Peer teaching for my kids? No thanks

Peer teaching has serious downsides.

Peer teaching* has become increasingly popular over the last 30-40 years, in conjunction with the rise of mixed ability grouping in K-12 public schools.  Typically involving a slower learner receiving instruction from an advanced student, this practice has significant downsides for both parties.

Students Act as Teachers sums ups the story of frustrated teachers in Manhattan who created a buddy program, enlisting older students to help teach struggling readers.  Part of the goal was to have the older students “get a dose of their own medicine by seeing how difficult it can be to teach”. How did it turn out?

The results, they said, were mixed.

This mirrors my observations, even though I’ve had at least one teacher insist there was abundant research strongly supporting the use of peer teaching.  That’s what she learned in graduate school.  As in many other aspects of “innovative” pedagogy, research of questionable quality is used to support instructional practices that are often implemented in a haphazard manner.  In one case I know, a student struggling in geometry was asked to tutor another student who was struggling in algebra.  The teacher insisted both would benefit, but as it turned out  the struggling geometry student received no help in her area of weakness.  Based on other conversations with this teacher, it was clear that the intended benefit was to strengthen social connections, promoting compassion and self-esteem that would ultimately pay off in improved geometry skills.  Spare me.

Not supported by research

The 2008 National Mathematics Advisory Panel reviewed “instruction in which students are primarily doing the teaching”, finding “only eight studies that met our standards for quality”.  Additionally, the Panel found 20 high-quality studies of cooperative and collaborative learning.   The only definitive benefit to students shown by any of these studies was an improvement in computation skills.  I’m imagining a scenario where one student is helping another in drilling math facts.  I can buy that.  Otherwise, peer teaching seems to be a waste of precious classroom time.  Here is how the Panel puts it.

There is suggestive evidence that peer tutoring improves computation skills in the elementary grades. However, additional research is needed.

Are most kids good at teaching?

Some math kids like to tutor and are probably good at it, but I tend to think of teaching as a separate gift. I know many people who are masters at what they do but can’t explain it worth a darn.

I want expert teachers, not other students, teaching my kids.

Unfortunately, I have many anecdotes about the downsides of peer teaching.  A bright fifth-grader I know decided it was best to clam up after being derided as a know-it-all in his collaborative learning group.  So much for learning compassion and self-esteem.

* Peer teaching is included as part of various “cooperative”, “student-centered” learning strategies, with names like Team Assisted Individualization, Student Teams-Achievement Division, and peer-to-peer learning.

Related:  Proficiency grouping makes more sense than differentiated instruction (Cost of College)

High school writing instruction should be less creative and more ‘formulaic’

“Academic writing is formulaic“, according to one SAT tutor who has written a number of books on the topic.  It would seem to follow that creative writing should not be an important focus of high school curriculum.  Students should master the “formula” before they spend too much time on poetry, journaling, or similar exercises in creative writing.

… one of the things I try to get kids away from in terms of their academic writing is the idea that everything they write has to be wildly new and creative. Academic writing is formulaic. It just is. Clarity trumps pretty much everything. You can be creative when you’ve mastered all the rules, but until they, you need to pay attention to what people with more experience do and learn from them. (I think part of the problem is all the hysteria over plagiarism: of COURSE kids shouldn’t be stealing other people’s work, but they also need models! How else are they supposed to learn to write?) When they try to be creative, they write jumbled sentences and the like — it’s just a disaster.

When it comes to writing, most students need to learn the rules before they can break the rules.

Students are not being taught academic writing in high school.

In his “third column on the teaching of writing in colleges and universities“, Stanley Fish addressed a question from readers.

Isn’t the mastery of forms something that should be taught in high school or earlier?

His response, based on years of experience as a college professor:

By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all….

High schools should try something different.

I think K-12 schools would see greater success if they used something like the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’, a methodical and efficient approach to writing instruction.  I would love to see a separate composition course in high school, employing a basic method like that of Kerrigan, and involving plenty of practice writing.  I suspect a course like this would work well as an online option.

It worked at New Dorp High School in New York City, where it was found”that returning to fundamentals like explicit grammar instruction and formulaic writing has succeeded in turning around the dismal performance of high poverty students”.

Proficiency grouping makes more sense than differentiated instruction

Proficiency grouping, or “tracking” as it was then called, used to be common in American public schools.  But then it begin to fall out of favor in the 1960s because it was considered inconsistent with “equality of opportunity”.

Tracking was replaced by heterogeneous classes with differentiated instruction – “the strategy whereby teachers adjust their material and presentation to the diverse array of academic abilities within a given classroom”.

Differentiated instruction is tough on educators, with 83% of teachers reporting that differentiation is difficult to implement in practice.

Differentiated instruction is inefficient, increasing costs with questionable learning benefits.  Only a small portion of a class session can be used to teach at the appropriate level for any student, especially hurting children at either end of the ability spectrum.  Students end up receiving only the ”occasional crumb” from their teacher .

Differentiation is given a lot of lip service, but in practice it amounts to teaching to the middle while throwing the occasional crumb to students who are struggling or who are ahead. This only works as a strategy if the administration is satisfied to be able to say that there was some small element of each lesson that met each student at her/his readiness level, rather than realistically holding out for a system where most students get quite a lot out of each lesson.

This training video shows how teachers may resort to using curious methods to preserve the self esteem of students in their mixed ability classrooms.

… once they’re in their mixed ability groupings I can help the struggling kids feel smarter by asking them easy questions and make the advanced kids feel challenged by asking them hard questions.

Do we think the kids don’t get it?

Differentiated instruction promotes the use of peer teaching, whereby an advanced student tutors a slower learner.  This practice has significant downsides for both parties, which I will write about in an upcoming post.

Flexible proficiency grouping is better than trying to differentiate instruction within a classroom.

Joanne Jacobs wrote about one study.

Sorting students by performance “significantly improves” reading and math scores, concludes a study that analyzed  data linked to a cohort of elementary students in Dallas. Sorting helps both high- and low-performing students, though the high achievers showed larger gains.

Meta-analysis supports proficiency grouping.

The academic benefits are clearest for those in the higher ability groups, but students in the lower groups are not harmed academically by grouping and they gain academic ground in some grouping programs.

The future?
Recent trends and a historical perspective are provided by the Tom Loveless in the 2013 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?  Ability grouping within classrooms* has been growing, but the trend going forward is unclear.

* I found the terminology used in this report a bit confusing because it deviates from most standard definitions I’ve read elsewhere.

Related:  New York school district gets ‘creative’ by tracking students for reading instruction (Cost of College)

Quick Links – Obama on education; stereotyping boys; chimps have better working memories than those of humans

◊◊◊  Obama on education in State of Union address (Washington Post)

Universal ‘high-quality’ preschool

Tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America.  Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than seven dollars later on – by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime.  In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, and form more stable families of their own.  So let’s do what works, and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind.  Let’s give our kids that chance.

High-tech curriculum for high schools

…  Tonight, I’m announcing a new challenge to redesign America’s high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy.  We’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering, and math – the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.

Link higher education federal aid with ‘affordability and value’

Tonight, I ask Congress to change the Higher Education Act, so that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid….

College Scorecard

…  And tomorrow, my Administration will release a new “College Scorecard” that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.

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◊◊◊  “..the study found that stereotypes seemed to be holding boys back.” (Dr. Helen at PJ Media)

Boys may be suffering from stereotype threat.

The belief that girls are brainier and better behaved is holding boys back at school, research suggests.

A study of British pupils found that, from a young age, children think girls are academically superior.

And, what’s more, they believe that adults think so too….

And by the age of seven, boys shared the belief that they were naughtier and did less well at school. Follow-up questions showed the children thought that adults had similar expectations.

The second part of the study found that stereotypes seemed to be holding boys back…

Study co-author Dr Robbie Sutton said: ‘Our study suggests that by counteracting the stereotypes in the classroom – wherever they might have come from originally – we can help boys do better.’

Noncognitive skills come into play in boys’ poor school performance.

This reminds me of the study I found on girls taking over at college. In it the researchers state:

One source of the persistent female advantage in K–12 school performance and the new female lead in college attainment is the higher incidence of behavioral problems (or lower level of noncognitive skills) among boys. Boys have a much higher incidence than do girls of school disciplinary and behavior problems, and spend far fewer hours doing homework (Jacob, 2002).

Are boys’ poor behavior and low academic performance partly due to low expectations?  Dr. Helen wonders if teachers tend to use grades to punish boys since other discipline options are more limited.  A related aspect is that much of early academic success may hinge on noncognitive and literacy skills, which boys tend to develop later than girls.

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◊◊◊  Working memory of chimpanzees is ‘far better’ than that of humans

Chimpanzees can far outperform humans in some mental tasks, including rapidly memorising and recalling numbers, Japanese scientists have shown.

A good working memory is needed to survive in the wild.

Prof Matsuzawa, who combines the study of wild chimpanzees in west Africa with research using the captive colony in Kyoto, said such a good working memory – the ability to take in an accurate, detailed image of a complex scene or pattern – was an important survival tool in the wild.

For example, the apes can quickly assess and remember the distribution of edible fruit in a forest canopy. Or, when two rival bands of chimpanzees encounter one another, they can assess the strength of the rival group and decide whether to fight or flee.

Memory of chimps ‘far better than human’ (Financial Times)

Even if boys score better than girls on standardized tests, they get lower grades

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college….

The sometimes controversial Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about this problem of “Boys at the back” in our public schools, illustrated in this chart posted by Mark Perry.

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.

The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.

That last sentence, which I’ve highlighted, may hold a key to one reason for the gender gap in school performance.  Girls have the edge over boys not only in earlier development of certain social and organizational skills, but also in reading and writing.  Over time schools have pushed down more rigorous academic and organizational requirements to younger grades, making it more likely for boys to develop early gaps that often persist to the upper grades and college.

A related reason for the gender gap may be what David Brooks called the lack of cultural diversity.

… The education system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of person: one who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious. People who don’t fit this cultural ideal respond by disengaging and rebelling.

Far from all, but many of the people who don’t fit in are boys….

I wrote about this last year.

Brooks is describing what is often called the “feminization” of public schools.  This term is distasteful to some, probably because it reinforces gender stereotypes.  Whatever the label, it does appear that schools have become “culturally homogeneous” in a way that hurts boys more than girls.  It starts in elementary school when an early reader is told that he got the wrong answer because he picked “mad” instead of “sad” to describe how the boy in the story feels after he doesn’t get the bike he wanted for his birthday.*  It continues through high school where group discussions in history class only allow expressions of compassion for victims of war but no praise for brilliant military maneuvers.  The message is clear – only certain types of behaviors and thoughts are welcome in the classroom.

There’s no doubt that students do need to be ”studious and industrious” to perform well academically.  It just seems that public schools are misguided in the methods they use in trying to develop those qualities in all students, particularly in boys.

Suggested reforms

Sommers points out that this gender gap should motivate schools to find ways to promote boys’ academic achievement, as they have done for girls in recent cases when the gender gap has been reversed.  She suggests some changes that the British, the Canadians and the Australians have implemented.

… These include more boy-friendly reading assignments (science fiction, fantasy, sports, espionage, battles); more recess (where boys can engage in rough-and-tumble as a respite from classroom routine); campaigns to encourage male literacy; more single-sex classes; and more male teachers (and female teachers interested in the pedagogical challenges boys pose).

One example of how poor noncognitive skills can create a misalignment between grades and test scores

I know of a case where a middle school boy consistently earned almost perfect test scores in his social studies class and who reached the finals in his state’s geography bee contest.  However, his average grade was significantly lowered by his poor class notes, likely due to a deficit in “noncognitive skills”.  Because of his grades, and because “behavior and work habits” counted so heavily in the admissions process, he was shut out of his high school’s social studies honors track.  If not for his parents’ intervention to override the school’s policies and allow him to enroll in the honors course, he might have languished in courses that were too easy and boring for him.  As it happened, he went on to graduate with honors and enroll in an elite university.

Related:

• Only when women are overrepresented on every educational metric will we have reached the goal of ‘full gender equity’? (Carpe Diem)
• Public schools are not diverse enough for boys (Cost of College)
• Girls make better grades because they’re nicer? (onlineathens.com)

Teachers should harness technology to find gaps in student knowledge

So do we all agree with edX president Anant Agarwal that technology might be the “single biggest innovation in education” in the last 200 years?  It certainly seems possible.

Technology ’will topple many ideas about how we teach’.

Because education is economically important yet appears inefficient and static with respect to technology, it’s often cited (along with health care) as the next industry ripe for a major “disruption.” This belief has been promoted by Clayton Christensen, the influential Harvard Business School professor who coined the term “disruptive technology.” In two books on education, he laid a blueprint for online learning: it will continue to spread and get better, and eventually it will topple many ideas about how we teach—and possibly some institutions as well.

My observation as a parent is that technology is unlikely to make human teachers obsolete any time soon, but the opportunity for schools to use data more efficiently screams out as a way to improve human teachers.

Technology will define where online education goes next. All those millions of students clicking online can have their progress tracked, logged, studied, and probably influenced, too. Talk to Khan or anyone behind the MOOCs (which largely sprang from university departments interested in computer intelligence) and they’ll all say their eventual goal isn’t to stream videos but to perfect education through the scientific use of data. Just imagine, they say, software that maps an individual’s knowledge and offers a lesson plan unique to him or her. Will they succeed and create something truly different? If they do, we’ll have the answer to our question: online learning will be the most important innovation in education in the last 200 years.

Teachers should harness technology to find gaps in student knowledge.

I recently heard a local high school teacher claim he did not have time to conduct formative assessments*.  Part of the school’s explanation for this was that excessive mandatory testing requirements left no time for teachers to find student’s gaps in knowledge.  I’m not buying this, because Khan Academy and other sources offer “software that maps an individual’s knowledge”.  I’ve had a brief glimpse of education software used in our public schools that also does this, generating data similar to that provided by KA.

Personalized data like this would enable a teacher to use his time more efficiently, even making differentiated instruction more feasible.  But instead, a school that claims it is teaching 21st century skills is letting its instructors rely on clunky data-gathering methods that shortchange its students.  Unfortunately, it’s going to take a little while for technology to disrupt this school’s hold on teaching methods.

…
* Formative assessment or diagnostic testing is a range of formal and informal assessment procedures employed by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment.[1] It typically involves qualitative feedback (rather than scores) for both student and teacher that focuses on the details of content and performance.[2] It is commonly contrasted with summative assessment, which seeks to monitor educational outcomes, often for purposes of external accountability.[3]

Quick Links – Public pensions don’t work so well; New York education reform report; Googling still might be making us stupid

◊◊◊  How public pensions work

It’s not pretty:

Politicians around the country have demonstrated complete inability to manage pensions effectively. They promise big benefits, don’t tax voters enough to pay for them, and then invest the money in fly by night, risky Wall Street schemes (with big fees for their banking cronies and contributors) in the hopes that a few big wins and aggressive moves will cover the funding gap.

Those are Walter Russell Mead’s words, written upon learning that the New York City comptroller proposed “taking New York’s pension money and investing it in mortgages, loans, and infrastructure projects” to help in the recovery after Hurricane Sandy.  On the surface this might seem like a good idea.

But the temptations and pitfalls are huge. Let local politicians get the idea that pension funds are pots of money that can be invested in pet projects, and it won’t take long before bad things start to happen. The potential for conflict of interest is just too high for this to be a good idea.

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◊◊◊  New York State – Governor Cuomo Education Reform Commission released its preliminary report this month.

The report has generated complaints that it includes big ideas with no specifics about funding.

The gubernatorial panel established to recommend a host of education reforms and priorities produced a series of ideas that Gov. Andrew Cuomo himself earlier today admitted would be a heavy lift.

The proposals announced by commission chairman Dick Parsons would expand pre-K and Kindergarten to a full day, lengthen the school year and create a so-called “bar exam” to ensure teacher competency.

Unless they first make fundamental reforms in curriculum and teaching, I would not want my kids to be captives of the public schools for any longer than the 180 days required today.

The report also recommends consolidating schools and districts to save money, an old idea that has repeatedly met strong resistance in many areas.  The idea of “making schools a hub for health care and social services” is a pipe dream given the aversion to raising taxes in the current economic environment.

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◊◊◊  ‘Does Constant Googling Really Make You Stupid?’ [Excerpt] (Scientific American)

From Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? by Robin Marantz Henig & Samantha Henig

Preliminary data suggest that all those tweets, status updates and other digital distractions may actually stave off cognitive decline

A small study of 24 older adults found that frequent Googling “appears to enhance brain circuitry”.  However, it seems a wild leap to conclude from this that it enhances “sophisticated thinking and higher-order cognition”.

… Google, it seems, might be doing something different to the brains of digital natives, creating a new set of neural connections and engaging young brains in an unprecedented way. With their brains thus wired, Millennials might be using the web as a vehicle for sophisticated thinking and higher-order cognition. And they might be even more mentally engaged while online than their elders are while reading a book.

I don’t doubt Googling and other digital activities that vie for our attention are changing our brain circuitry.  But there is scant evidence that today’s “continuous partial attention” is making us smarter.  The fact is we need focused attention and a broad base of knowledge before we can become critical thinkers.

Indeed, evidence from cognitive science challenges the notion that skills can exist independent of factual knowledge. Dan Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is a leading expert on how students learn. “Data from the last thirty years leads to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not only because you need something to think about,” Willingham has written. “The very processes that teachers care about most — critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving — are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).”

Quick Links – Top-paying jobs for community college graduates; no mandate relief in New York; high salary for high school principal; plus more

◊◊◊ Top ten jobs for two-year graduates (Community College Spotlight)

The top job is an air traffic controller,with a median 2010 salary of $108,040.

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◊◊◊  New York mandate relief report fails to recommend action on the most costly state requirements

ALBANY, N.Y. – Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Mandate Relief Council voted down 51 of 65 requests for help from local governments and school districts Tuesday, approving 14 suggestions for review of state mandates for special education and two other school issues….

The Council also recommended further study of a request to drop the state mandate for school districts with fewer than 1,000 pupils to have internal auditors on staff; and a state Education Department rule that mandates students get a “minimum number of minutes per week (seat time), by grade level and subject area.”

Requests to reduce the crippling pension costs were among those that were rejected.

They rejected requests to reduce the mandate to transport private school students; to reform teacher tenure and “last in, first out” work rules; to change the Triborough Amendment to the Taylor Law that keeps automatic teacher pay raises in place after a contract has expired; and to reduce the cost of public employee and teacher pensions. The requests included letting school districts create pension reserve funds, but that was rejected because it was an expansion of district authority, not a state mandate.

Also rejected were local government requests regarding the Wicks public works contracting law, health insurance contributions, restrictions on new unfunded mandates, tax cap exemptions, legal services for the poor and the MTA commuter tax.

Staff of the panel said that the rejected requests were beyond the scope and the authority of the council to decide because they were matters of state law, covered by local union contracts, or otherwise not a qualified candidate for elimination or reform.

I believe a constitutional amendment is needed to reduce pension costs, one of the most costly state mandates.  If that’s the case, the Council could have made that recommendation.  You can see a copy of the full report at the Mandate Relief Council site.

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◊◊◊  Westchester County high school principal earns $377,080 annuall, including $131,352 in pension payments

New York’s highest-salaried school principal, James Ruck, who has led Harrison High since 2006, will earn $245,728 this year, setting a new standard for a building administrator in the nation’s hottest market for education leaders.

Ruck, 68, the former schools superintendent at Suffolk County’s Sachem Central schools, augments his Harrison pay with an estimated $131,352 a year in pension payments, pushing his annual income to more than $377,000. Ruck, of Northport, intends to step down from Harrison in June

About 1,000 students attend Harrison High School.

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◊◊◊  ‘Motivation, Not IQ, Matters Most for Learning New Math Skills’ (Time)

But IQ does matter in overall math achievement levels.

… While some element of math achievement may be linked to natural inborn intelligence, when it comes to developing skills during high school, motivation and math study habits are much more important than IQ, according to a new study…

To their surprise, the researches found that IQ does not predict new learning — in other words, intelligence as measured by the IQ test does not indicate how likely students are to pick up new concepts or accumulate new skills. While children with higher IQs did have higher test scores from the beginning of the study, how much newmaterial the kids learned over the years was not related to how smart they were, at least not once demographic factors were taken into account.

“Students with high IQ have high math achievement and students with low IQ have low math achievement,” Murayama says. “But IQ does not predict any growth in math achievement. It determines the starting point.”

Wisconsin law supporting phonics instruction will be better for students and teachers

Sandra Stotsky writes that Wisconsin’s “Read to Lead” education reform law enacted earlier this year will have benefits for both students and teachers.  Among other provisions, this law steers education schools to provide instruction on the most effective methods of early reading instruction.  The expected benefits will be improved reading levels for students and more objective evaluations for teachers.

Education schools have been slow to include phonics as part of training new teachers.

Imagine a physics program that won’t teach the theory of relativity. Or an English department that shuns Shakespeare. That would be equivalent to how U.S. schools of education treat the most effective method for teaching beginning reading.

That method is called decoding, the shorthand word for the scientifically tested techniques for teaching children the relationships between symbols and sounds, often just called phonics. Reformers have fought for generations to have decoding skills taught systematically and directly, but schools of education will have none of it.

Instead, the education establishment prefers to teach beginning readers to guess at the identification of a written word using its context — the so-called whole-language approach. The people who run education schools hate the “code” because they say it requires a repetition of boring exercises — “drill and kill” — turning children off and discouraging them from “reading with meaning.” There has never been evidence for this view, however.

Wisconsin joins a few states, including Massachusetts, in making changes that require new teachers to pass the MTEL Foundations Of Reading Test, an exam that tests their knowledge of phonics instruction.

… The state Legislature passed a bill that will help ensure that teachers no longer receive inadequate training in their preparation and professional development. The Wisconsin Reading Coalition, the Wisconsin branch of the International Dyslexia Association, and a group of parents, educators, psychologists and other professionals supported the measure….

Supported by their state Department of Public Instruction, Wisconsin’s legislators followed the path taken first by Massachusetts, then by Connecticut in 2008, and most recently by Minnesota in 2011, to require the tests. Several other states are considering the requirement, as well.

The new law has positive implications for evaluating teachers.

Their efforts have broad implications. Many states are looking for objective ways to evaluate teachers at all levels. But the efforts by federal education officials to prod states into working out sound teacher-evaluation plans seem to be missing an important connection.

The policy makers in Washington want states to develop an appropriate professional way to determine which teachers are ineffective — a reasonable goal. But they have not made it clear that such evaluations need to judge whether a lack of adequate progress in children’s beginning-reading skills is the result of teacher incompetence or of deficient training….

Once the bill is signed into law and begins to affect training, Wisconsin will be able to evaluate teachers of beginning reading on their skills without worrying if they lack professional knowledge that could easily have been taught in their coursework. Let’s hope the work of the reformers in Wisconsin spreads to most other states.

——————————————————–

The introduction in recent years of “balanced literacy” to replace whole language instruction has been a step in the right direction, but limited in that it does not offer “systematic and explicit phonics instruction“.

Education schools whose coursework was once limited to whole-language approaches now have to explain the research support for a code-emphasis method and what systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics means in practice. The schools have done this grudgingly, limiting their effort to test preparation workshops or including it as a small part of a “balanced literacy” approach that allows teachers to teach phonics but only in context, thereby ensuring that it can’t be taught systematically.

Related:

• READ TO LEAD/EDUCATOR EFFECTIVENESS BILL SIGNED INTO LAW (Wisconsin State Assembly)
• Phonics instruction helps boys close the gender literacy gap (Cost of College)

Does hybrid learning hold the most promise?

Hybrid learning, combining online and face-to-face instruction, would seem to hold the most promise in incorporating technology into higher education.  A recent study supports this promise.

Monitoring 605 college students taking the same introductory statistics course at six public universities—including the University at Albany—SUNY, SUNY Institute of Technology—Utica/Rome, the University of Maryland—Baltimore County, Towson University,  CUNY—Baruch College, and CUNY—City College—during fall 2011, researchers split the students into two groups. One group completed the course in a traditional format, while the second group completed an online component complemented with an hour of in-class instruction each week.

Students were asked to complete a series of tests before and after the course, and researchers found that “hybrid-format students did perform slightly better than traditional format students” on outcomes including final exam scores and overall course pass rates, according to the report.

Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials (Ithaka S+R, May 22, 2012, William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, Kelly A. Lack & Thomas I. Nygren)

The better performance of students in the hybrid-format group was not statistically different and the study did not control for differences in teacher quality.  Still, it’s easy to imagine how the powerful combination of a strong teacher with a well-designed online component would deliver superior results with lower costs.

Meta-Analysis: Is Blended Learning Most Effective? (2009)

The United States Department of Education reported recently that it’s found some evidence to support the notion that blended learning is more effective than either face to face or online learning by themselves. Further, between online and face to face instruction, online is at least as good and may even have the advantage in terms of improving student achievement and potentially expanding the amount of time (and quality time) students spend learning.

Blended Learning Models Generating Lessons Learned (2012)

Since blended learning exploded onto the K-12 scene with promises of personalized and student-centered learning, it has proliferated into dozens of different models, with educators continually tweaking and changing those methods to find the perfect balance of face-to-face and online instruction to meet the needs of their students.

Interest in blended education remains high, spurred partly by research offering support for advocates’ claims that blended learning is more effective than either online or face-to-face instruction on its own.

But more research is needed to determine the effectiveness of the evolving blended learning models, including best practices and which models work best for which types of students . . .

Related:  Hybrid learning breaks down geographic barriers for Northeastern University (Cost of College)