Kim Ibara's List: Educational research

• Mainly collaborative some individual
• Formative with summative
• Student-centric
• Individual learning programs
• Can be applied across several areas of learning.
• Applicable to real life situations
• Transformative (learning through technology)
• Multiple sources – self, peer & teacher/mentor
• Anywhere anytime learning facilitated by transformative technology use

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• Once we know what verbs you're intending to activate in the classroom, then we can start talking about the technology nouns that will support these activities and experiences
• While the technology nouns are ever changing and improving, the educational VERBS remain the same. Powerful learning VERBS do not go obsolete, so neither will your instructional plans designed around them.

• • Intervention classes: Technology is integrated into every intervention class.
   
  • Change management leadership by principal: Leaders provide time for teacher professional learning and collaboration at least monthly.
   
  • Online collaboration: Students use technology daily for online collaboration
     (games/simulations and social media.)
   
  • Core subjects: Technology is integrated into core curriculum weekly or more
     frequently.
   
  • Online formative assessments: Assessments are done at least weekly.
   
  • Student/computer ratio: Lower ratios improve outcomes.
   
  • Virtual field trips: With more frequent use, virtual trips are more powerful. The best
     schools do these at least monthly.
   
  • Search engines: Students use daily.
   
  • Principal training: Principals are trained in teacher buy-in, best practices, and
     technology-transformed learning.
• Intervention classes: Technology is integrated into every intervention class.

• In classrooms that focus on performance, students often conclude that grades are more important than learning and what isn’t graded isn’t worth learning. Performance-oriented classrooms emphasize student-to-student competition by using class rank, percentile scores, curved grading, and grade-point averages. An emphasis on performance also tends to reinforce students’ belief that achievement is based on fixed, innate intelligence and that trying harder won’t make any difference. All this can make cheating seem like a viable strategy to students.
• In classrooms that focus on performance, students often conclude that grades are more important than learning and what isn’t graded isn’t worth learning
• In classrooms that focus on mastery, the opposite applies. When students see the inherent value of their work and regard it as personally meaningful, they are much less likely to cheat. When the goal is mastery, students work to improve themselves, not to outscore their classmates. When students get frequent formative feedback, they are more likely to buy into the idea that they can actually get smarter by refining the way they work
• Zito and McQuillan believe that teachers’ framing of goal orientation is the key to heading off classroom cheating
• three characteristics of classroom assignments
• had inherent
• intrinsically motivating
• Real-world relevance
• Personally meaningful
• assignments that demanded a demonstration of comprehensive understanding of a topic
• Requiring proof of understanding
• promoted engagement and honest work
• important to give formative feedback
• allow students to polish their open-ended assignments to meet high standards

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• Martin Haberman, who coined the phrase "pedagogy of poverty," related a conversation he had with his grandson's kindergarten teacher at a selective school. "Wouldn't it make more sense to admit the children who don't know their shapes and colors, and teach them these things?" he asked. The teacher looked at him as if he were "leftover mashed potatoes," but he persisted:
• "The children we teach best are those who need us least."
• In an almost offhand way, McClelland then issued what struck me as a truly provocative and profound challenge. Why, he asked, do we spend time trying to figure out which criteria best predict success in higher education? Why are colleges looking for the most qualified students? "One would think that the purpose of education is precisely to improve the performance of those who are not doing very well," he mused. "If the colleges were interested in proving that they could educate people, high-scoring students might be poor bets because they would be less likely to show improvement in performance."
• Of course that's not how most colleges see the purpose of education. Like other institutions that get to choose whom to admit, they're looking for the applicants they think are ready to succeed. When you boil it down, that means excluding those who most need what they have to offer.
• It's one thing to admit this guiltily, and something else again to build an admissions industry -- from kindergarten to graduate school -- around an unapologetic attempt to find the students who will be easiest to educate.

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• What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults.
• The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
• With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
• creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward.
• It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”
• there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children

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• My research has shown that praising students for the process they have engaged in—the effort they applied, the strategies they used, the choices they made, the persistence they displayed, and so on—yields more long-term benefits than telling them they are "smart" when they succeed.
• Teachers should also emphasize that fast learning is not always the deepest and best learning and that students who take longer sometimes understand things at a deeper level
• Some teachers teach their students about the different mindsets directly.
• Teachers can also ask their students to choose an area in which they would like to improve and then to establish a personal goal that would be a big reach for them.
• Through such exercises, teachers are transmitting crucial information— telling students that they view them all as having intelligence that they can choose to develop
• Meaningful learning tasks need to challenge every student in some way. It is crucial that no student be able to coast to success time after time; this experience can create the fixed-mindset belief that you are smart only if you can succeed without effort.
• Meaningful learning tasks give students a clear sense of progress leading to mastery. This means that students can see themselves doing tasks they couldn't do before and understanding concepts they couldn't understand before.
• Homework assignments should not feel like mindless, repetitive exercises; rather, they should present novel problems for students to solve, require them to apply what they've learned in new ways, or ask them to stretch to the next level.

• Grade for Growth

   

  The way teachers evaluate their students' work can also help students develop a growth mindset. At one high school in Chicago, when students don't master a particular unit of study, they don't receive a failing grade—instead, they get a grade of Not Yet. Students are not ashamed of that grade because they know that they're expected to master the material, if not the first time, then the next time, or the next.
• Whenever students say they can't do something or are not good at something, the teacher should add, "yet." Whenever students say they don't like a certain subject, the teacher should say, "yet." This simple habit conveys the idea that ability and motivation are fluid.

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• There is, however, someone who recognizes that the data is being misinterpreted.  NEAToday published remarks from National Association of Secondary School Principals Executive Director, Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi, that have taken "a closer look at how the U.S. reading scores on PISA compared with the rest of the world’s, overlaying it with the statistics on how many of the tested students are in the government’s free and reduced lunch program for students below the poverty line." Tirozzi pointed out, “Once again, we’re reminded that students in poverty require intensive supports to break past a condition that formal schooling alone cannot overcome.”
• While the overall PISA rankings ignore such differences in the tested schools, when groupings based on the rate of free and reduced lunch are created, a direct relationship is established.

• The professor said he did find a way to greatly reduce cheating on homework in his class. He switched to a “studio” model of teaching, in which students sit in small groups working through tutorials on computers while professors and teaching assistants roam the room answering questions, rather than a traditional lecture. With lectures, he detected cheating on about 11 percent of homework problems, but now he detects copying on only about 3 percent of them.
• It might help that he shares findings from his study to his students, showing them that cheaters are much more likely to get C’s and D’s on exams than those who work out homework problems on their own.