Google search tips for students

Students lack good Google search skills.

Sadly, though web searches have become an integral part of the academic research landscape, the art of the Google search is an increasingly lost one. A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a “reasonably well-executed search.” Wrote researchers, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process.”

If college students are so poorly prepared to conduct Google searches, K-12 students must be even less so.  With all the talk about teaching 21st century skills in our public schools, not enough time is spent on this basic element of  school work.  What’s going on?

Here’s an infographic from HackCollege that offers basic search tips.  If teachers even spent a few hours on this every year, high school graduates would be better prepared for college and for life.

CLICK IMAGE TO GO TO INFOGRAPHIC

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I need to use these tips more regularly:

Using the Internet is ‘supereasy’, but ‘deep reading, advanced math, scientific reasoning’ is hard

‘Digital Literacy’ Will Never Replace The Traditional Kind

I would like K-12 schools to focus more on teaching background knowledge and traditional competencies instead of spending so much time teaching so-called 21st century skills.

… But that’s not how an increasingly powerful faction within education sees the matter. They are the champions of “new literacies” — or “21st century skills” or “digital literacy” or a number of other faddish-sounding concepts. In their view, skills trump knowledge, developing “literacies” is more important than learning mere content, and all facts are now Googleable and therefore unworthy of committing to memory.

Students need a broad base of knowledge before they 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).”

iPads are not a prerequisite for innovation, collaboration, and evaluation.

There is no doubt that the students of today, and the workers of tomorrow, will need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st century skills” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you have to know what came before. To collaborate, you have to contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information against knowledge you’ve already mastered. Nor is there any reason that these skills must be learned or practiced in the context of technology. Critical thinking is crucial, but English students engage in it whenever they parse a line of poetry or analyze the motives of an unreliable narrator. Collaboration is key, but it can be effectively fostered in the glee club or on the athletic field. Whatever is specific to the technological tools we use right now — and these tools are bound to change in any case — is designed to be easy to learn and simple to use.

Using the Internet is “supereasy” compared to “deep reading, advanced math, scientific reasoning”, which are hard.  Schools need to focus on providing expert instruction for the hard stuff.

Related:  Wikipedia co-founder says we need to memorize things, not just ‘Google it’

Some reasons for the explosive growth in tutoring

The “tutoring-industrial” complex has proven to be recession resistant, experiencing an increase in business of at least 1,000 percent since 2001.

Whether they’re seeking remedial help for their child or a leg up to the Ivy League, millions of parents are encountering a frustrating new homework project of their own: learning the intricacies of the tutoring-industrial complex. The “supplemental education” sector is now an estimated $5 billion business, 10 times as large as it was in 2001, according to Michael Sandler, founder of education-research and consulting firm Eduventures. Tutoring firms no longer offer just subject-specific help in, say, Latin or chemistry; increasingly, they’re marketing a dizzying menu of test prep, study skills, enrichment tutorials, scholastic summer camps and prekindergarten readiness programs….

Recession resistant

And while other industries struggled through the downturn, the tutoring sector has grown more than 50 percent since 2008, according to Eduventures. “We’re somewhat recession-resistant,” says Joe Nativo, chief financial officer of Kumon Math and Reading Centers, a chain that says it has taught more than 4 million children worldwide.

The article gives some reasons behind the increase in tutoring.

• Growing competition for entrance to elite colleges
• Increase in average class size.  (This is a dubious claim, considering the increase is minimal and that research tying class size to student achievement is weak.)
• Higher numbers of children diagnosed with learning disabilities
• “Hand-wringing parents” fearful that their children will fall behind
• More effective marketing that plays into parents’ fears
• The No Child Left Behind mandate that schools “in need of improvement” provide tutoring for students has lead to $900 million in federal money spent annually on tutoring

Is constructivism also fueling the tutor boom?

There is no mention that the tutoring boom may also be the result of changes in teaching methods and curriculum that have come to focus on fads instead of on research-based pedagogy.  But given that the explosive growth in Kumon Math and Reading Centers with their focus on traditional skills practice  has made it the largest franchise tutoring firm in the U.S., I believe this is a factor.   I’m also reminded of a local Chyten tutoring center that advertises a return to the basics.

Math Facts Boot Camp
Pre-Algebra; Algebra I; Algebra II; Geometry
With the new emphasis on “real world” or “integrated” math, many educators agree that the skills that go into solving math problems, pure and simple, are being lost.
Chyten’s Math Facts Boot Camps are comprehensive and intensive courses in which the ability to solve equations is brought back to its rightful position, front and center in a student’s math mind.

In the enduring words of Catherine at Kitchen Table Math:

 No parent hires a constructivist tutor

Phonics instruction helps boys close the gender literacy gap

Phonics instruction helps boys close the gender gap on reading skills according to recent research findings.

The use of more traditional phonetics-based lessons helps boys catch up with girls – even doing better on some tests – and prevents some children from needing ‘special’ schooling, according to new research findings.

Better for low-income students

A study of synthetic phonics also found children from disadvantaged backgrounds do as well as those from better off homes.

Fewer students assigned to special education classes

“We found children were performing well who might otherwise have ended up in special teaching arrangements,” she added.

Learning sounds instead of guessing words
Beginning in the 1960s, synthetic phonics was replaced in favor of whole language and later balanced literacy instruction.  Instead of learning the sounds that make up words (phonics), students were taught to guess at words based on content and pictures (whole language).

This study was conducted in Scotland, and in January it was reported that thousands of primary schools in the UK have signed up to participate in an initiative to increase funding for phonics instruction.

UK Schools Minister Nick Gibb on the phonics funding program:

This is an open invitation to all schools to improve the way they teach systematic synthetic phonics – the tried and tested method of improving the reading of all our children, especially the weakest.

Some evidence from The Importance of Phonics: Securing Confident Reading evidence paper.

The importance of a systematic approach to phonics instruction

Recent inspection evidence from a sample of 12 primary schools supports this view….

In 2006, the Department for Education and Skills commissioned the Universities of York and Sheffield to conduct a review of the experimental research on using phonics to teach reading and spelling. Torgerson, Hall and Brooks found that systematic phonics teaching “enables children to make better progress in reading accuracy than unsystematic or no phonics, and that this is true for both normally-developing children and those at risk of failure” (2006)

In Australia, the committee for the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy produced the report ‘Teaching Reading’ (2005). The committee concluded: “The evidence is clear, whether from research, good practice observed in schools, advice from submissions to the Inquiry, consultations [...] that direct systematic instruction in phonics during the early years of schooling is an essential foundation for teaching children to read. …systematic phonics instruction is critical if children are to be taught to read well, whether or not they experience reading difficulties. [...] Moreover, where there is unsystematic or no phonics instruction, children’s literacy progress is significantly impeded, inhibiting their initial and subsequent growth in reading accuracy, fluency, writing, spelling and comprehension.”

In England, Jim Rose (2006) in his ‘Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading, Final Report’ emphasised that beginner readers should be taught using a systematic approach to phonics and cautioned that evidence submitted to the review suggested that, for almost all children, diluting the approach by using a mix of approaches can hinder children’s progress….

Related:

• Boy Oh Boy! by Malkin Dare (Society for Quality Education, 12/2010)
• Illiterate boys: The new international phenomenon by Dr Bonnie Macmillan (RRF Newsletter 51, 2004)
• Response to public consultation on the Year 1 phonics screening check (March 2011)
• Phonic teaching resources and funding for schools FAQs

Ability grouping produces positive results for high level students

Ability 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.

That’s the conclusion from Meta-analytic Findings on Grouping Programs – James A. Kulik, The University of Michigan; Chen-Lin C. Kulik, The University of Michigan; 1992.  Here’s the abstact:

Meta-analytic reviews have focused on five distinct instructional programs that separate students by ability: multilevel dasses, cross-grade programs, within-class grouping, enriched classes for the gifted and talented, and accelerated classes. The reviews show that effects are a function of program type. Multilevel classes, which entail only minor adjustment of course content for ability groups, usually have little or no effect on student achievement. Programs that entail more substantial adjustment of curriculum to ability, such as cross-grade and within-class programs, produce clear positive effects. Programs of enrichment and acceleration, which usually involve the greatest amount of curricular adjustment, have the largest effects on student learning. These results doe not support recent claims that no one benefits from grouping or that students in the lower groups are harmed academically and emotionally by grouping.

This is a relatively old report.  I’m not sure if its conclusions have been rejected by more recent research.

The full article is here.

Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – FIRST DRAFT being CONCRETE

I’m still on Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of Writing to the Point, and the latest assignment to write the first draft of an essay continues the focus on being specific and concrete.  (This is part of my project to study and learn the entire Six-Step method, explained in my initial post in this series.)  For a recap, here are Steps 1 through 4.

STEP 1. Write a short, simple declarative sentence that makes one statement. (Chapter 1, page 6)

STEP 2. Write three sentences about the sentence in Step 1—clearly and directly about the whole of that sentence, not just something in it. (Chapter 2, page 18.)

STEP 3. Write four or five sentences about each of the three sentences in Step 2—clearly and directly about the whole of the Step 2 sentence, not just something in it. (Chapter 3, page 31.)

STEP 4. Make the material in the four or five sentences of Step 3 as specific and concrete as possible. Go into detail. Use examples. Don’t ask, “What will I say next?” Instead, say some more about what you have just said. Your goal is to say a lot about a little, not a little about a lot.  (Chapter 4, page 43)

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ABSTRACT or GENERAL vs. CONCRETE or SPECIFIC:
To reiterate a point from the previous post, Kerrigan Method sentences X-1-2-3 are usually abstract or general.  In contrast, the sentences in the body of the paragraphs that follow from 1-2-3 must fill in the details by being concrete and specific.  Both types of sentences are vital to good writing.

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THE ASSIGNMENT
Write a theme on the following sentence X:  ”A student must have a regular schedule of study.” … be specific and concrete, far beyond what you feel necessary.  Go all out in this respect.  Go into detail .  Give examples.  Don’t feel ridiculous.  You are not expected to produce a “good” theme here, but you can make it a good exercise.

After considerable head scratching, here is what I wrote.

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X  A student must have a regular schedule of study..
1.  A student needs a study schedule to maximize academic achievement.
2.  A student needs a study schedule to accommodate his other activities.
3.  A student needs a study schedule to maintain good health.

—————————————————————————————————————————————

X  A student must have a regular schedule of study.

1.  A student needs a study schedule to maximize academic achievement.  Since his first priority is usually his schooling, it is important that a student find ways to improve his academic performance.  One way to do that is to plan and implement a study schedule that will put his school work at the top of his list of things to do.  If getting an A in a chemistry test requires three hours of reviewing notes and practicing problems, then that time must be set aside to take precedence over television, Facebook or daydreaming.  For example, sometimes scheduling 20 minutes a day to review vocabulary words is the only way to get a top grade in Spanish class.

2.  A student needs a study schedule to accommodate his other activities.  While academics are his first priority, a student must also fit in all types of other activities into his routine.  Eating, sleeping, sports, club activities, and simply relaxing are usually all important aspects of a student’s life.  Without a schedule, time is frittered away and a student may end up sleep deprived or being kicked off the track team for missing practices.  All these different activities can be planned so a student will be able to perform competently in school and as well as in other parts of his life.

3.  A student needs a study schedule to maintain good health.  Without a schedule, the elements of a healthy lifestyle will suffer.  If a student neglects to plan ahead for sufficient study time, then he may find himself up late at night cramming for a test when he should be sleeping.  He may find himself eating on the run, which often means fast food and cookies instead of healthier options.  This can lead to poor nutrition, weight gain, or more serious medical conditions.  Making time for adequate studying causes a student to feel well-prepared, while the opposite causes stress.  Sleep deprivation, poor eating habits and high stress can be avoided by a well-planned study schedule.

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WHAT I LEARNED
There is always room for more detail.  Even when you think you’ve put in as much as can, you can usually squeeze in some more.  Editing out excessive information can be done later in the process, as I will probably learn in future assignments..
.… 

Previous posts in this series:

• The Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’
• Step 1 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – SUBJECT & PREDICATE
• Step 3 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – being SPECIFIC
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – being CONCRETE
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – going into DETAIL
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – using EXAMPLES
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – ABSTRACT vs. CONCRETE
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – FUNCTION OF A PARAGRAPH

Step 1 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – SUBJECT & PREDICATE

I’m backtracking to cover some basic elements of  Kerrigan’s Writing to the Point Step 1, omitted in my previous posts. (For new readers, this is my project to study and learn the entire Six-Step method, explained in my initial post in this series.)

Here is Kerrigan’s first step in writing an expository essay:

STEP 1. Write a short, simple declarative sentence that makes one statement. (Chapter 1, page 6)

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The Step 1 sentence is what Kerrigan calls the X-sentence, and it should have a SUBJECT and a PREDICATE.

First, a review of some basic grammar:

The subject is the person or thing that acts or is described in the sentence. The predicate, on the other hand, is that action or description.

At a basic level, the X-sentence will look like this:

Subject———1———1———1—–Predicate
Somebody or something …………… is something
Somebody or something …………… was something
Somebody or something …………… does something
Somebody or something …………… did something

Examples:
Subject———1———1———1—–Predicate
Oxygen ………………………………………. is essential for life.
George Carlin …………………………….. was funny.
Power …………………………………………. corrupts.
Grandma …………………………………….. taught us valuable lessons.

Subject and predicate – both must be parts of the X-sentence.

The X-sentence is the thesis of the essay.

A subject without a predicate is a topic, but not a thesis. For expository writing you need a thesis, not just a topic.  This is an essential point in the Writing to the Point method.  The supporting details for the thesis flow from the X-sentence, creating the structure that makes the essay concise, clear and to the point.

Here are a few more examples of X-sentences:

X  Autumn is an exhilarating time of year.
X  Hosting a teen party can be nerve-wracking.
X  The Penn State scandal is a tragic event. 

Other characteristics of the X-sentence:

• Short and simple
• Declarative sentence – a statement, not a question or a command
• Should make only one statement

All this is basic stuff, right?  Sometimes kids don’t learn (or remember) basic stuff.  I’m sometimes surprised at what kids are not taught in school.

Previous posts in this series:

• The Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’
• Step 3 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – being SPECIFIC
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – being CONCRETE
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – going into DETAIL
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – using EXAMPLES
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – ABSTRACT vs. CONCRETE
• Step 4 of the Kerrigan method of ‘Writing to the Point’ – FUNCTION OF A PARAGRAPH

A liberal arts education is good and central planning is bad

To the critics of “frivolous” humanities majors and advocates who want our government to push for more STEM college graduates, Virginian Postrel responds that a liberal arts education is good and central planning is bad.

The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labor market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning – the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino,California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the “soft” professions that complement them.

Chemists Struggle Too

The commentators excoriating today’s students for studying the wrong subjects are pursuing certainty where none exists. Like the health fanatics convinced that every case of cancer must be caused by smoking or a bad diet, they want to believe that good people, people like them, will always have good jobs and that today’s unemployed college grads are suffering because they were self-indulgent or stupid. But plenty of organic chemists can testify that the mere fact that you pursued a technical career that was practical two or three decades ago doesn’t mean you have job security today.…

The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn’t that I didn’t learn Fortran, but that I didn’t study Dante.

The most valuable skill anyone can learn in college is how to learn efficiently — how to figure out what you don’t know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems. Liberal-arts advocates like this argument, but it applies to any field. In the three decades since we graduated, my college friend David Bernstein has gone from computing the speed at which signals travel through silicon chips to being an entrepreneur whose work includes specifying, designing and developing a consumer-oriented smart-phone app.

When he was an undergraduate, he wrote in an e-mail, his professors “stressed that they weren’t there to teach us a soon-to-be obsolete skill or two about a specific language or operating system … but rather the foundations of the field, for example: characteristics of languages and operating systems, how one deals with complex projects and works with others, what is actually computable, the analysis of algorithms, and the mathematical and theoretical foundations of the field, to pick just a few among many. That education has held me in good stead and I’ve often pitied the folks who try to compete during a lifetime of constant technological change without it.” Whether you learn how to learn is more a question of how fundamental and rigorous your education is than of what specific subject you study.

The argument that public policy should herd students into Stem fields is as wrong-headed as the notion that industrial policy should drive investment into manufacturing or “green” industries. It’s just the old technocratic central planning impulse in a new guise. It misses the complexity and diversity of occupations in a modern economy, forgets the dispersed knowledge of aptitudes, preferences and job requirements that makes labor markets work, and ignores the profound uncertainty about what skills will be valuable not just next year but decades in the future.

High school graduation goals do not include getting students ready for college

Sadly, I was not surprised to learn that our local high school does not include “college or career ready” as part of its goals for graduates.

The district has adopted graduation goals. A graduate of the Eastchester Schools will be:

• A respectful individual
• A life-long learner
• An effective communicator
• A complex thinker and problem solver
• A competent and responsible user of technology

Words have consequences.

At our local school only 59% of high school graduates are  “college or career ready” *.  This at an annual  cost of about $23,389 per pupil.

I prefer the Obama administration’s articulation of goals – much more specific, concrete, and measurable.

The goal for America’s educational system is clear: Every student should graduate from high school ready for college or a career.

Different school, similar problem
At a nearby school district, some parents are advocating that college preparation has to be front and center as goals, instead of  other squishy priorities like global awareness, global responsibility, and 21st century skills.

* UPDATE:  I changed “college ready” to “college or career ready” to accurately reflect what was measured.  In other words, 59% were not prepared for “post-secondary” success as determined by New York’s Aspirational Performance Measure (APM).

Apple iBooks 2 – Is easier and flashier always better for learning?

Apple announced it would update its iBooks platform to include textbook capabilities.

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iBooks 2 was introduced last week, and I can’t help but get excited.

… a new textbook experience for the iPad. The first demonstration showed what it’s like to open a biology textbook, and see an intro movie playing right before you even get to the book’s contents. When you get to the book itself, images are large and beautiful, and thumbnails accompany the text. To make searching easier, all users need to do is tap on a word and they go straight to the glossary and index section in the back of the book.

Navigating pages and searching is easy and fluid, and at the end of each chapter is a full review with questions and pictures. If you want the answers to the questions, instead of searching for a page toward the back of the book, all you need to do is tap the answer to get immediate feedback.

Need to take notes? Apple now lets anyone highlight any text on the page using your finger. iBooks 2 immediately and automatically takes your highlighted notes and turns them into flash cards for later studying.

Downsides?
Okay, I’m salivating just thinking about how easy this will be to use.  But I wonder about the downsides.  Remember, there are always downsides.

I’m taking a self-study continuing education course right now, using an e-textbook.  When I need to look up a term in the book, it’s easy to do a quick search without having to know the context, without having to think much about it.  But if I had to search the old-fashioned way, I would be forced to consider what chapter or context would likely include the term.  I would have to think more and in different ways – assess, infer, predict, recall, reason, apply logic, and more.  It would not be as easy as simply typing in a word and letting the search function find it for me.*  Does this make a difference in how I’m learning?  Yes, I believe it does.  And while I don’t know exactly how it’s different, I strongly suspect there’s a downside.  Does the overall improved efficiency make up for the decreased amount of critical thinking?  I just don’t know.

Here’s my question in a nutshell.  Even if it’s easier to go through the course material, is it possible that I am actually learning less?

* Yes, a paper book typically has an index that can be used in a manner similar to an ebook search function, but it usually requires more thinking skills to use as efficiently.

A more basic problem for public schools:  In order to buy and read these textbooks, each student will have to own an Apple iPad.

Related:  Kindle Fire – the end of deep and focused reading?