by Scott McLeod | Mar 30, 2007 | Research and Evaluation |
One of the largest studies ever done of United States classrooms (over 2,500 elementary classrooms) has found that
- elementary students spend over 90% of their time working alone or listening to the teacher (rather than, for example, working collaboratively with peers);
- most kids had a healthy classroom ’emotional climate’ but that only about 1 in 7 kids had a consistently high-quality ‘instructional climate’ all three years studied; and
- the typical teacher scored only 3.6 out of seven points for ‘richness
of instructional methods,’ and 3.4 for providing ‘evaluative feedback’
to students on their work.
The study’s findings are reported in this week’s Science magazine.
by Scott McLeod | Mar 29, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, Management and Operations, Planning and Funding, Research and Evaluation, Tech Integration |
Minnesota is used to being at the top. Our accolades include being one of the best states in the country in which to raise a family, being at the top on child and adult health measures, and being one of the highest states in terms of adult educational attainment. The state consistently is at the top when it comes to academic achievement on national and international tests as well. But when it comes to K-12 technology we’re not doing so well.
Last year Education Week gave Minnesota a D when it came to K-12 technology policy and practice. This year its annual Technology Counts issue bumps Minnesota up to a C but notes that the state is still below the national average. Here are some of the relevant tables from the Minnesota report (click on each for a larger image):
You can see from the charts below that we lag the nation as a whole when it comes to closing the digital divide (click on each for a larger image). On average, our poor and/or minority students have less access to instructional computers than do similar students in other states.
How did your state do? Visit Education Week to find out.
by Scott McLeod | Mar 19, 2007 | Miscellaneous, News and Events, Research and Evaluation |
To quote Casey Kasem: ‘the hits just keep on coming.’ Only in this case, the hits aren’t so good (at least not for American education).
In case you haven’t been keeping track, here’s a list of some recent reports that bemoan our schools’ inability to prepare globally-competitive citizens. Continuing our country’s long-standing tradition, committees, commissions, and task forces have been scrambling over each other to issue the latest update on our schools’ ineptitude:
This doesn’t include magazine articles, speeches, interviews, and other activities along these lines. We might be in danger of losing our global lead on some measures, but I’m guessing we’re still ahead of everyone else when it comes to task force and commission reports!
Did I miss any? Are we seeing similar activity in other countries?
by Scott McLeod | Mar 2, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, Research and Evaluation, Tech Integration |
Many of my educational leadership colleagues across the country would say that they are working in the area of social justice. They write articles with titles like Expanding the landscape of social justice: A critical ecological analysis; Leadership for social justice and equity: Weaving a transformative framework and pedagogy; School leadership reforms: Filtering social justice through dominant discourses; and Educational leadership and social justice: Practice into theory.
From conferences and other interactions, I know these folks and can say
with complete certainty that they all are absolutely top-notch
scholars. I also know each and every one of these articles is
well-researched, well-reasoned, well-regarded, and well-meaning.
That said, I’m troubled by the fact that educational leadership
folks (faculty and K-12 leaders both) aren’t talking more about digital
technologies and future employability when they talk about social justice.
Indeed, I rarely hear mention of technology at all within these
contexts. I’d like to see more discussion in both K-12 and higher ed
about the future world that disadvantaged kids are going to live in and
what we need to do to boost their digital participation, citizenship,
and employability opportunities.
NCLB is framed as social justice legislation, but its basic premise
is that boosting disadvantaged students’ performance on industrial-era
skills is socially just practice. Similarly, we talk about the digital divide
mostly in terms of giving kids access to computers and the Internet and
not so much in terms of teaching them how to be effective participants
in a technologically-suffused, globally-interconnected future.
It’s not enough to give disadvantaged students access to digital
technologies. They also need opportunities to learn to use those
technologies in ways that will enhance their opportunities to be
fully-functioning members of our future society. Disadvantaged students
are the ones most in need of these pedagogical opportunities because
their families and communities are less likely to have the means to
provide such opportunities outside of school. I read a quote from
someone (and I dearly wish I could remember who said it) that said
something like “poor kids have things done to them by computers, while
affluent kids get to do things with computers.” The author’s premise
was that even when disadvantaged students get to use computers in
schools, too often it’s for drill-and-kill, repetitive, basic fact work
rather than them getting to use computers in creative, collaborative,
problem-solving ways. I think the author was deadly correct regarding
many, many schools.
Many of us education bloggers write a lot about transforming
classroom practice to reflect the needs of a new world: we often call
it ‘School 2.0.’ Is School 2.0 the ultimate
social justice issue for disadvantaged students? Is School 2.0 the most
critical social justice issue of our time if disadvantaged students
aren’t going to be left even further behind than they already are? If
so, why aren’t we framing more of our technology initiatives and
discussion in this way? Where’s our moral imperative?
This post also is available at the TechLearning blog.
by Scott McLeod | Feb 23, 2007 | Higher Education, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Reading, Research and Evaluation |
The Brookings
Institution’s Hamilton Project recently released a report titled An Education
Strategy to Promote Opportunity, Prosperity, and Growth. After noting that
approximately $874 billion per year is spent on education in the United States,
the authors highlight the economic and educational benefits of universal
preschool and rethinking our current system of financial aid for higher
education. Here are some interesting quotes from the report…
Preschool
Jens Ludwig of Georgetown University and Isabel Sawhill of The Brookings
Institution propose a program called Success by Ten. This program would give
children from low-income families high-quality, full-time education for the
first five years of life, and then would use proven-effective methods to give
them extra help during their elementary school years. The early childhood
program would be based on the successful Abecedarian Project; it could be
thought of as “Head Start on steroids,” as it would combine, expand, and
transform the Early Head Start and Head Start programs. Ludwig and Sawhill
estimate that, if fully implemented, Success by Ten could increase GDP by up to
0.8 percent, while, on an individual level, bringing the dramatic benefits of
Abecedarian – greater employment and college entry, reduced teen pregnancy and
crime – to millions of American children.
Higher education
Susan Dynarski and Judith Scott-Clayton, both of Harvard University,
argue that the complexity and sluggishness of the federal system for
distributing student financial aid creates serious obstacles to college
attendance by making it enormously difficult for low- and moderate-income
students to assess their eligibility for aid. Indeed, studies have found scant
evidence that the federal program of grants and tax credits actually increases
enrollment, in contrast to the proven effects of much simpler programs such as
the Social Security Student Benefit Program and Georgia’s HOPE program. While
the complexity of the current system is intended to target aid to those who need
it most, Dynarski and Scott-Clayton show that a dramatically simplified aid
process could nearly reproduce the current distribution of aid. Under their
proposal, students could figure out their grant aid eligibility by looking at a
small, simple table that fits easily on a postcard. In fact, the table would be
put on a postcard and distributed through schools and the mail so that aid
information could be simple, certain, and delivered early. Meanwhile, the
application process could be as easy as checking a box on the family’s regular
tax returns. Dynarski and Scott-Clayton estimate that their proposed program
would increase enrollment among the grant-eligible population by between 5.6 and
7.4 percentage points.
The authors also discuss the teacher labor market and K-12 curricular
experimentation, among other things. Even if you’re not interested in
large-scale education policy issues, the report might be worth a quick read
just to familiarize yourself with some of the ways national policymakers think
about K-12 education.
by Scott McLeod | Feb 21, 2007 | Communication, Gaming, Online Learning, Pre-Service Preparation, Research and Evaluation, Tech Integration, Tech Tools |
Yesterday I uploaded our third
CASTLE Conversations podcast. I interviewed Julie Sykes, a doctoral student here at the University of Minnesota, about her Spanish Pragmatics Project, which is using virtual world software (like Second Life) to help postsecondary Spanish students learn how to communicate effectively with native Spanish speakers. Screenshots are included with the podcast.
The intent of CASTLE Conversations is to interview folks that have expertise and are
doing interesting things but may not have much national visibility. Keep giving us feedback and let us know what
you think. As always, we’re interested in your nominations for interviewees.
Happy listening!
by Scott McLeod | Feb 16, 2007 | Higher Education, Research and Evaluation |
As an untenured professor at a major research university, of necessity I
spend a lot of time thinking and talking about ‘writing’ and ‘publication.’ I’ve
blogged about some of this before. I’m essentially caught between two
worlds: the dynamic, interactive, freewheeling, rough-and-tumble, unmoderated cosmos of Web
2.0 and the slower-moving, calmer, peer-reviewed realm of traditional academic
publishing. It’s often a difficult tension, particularly for those of us who are
using these new communication and collaboration tools but whose tenure decisions
are being made by peers that are not active technology users. Recently several
higher education organizations have explicitly noted the strain and advocated
for some reconsiderations of what it means to write, to publish, and to reach an
audience.
- MLA Task
Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion: Departments
and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new
media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for
evaluating these forms of scholarship. (p. 5)
- 2007 Horizon
Report: Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync
with new forms of scholarship. The trends toward digital expressions of
scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move
away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication. New
forms of peer review are emerging, but existing academic practices of
specialization and long-honored notions of academic status are persistent
barriers to the adoption of new approaches. Given the pace of change, the
academy will grow more out of step with how scholarship is actually conducted
until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotion processes are
eased. (p. 4)
George
Siemens has noted that
The central filtering agent is no longer the teacher or institution. It’s
the learner. Think about what that means to our education system as we know it
today. It changes everything . . . . [A]s educators, we are not grasping (or prepared
for) the depth of the change that is occurring under our feet. If it’s happened
(breaking apart the center) in every other industry – movies, music, software,
business – what makes us think that our educational structures are immune? And
what does it mean to us? What should we be doing now to prepare our
institutions? Ourselves? Our learners?
He also notes that
Information validity is increasingly determined by the views of many individuals, not the select domain of a few [e.g., Amazon book reviews or Digg or Technorati rankings] . . . . [E]xpert-bases systems have value, but their value diminishes simply
because no single person can keep up with today’s information. A
network, however, can.
Of course this has major implications for the academic concept of peer review (which is under fire on some fronts). I wonder when the egg is going to crack in academia. Two years? Five? Ten? And how do we retain our hedgehog concepts of research and scholarship while simultaneously adapting to the realities of a new era?
FYI, I highly recommend the Horizon Report, which
highlights six technologies that will have major impacts on higher education in
the next one to five years.
by Scott McLeod | Feb 14, 2007 | Leadership and Vision, Management and Operations, Pre-Service Preparation, Professional Development, Research and Evaluation, Tech Integration, Tech Tools |
If we’re going to teach Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
literacy skills in schools, we need ways of determining whether or not those
skills have been learned by students. The Partnership for 21st Century
Skills notes that answering the question ‘How do we measure 21st
century learning?’ will be critical as we try to prepare students
who can be productive citizens in the new technology-suffused,
globally-interconnected economy.
Over in the United Kingdom, the British government’s Key Stage 3 ICT Literacy
Assessment for 12- and 13-year-old aims to assess higher-order thinking
skills in conjunction with ICT use. For example, as part of a task to draft and
publish a journalistic article, students must use search engines to collect and
analyze employment data, e-mail sources for permission to publish their
information, and present data in graphic and written formats using word
processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software, all within a simulated
computing environment. Student actions are tracked by the computer and assessed
for both technical and learning skills such as finding things out,
developing ideas, and exchanging and sharing information. If
you’re interested, you can download a
demonstration file and see for yourself.
Other interesting projects in the U.K. include Northern Ireland’s Council for
the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment A-Level Examination in the Moving
Image (students must create
and assess digital film clips), the Ultralab International Certificate in
Digital Creativity (students must defend their digitally-produced film,
artwork, and music to a panel of peers and professionals), and the eViva e-portfolio initiative (online
space where students can receive feedback on their research and communication,
data analysis, and presentation skills). If anyone in the U.K. is reading this
post and has experience with any of these assessments, I’d love to hear your
perspectives in the comments section.
Over here in the United States, ETS also is
attempting to create new assessments of 21st century learning skills. I had a
chance last fall to get a personal demonstration of the ETS ICT Literacy Assessment. Like the Key
Stage 3, ETS’ assessment is a scenario-based test. This is a completely new
paradigm for ETS, which the ETS representative said is challenging but also
exciting for its psychometricians to try and wrap their heads around. I
encourage you to visit the
demo site and see how the test works. It may not be ideal, but I think it’s
a lot further from your typical standardized test than one might expect. It’s an
interesting attempt to blend both the technology and information literacy skills
needed by future generations and at least offers some food for thought. Also
check out the News
and Research
links to find out more about the results from ETS’ pilot tests.
We will see the birth of many new 21st century
assessments in the years ahead. Like these early attempts, most of
these assessments will be performance-based and thus will avoid some of the
objections we hear about current standardized tests. Most, if not all, also will
utilize the multimedia, simulation, and tracking power of digital technologies
to create more authentic assessments of real-life tasks. It should be an
interesting journey.
Credits
Much of the information in this post, including some very close paraphrasing,
comes from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills report, Assessment
of 21st Century Skills: The Current Landscape. If you’re interested in 21st
century learning skills, this report should be an important addition to your
reading list.
Other resources
This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.
by Scott McLeod | Jan 5, 2007 | Miscellaneous, Research and Evaluation, Tech Tools |
Listen to this post!
David Warlick blogged a bit about this idea last June, but I thought it was interesting that one of the most popular articles in 2006 from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge series was the one titled Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation. The article discusses using open source software development ideas to address previously-unsolvable scientific problems. The article is definitely worth a read, as are several other of the top articles from last year.
It would be fascinating to use this model in a school system. For example, a school or district blog could throw out a question (e.g., How can we better engage parents? How can we improve the academic achievement of non-English-speaking students? How can we cut our heating and electricity costs?), and solicit solutions from educational experts, other experts, the general public, etc. Obviously you’d have to sort the wheat from the chaff and, in some instances, there might need to be some way of providing an incentive large enough for folks to participate. Nonetheless, I think the idea has some power if implemented thoughtfully.
Does anyone know of a school or district that is doing this right now and seeing positive effects?
by Scott McLeod | Jan 3, 2007 | Leadership and Vision, Pre-Service Preparation, Professional Development, Research and Evaluation |
Listen to this post!
The December 2006 issue of NASSP Bulletin has an article by Drs. Chien Yu and Vance A. Durrington, assistant professors at Mississippi State University, on practicing and preservice administrators’ perceived levels of proficiency on ISTE’s National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A). The researchers surveyed 57 aspiring administrators and 16 practicing administrators who were serving as their mentors. The professors asked the respondents to rate themselves on a Likert scale from 1 to 5 regarding their perceived ability to perform the NETS-A standards and performance indicators. So what did the researchers find out?
In the researchers’ own words, “there were no significant differences between mentors’ and mentees’ perceived ability to the criteria for each standard.” That’s another way of saying that the folks mentoring the administrator newbies said that they knew no more than the folks they were mentoring when it came to technology-related leadership issues. Ouch.
The other interesting finding was that both the mentees and the mentors rated themselves above average on every standard. For example, the mentees’ average responses ranged from 3.32 to 3.75 across the six standards, while the mentors’ averages ranged from 3.21 to 3.78. The overall average for the mentees (3.61) was slightly higher than that of the mentors (3.58).
Now the number of participants in this study is small, particularly on the mentor side of things, but nonetheless the results are both depressing and inspiring. Depressing because there’s not going to be much good mentoring occurring on the technology leadership front when the mentees know more than the mentors. And, of course, inspiring <insert sarcasm here> because it’s good to know that there’s above-average technology leadership occurring in these participants’ schools. You know it is because they said it was.
This study raises a couple of thoughts in my mind:
- First, never rely on participants’ self-ratings as evidence of anything, at least not without corroborative evidence from elsewhere. For example, for our study of data-driven decision-making readiness here in Minnesota, we asked similar questions of teachers, principals, and superintendents. If teachers said they were using formative assessments for student progress monitoring, we wanted to check their responses against what the administrators in their district said. If administrators said they were modeling data-driven practices for staff, we wanted to see what the teaching staff thought. You get the idea. In this study the authors didn’t comment on the validity of the averages, they simply reported them, so at least they didn’t make the same mistake that was made in this NASSP article, in which the researcher asked principals to rate themselves and then used those self-reports to conclude that “principals with technology training are stronger leaders in this realm.” Again, just because participants say it doesn’t make it true.
- Second, I’m guessing that the finding of no significant differences between practicing and preservice administrators probably is pretty accurate, despite the methodological concerns that I have raised. I personally think that honest, accurate self-reporting would have resulted in much lower averages, but my own experiences working with schools show that teachers know at least as much about technology leadership as principals. Whatever leadership knowledge advantage principals have is typically outweighed by the technology advantage that teachers, who are generally younger, often possess. The bottom line, however, is that neither group knows much because neither group has received much training.
As I near the end of this post, I’ll give a nod to our own Principals Technology Leadership Assessment (PTLA). As far as I know, the PTLA is still the nation’s only psychometrically-validated assessment of principals’ technology leadership inclinations and activities. The PTLA was created to help assess principals’ actual behavior (as opposed to simple self-ratings of proficiency). Although the PTLA also is based on self-perceptions, the questions ask principals about their frequency of action, not just how good they think they are. This was the closest we and the American Institutes for Research could get to a performance assessment without direct observation, collecting a portfolio, etc. If you’re interested in using the PTLA, contact me. The PTLA is free to K-12 school organizations and educational leadership preparation programs; we’ll even host the online survey for you.
Happy New Year, everyone. As you work with schools on various technology-related issues, please remember the leaders. As I said in my very first post at Dangerously Irrelevant, sustainable success in schools never occurs without effective leadership. There are innovative, technology-using educators in almost every school and district. Their potential impact runs smack into the brick wall of their administrators’ lack of knowledge and/or training. We need more effective technology leaders in formal administrative roles like principal or superintendent. We need them now.
This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.
