISC over the relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental retardation became more lenient over time,” Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. “Yet no one drew the obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They simply were not making any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion for mental retardation.”
Report Finds Better Scores in New Crop of Teachers - New York Times
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The most successful educational systems in the world, like those in Singapore and Finland, recruit teachers from among the top third of their college graduates. By contrast, some studies over the years have found that the United States recruits from the bottom third.
Bard President to Meet With City Over C Grade - New York Times
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“You have a system that is broken and that is failing, and they are desperately trying to improve it. But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” he said. “There are a couple of places, and we’re one of them, that really do something different and well.
“Not all plants are weeds,” he said, “so why are you spraying insecticide on the whole thing?”
Abolish the SAT — The American, A Magazine of Ideas
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- I imagine a lot of people in the anti-testing crowd are waving this article around with a sense of vindication. Murray manages a sucker-punch with this one. His argument does not derive from an opposition to broad-scale testing. Instead, Murray contends the current SAT should be abolished because it is a "PC" (and hence less valid) version of its older, truer self, which he believes was a good measure of inherent aptitude (think "g" a-la his and Herrnstein's Bell Curve).post by taryn930 on 2007-08-24
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Conant’s cause was as unambiguously liberal in the 1940s as income redistribution is today.