Tracy Tuten's List: education

• It used to be that the SAT was   distinguished from its   competitor the ACT by the fact   that the former was seen as   measuring aptitude and being   effectively un-coachable, while   the latter was a gauge of   achievement in learning.
• At the risk of sounding   pejorative, I'd say that I was   expecting the test to be a   measure of who I was, while some   of my fellow students and their   parents treated it more as a   test of how they could present   themselves to admissions   officers.  And while I wouldn't   suggest that people tend to   think of it in these terms, I   believe that the latter   perception relies on the   academically damaging belief   that an individual student's   capabilities need not matter to   what goals he sets for himself.    That perception leads people to   believe that there is something   inherently unfair about a test   that you can't study for.
• And if   after four years of high school   they haven't developed much   skill for reasoning, that's okay   – they can take preparatory   courses to learn how to fake it   for an exam, and let that be   their stepping stone toward   academic accomplishment.  As a   society that values the promise   of formal education more than   the satisfaction of actual   learning, we have precipitated   the death of aptitude.  We are   afraid to acknowledge that it   exists, because aptitude,   whether the product of inborn   talent or effective rearing,   makes some people better suited   than others for certain goals.
• Lori Gottlieb, writing in The   Atlantic last year, claimed that   child-rearing in the current   generation has been excessively   focused on preserving   self-esteem.  As an illustration   of one symptom of this, Gottlieb   quoted clinical psychologist   Wendy Mogel as saying that   parents are actually relieved to   be told that their struggling   children are learning disabled,   so that today "every child is   either learning disabled,   gifted, or both – there's no   curve left, no average."  To   claim a learning disability is   the only way to set legitimate   lower benchmarks for   performance.  Kids are never   just bad at anything anymore,   because that's seen as being   more harmful to self-esteem.
• But my worries about the   individual effects of the death   of aptitude are dwarfed by my   concern for its effect on the   institutions of higher learning   that those individuals are   entering.  College is not a   one-directional relationship of   dispensing knowledge to young   people.  The entire institution   gains or loses value on the   basis of what its students put   into it.  By telling students   with low aptitude and low   interest that they can, should,   and must strive to accomplish   the same things as their   higher-achieving peers, I fear   that we're saturating higher   education with people who   subtract value from their   institutions by committing   minimum effort and lowering   whatever curve still exists for   the measurement of performance.
• We all seem to   agree that standards for college   readiness need to improve, but   you'll hear virtually no one   asserting that when those   standards are not met, the   student ought to leave off   college altogether, or to defer   it until they have acquired, by   sheer will or by natural   intellectual growth, the   aptitude to be successful at the   proper level.  Indeed, just as   common in criticism of education   is the sentiment that we must   see to it that more children   enter and complete college.  But   if those children don't have the   aptitude to do so, the goal of   improving college curriculum   contradicts the goal of   college-for-all.
• We can't keep   pretending that there is no such   thing as aptitude and that every   child has equal cause to vie for   the topmost positions of   intellectual esteem.  It does a   disservice to the student and   the school in kind.

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• Education policymakers have long assumed that students who learn more have been taught more effectively. A startling new study conducted by an international consortium of scholars at Peutêtre University in Toronto has thrown this assumption into question.
• While gains varied slightly from one section of a course to the next, the starkest differences were between those who took a course and those who did not, and those who did the work and those who did not.

• Other scholars were quick to dismiss the findings. “The Peutêtre findings rest on the long-disproven axiom that you can only learn subject matter through a transmission model,” said Lorraine Caulk, professor of educational neurobehavior at Instructors College in Iowa City. “In fact, research has shown that when we empower children as self-initiating scholars, they start to exhibit strategic thought behaviors without the hierarchical modeling of traditional task performance.”

   

  “I’m not sure what that means,” retorted Feldspar. “If Dr. Caulk would care to clarify her statement, I’d be happy to try to respond to it.” Dr. Caulk replied that she was using standard research terminology and that Dr. Feldspar should acquaint himself with the literature.
• William Pollock
• Jeff Howard at http://efficacy.org/Strategy/tabid/246/default.aspx#/?CSSTabID=1 led me to believe and promote the saying in my schools “Think you can… Work hard… Get smart! Smart is what you become not what you are. Novel isn’t it?

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• 2. Look after your work space

   

  At the end of each day, take a few minutes to tidy your desk.

   

  Though this has a practical benefit, it also has a psychological effect too, in that it gives you closure on the day and gives you a feeling of control over the work.

• 4. Set parameters for success

   

  What makes a successful day? How much do you need to achieve in order to be satisfied with the day’s work?

   

  Don’t set the bar too high. If you plan to do as much as physically possible, then the best you can do is just reach your target, but anything less is a failure.

   

  But if you set the bar at a level you know you can achieve consistently, then you can exceed your own target. I used a target of 500 words per day, because I knew I could achieve that even on a bad day.

• 7. Focus on one thing at a time

   

  You can only fully engage with the work if you know exactly what you are trying to do.

   

  There will be times when this is difficult becasue there are so many things to do, but you just have to acknowledge them, put them to one side, and tell yourself, “it’s OK, I’ll get to that stuff later”

• 9. Finish things as you go

   

  Try not to leave things unfinished. Stay with the task until you are done.

   

  If you leave big gaps, you are saving up all the hard work for later, but if you finish the section, you can move forward knowing that it is done.

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• Peer assessment helps students reflect and exposes them to different ideas. It scales assessment and allows large online classes to use open-ended assignments. However, it requires students to spend significant time grading. How can we lower this grading burden while maintaining quality? This paper integrates peer and machine grading to preserve the robustness of peer assessment and lower grading burden. In the identify-verify pattern, a grading algorithm first predicts a student grade and estimates confidence, which is used to estimate the number of peer raters required. Peers then identify key features of the answer using a rubric. Finally, other peers verify whether these feature labels were accurately applied. This pattern adjusts the number of peers that evaluate an answer based on algorithmic confidence and peer agreement. We evaluated this pattern with 1370 students in a large, online design class. With only 54% of the student grading time, the identify-verify pattern yields 80-90% of the accu- racy obtained by taking the median of three peer scores, and provides more detailed feedback. A second experiment found that verification dramatically improves accuracy with more raters, with a 20% gain over the peer-median with four raters. However, verification also leads to lower initial trust in the grading system. The identify-verify pattern provides an ex- ample of how peer work and machine learning can combine to improve the learning experience.