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Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, reports that children from as young as 8 months old through preschool explore through techniques that would seem familiar to any scientist: they make hypotheses and test them against data; predict outcomes using statistics, and can infer the causes of failed actions.

All of these things, Gopnik and her colleagues argue, happen years before any formal training in the same scientific techniques. "What we need to do to encourage children to learn is not to put them in the equivalent of school, tell them things, give them reading drills or flash cards. We really need to put them in a safe, rich environment where the natural capacities for exploration, for testing, for science can get free rein," she said in a briefing with reporters.

Students who won lotteries to attend charter middle schools performed, on average, no better in mathematics and reading than their peers who lost out in the random admissions process and enrolled in nearby regular public schools, according to a national study released today.

On average, though, the charter middle schools in the study enrolled a lower percentage of students who are eligible for free and reduced-price school meals than charters nationally, and served smaller percentages of students scoring below proficiency levels on state exams than their national peers.

ClarkAC wrote: I think this just adds weight to the notion that the devil is in the details. Some charters (i.e., some KIPP schools - not all) are producing great results. Some are not.Some kids getting vouchers are doing much better. Some are not.Some traditional public schools are great. Some are not.On average, no one solution shows impact because we are looking at averages.I agree. We need to get under the hood. Until then, we won't find the solutions we seek. 6/29/2010 12:38 PM EDT on EdWeek

New version of Google documents

The new version has chat, character-by-character real time co-editing, and makes imports and exports much better

Over the next couple of weeks, they’re rolling out the ability to upload, store, and share any file in Google Docs

Most of the students were quite awkward in their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a seminar on "Designing for Effective Change" for the Honors Program, but lacking experience in this sort of approach to instruction, the students wrote to their conception of what I wanted to hear from them. I can’t imagine a more constipated mindset for producing interesting prose. For this class there was a need for them to unlearn much of their approach which had been finely tuned and was quite successful in their other classes. They needed to take more responsibility for their choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on which to write, I also gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so long as they could create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of the early writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other readers if they didn’t first please themselves. It was a message they were not used to hearing.

The commenting, more than any other activity the instructor engages in, demonstrates the instructor’s commitment to the course and to the students. In turn the students, learning to appreciate the value of the comments, start to push themselves in the writing

Is open blogging this way consistent with FERPA? As best as I’ve been able to determine, it is as long as students “opt in

Reflective Practitioner

Reflective Practitioner.  

The reflective writing has been valuable but definitely the nearly 4,000 comments have been even more of a learning experience. This is the single best professional development experience I've had.