Marshall Memo 660
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
November 7, 2016
1. Five ideas from recent gender research
3. What should high-school seniors make of all those college rankings?
4. High-school reading difficulties conflated with behavior problems
5. Do new Common Core reading tests measure content knowledge?
6. Building students’ savvy at navigating the Internet
7. World language students create a class blog
8. Conquering the grading beast
9. Improvising to bring computer access to all students
10. Short item: Teaching resources website
“Dropped in the middle of the forest, hikers know they can’t divine their way out by looking at the ground. They use a compass. Similarly, fact-checkers use the vast resources of the Internet to determine where information is coming from before they read it.”
Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew (see item #6)
“To be truly literate in the Information Age, our students need to understand how to frame a worthwhile question and then go out and find worthwhile answers.”
Laura Sexton in “Ask New Questions: Inquiry as the New Literacy” in The Language
Educator, October/November 2016 (Vol. 11, #4, p. 29-31), no e-link available
“The Internet is like a small town, and what you do will come back to you.”
David Hill in “Inside the New Standards for Kids and Screen Time” by Markham Heid
in Time Magazine, November 7, 2016 (p. 15-16), available for purchase at
“Digital literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies on the Internet.”
Cornell University’s definition, quoted in “Blogging to Build Digital Literacy and
Community Awareness” (item #7), full text at https://digitalliteracy.cornell.edu
“The interaction between a student and an institution is not the same as the interaction between a student and a refrigerator.”
Willard Dix, expressing skepticism about college rankings (see item #3)
(Originally titled “Gender Insights Coming to Your Classroom”)
In this Educational Leadership article, David Sadker (American University) and Melissa Koch (Anita Borg Institute) share insights on gender equity:
• Stereotype threat is powerful but malleable. “No one is immune from stereotype threat,” say Sadker and Koch. “Each of us holds an image of some group (gender, racial, ethnic, religious, economic class, and so on) that we believe has knowledge or ability superior to ours.” When girls face challenging academic work in science, math, and technology, the stereotype about male superiority can cause them to underperform. A study of college students found that simply telling some women, “this mathematics test has not shown any gender differences in performance or mathematical ability” neutralized stereotype threat; those women outperformed women who were told it was a test of math ability. The experimental group also did better than the men who took the test. Another study of students taking an AP calculus test revealed these differences:
“Flip the Script on Fate Control” by Bryan Goodwin in Educational Leadership, November
2016 (Vol. 74, #3, p. 83-84), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2fJ6Vi4; Goodwin can be reached at [email protected].
In this New York Times column, Frank Bruni says he’s frustrated with the dozens of college ratings out there and has some guidance for high-school seniors as they figure out which colleges they should apply to. Bruni likes this quote from Willard Dix, a long-time observer of the college admissions process: “You can slice and dice it any way you like, but this isn’t like Consumer Reports, which tests something to see if it does or doesn’t work. The interaction between a student and an institution is not the same as the interaction between a student and a refrigerator.”
Those who publish college rankings base them on objective data about each institution, but they also make value judgments about what’s most important. For potential applicants to make smart choices, it’s vital to read the fine print and look at exactly what’s being measured – for example:
In this Education Gadfly article, Ruth Wattenberg reports on her analysis of publicly released test items in the reading tests developed by PARCC and Smarter Balanced for grades 3, 5, and 8. Her goal was to see if they “reflect and reward Common Core’s call to build broad knowledge.” Her fear was that the new tests, like their predecessors, assess generic reading skills (main idea, author’s intent, etc.), which will continue to discourage schools from spending instructional time on science, social studies, and the arts.
The result? “I found that the reading passages of both PARCC’s and SBAC’s third-grade assessments are content-rich and contain challenging vocabulary,” says Wattenberg. “The knowledge and vocabulary that are embedded in these passages range across astronomy; human and physical geography; cultural adaptation; units of measurement; space travel; biological, physical, and evolutionary processes; manufacturing processes such as logging and papermaking; and a heavy dose of animal characteristics and habitats.” The sample passages also contained challenging vocabulary: rodent, species, markings, nocturnal, Asia, tassels, gorge, tundra, survival, intestine, adapted, torpid, teeming, caribou, dramatically, heritage, vanished, formula, chemicals, bleached, graphite, slates, crystallizes, chunky, space station, spacecraft, orbits, planets, space, and Antarctica.
Wattenberg’s study of fifth-grade released items revealed a similarly rich array of content and vocabulary, including the experience of immigration; the role of lighthouses in seagoing cultures; human impact on sea animals; the process that promotes crickets’ chirping; Renaissance Italy and the Leaning Tower of Pisa; evolution and animal behavior; and more. And in eighth grade, released items drew on knowledge of the invention process; the workings of the telegraph and phonograph; sound waves; the basics of business and commerce, including patents, ventures, and entrepreneurs; the meaning of radicalism; Ansel Adams and the art of photography; and terms like finance minister, Federal Reserve Bank, inflation, taxes, and more.
The bottom line: “Preparing students to score well on these tests,” says Wattenberg, “requires systematically and deliberately exposing them to and instructing them in a rich, broad curriculum of science, history, geography, and the arts, starting at the earliest grades and continuing through every grade. Happily, this is the same kind of curriculum that will prepare them well for their middle and high school classes in social studies and science.”
In other words, the PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments are tests of knowledge, not just skills.
How good are today’s young “digital natives” at finding the answer to a factual question online? ask Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew (Stanford University) in this Education Week article. “True, many of our kids can flit between Facebook and Twitter while uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend,” they say. “But when it comes to using the Internet to get to the bottom of things, Junior’s no better than the rest of us. Often he’s worse.”
Why? Because all too many kids naively look at the top-ranked website and aren’t good at spotting the difference between reliable websites and fringe groups that cleverly disguise their real agenda. In studies conducted at Stanford, middle-school students didn’t distinguish between a news story and an advertisement, high-school students took a one-sided chart from a political action committee at face value, and college students credulously accepted as reliable a .org website that popped up at the top of the pile. In a study at Northwestern University, report Wineburg and McGrew, students “ignored the sponsoring organization and the article’s author, blindly trusting the search engine to put the most reliable results first.”
In another study, 25 Stanford undergraduates were asked to spend 10 minutes comparing the trustworthiness of the American Academy of Pediatrics website and that of the American College of Pediatricians. Students were told they could click on links, Google information, or do anything else to arrive at their judgment. More than half of students rated the second website “more reliable,” and even those who preferred the first treated the two organizations as equals. One student said, “They are both from academies or institutions that deal with this stuff every day.”
The students utterly failed to uncover a major difference between the groups. The American Academy of Pediatricians was established in 1930, has 66,000 members, and publishes the journal Pediatrics, while the American College of Pediatricians broke with the first organization in 2002 over its stance on adoption by same-sex couples, believes that homosexuality is linked to pedophilia, and has been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Why didn’t the Stanford students figure this out? Because, say Wineburg and McGrew, “they spent most of their time reading the articles on each organization’s site. But masking true intentions and ownership on the web has grown so sophisticated that to rely on the same set of skills one uses for print reading is naïve. Parsing digital information before one knows if a site can be trusted is a colossal waste of time and energy.”
What strategies do expert fact-checkers use that might be helpful to the rest of us? Here are three pointers:
• Don’t rely on the order of search results. It’s a misconception to think Google rank-orders sites by reliability. Savvy readers scroll down to the bottom of the search results page and make an informed decision about where to click first.
• Read laterally. If you land on an unfamiliar site, leave it and explore others, open a new tab, or Google the name of the organization or its president. “Dropped in the middle of the forest, hikers know they can’t divine their way out by looking at the ground,” say Wineburg and McGrew. “They use a compass. Similarly, fact-checkers use the vast resources of the Internet to determine where information is coming from before they read it.”
• Don’t rely on a website’s “About” information. “If a site can masquerade as a nonpartisan think tank when funded by corporate interests and created by a Washington public relations firm, it can surely pull the wool over our eyes with a concocted ‘About’ page,”
say Wineburg and McGrew.
“None of this is rocket science,” conclude the authors. “But it’s often not taught in school. In fact, some schools have special filters that direct students to already vetted sites, effectively creating a generation of bubble children who never develop the immunities needed to ward off the toxins that float across their Facebook feeds, where students most often get their news. This approach protects young people from the real world rather than preparing them to deal with it.”
In this article in The Language Educator, Grant Gearhart (Armstrong State University) says that blogging is “a powerful multimedia tool for promoting cultural connections with communities beyond the classroom… The very act of publishing a blog post embodies the goal of creating original content for a specific audience, but it does so through a widely accessible digital portal. As a result, the teacher ceases to be the definitive backstop for the author’s message, meaning the student will have to think more deeply about the writing, thus enhancing the overall authorial experience.” Blogging in a second language is especially helpful in getting students to consider how readers other than their teacher see their writing. The result: they work harder at catching errors and expressing themselves in the best possible way.
Gearhart got his college Spanish class going on a blog and was thrilled by the result; students took over and he became the “guide on the side” quite early in the process. “Soon,” he says, “the students imagined the blog as something more than just a website for a class; they began to see it as a bridge between what they were learning in class and what was happening on our campus and in our community.” Promoted on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the site became a place where other students could publish their writing. You can check out their mission-driven blog, “Building the Hispanic Voice at Armstrong,” at www.unydosarmstrong.wordpress.com.
Here are Gearhart’s suggestions for starting a class blog at the middle or high school level:
“Blogging to Build Digital Literacy and Community Awareness” by Grant Gearhart in The Language Educator, October/November 2016 (Vol. 11, #4, p. 36-39), no e-link available
In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez confesses that in her third year of teaching, she was confronted with a weekend of nothing but grading – worksheets, quizzes, make-up work, and essays. As she prepared to grade the worksheets, she remembered that they were from three weeks ago and no students had asked about them: “I stood, gathered that pile of worksheets and the ones from my four other classes, walked over to the recycling bin, and dropped them in. One hundred and twenty papers, gone in an instant. Yes, I still graded the other stuff: the quizzes, the essays… but those worksheets were no longer my problem. I felt kind of guilty. But mostly I felt free.”
Gonzalez suggests 20 ways of avoiding this scenario and giving students feedback more efficiently and effectively:
• Don’t grade everything:
• Get students involved:
• Get more efficient:
• Get your files in order:
• When all else fails, just dig out:
(Originally titled “Access: Let’s Get Creative”)
In this Educational Leadership article, author/consultant Catlin Tucker suggests five ways to expand computer access to all students:
Teaching resources website – Jennifer Gonzalez’s free website, The Cult of Pedagogy, www.cultofpedagogy.com has a wealth of helpful resources, including short videos on lesson design, inductive learning, jigsaw cooperative learning, reciprocal learning, rubrics, concept attainment, flipping, and more.
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About the Marshall Memo
Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 45 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”
To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 60 carefully-chosen publications (see list to the right), sifts through more than a hundred articles each week, and selects 5-10 that have the greatest potential to improve teaching, leadership, and learning. He then writes a brief summary of each article, pulls out several striking quotes, provides e-links to full articles when available, and e-mails the Memo to subscribers every Monday evening (with occasional breaks; there are 50 issues a year).
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• Publications (with a count of articles from each)
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Core list of publications covered
Those read this week are underlined.
American Educational Research Journal
American Educator
American Journal of Education
AMLE Magazine
ASCA School Counselor
ASCD SmartBrief
Communiqué
Ed. Magazine
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
English Journal
Essential Teacher
Exceptional Children
Go Teach
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Educational Review
Independent School
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)
Journal of Staff Development
Kappa Delta Pi Record
Knowledge Quest
Literacy Today
Mathematics in the Middle School
Middle School Journal
Peabody Journal of Education
Phi Delta Kappan
Principal
Principal Leadership
Principal’s Research Review
Reading Research Quarterly
Responsive Classroom Newsletter
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Teacher
Teaching Children Mathematics
Teaching Exceptional Children
The Atlantic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The District Management Journal
The Journal of the Learning Sciences
The Language Educator
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Time Magazine