Group items tagged

a discrete set of standards and outcomes

we've spent billions of dollars on technology that by almost every measure has had little or no widespread effect.

small schools are overrepresented among the country's highest achievers

were not as prescriptive about how they wanted their money spent.

want public education run more like a business

“The course is really a refresher, but they aren’t ready for a refresher. They need to learn how to learn.”

The knowledge gap at community colleges is increasingly being recognized as a national problem.

“Many, many community college presidents will say that math developmental education is the most difficult problem they’re facing,”

Instead of scribbling marks in the margins of printed papers, I opened each student’s paper in Google Docs, highlighted text and inserted comments to clarify my thoughts, and then turned on the screen recorder (Jing) to record my voice as I scrolled through the paper and pointed to items with my mouse. Right after recording, I uploaded the finished recording to Jing’s companion hosting site, and then I simply copied and pasted the link to the recording directly into the Google Doc.

After about four minutes, they began the next task, copying and pasting my reflection questions into the bottom of their docs, and then responding to those prompts as they reflected on their work and my feedback.

As I watched them, I couldn’t help but remember the way that I used to provide feedback. Students would receive their graded papers, flip past the comments I had scribbled in the margin, glance at the final grade, and then forget all about it.

The studying that middle school and high school students do after the dismissal bell rings is either an unreasonable burden or a crucial activity that needs beefing up. Which is it? Do American students have too much homework or too little? Neither, I’d say. We ought to be asking a different question altogether. What should matter to parents and educators is this: How effectively do children’s after-school assignments advance learning?

The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality. And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Although surveys show that the amount of time our children spend on homework has risen over the last three decades, American students are mired in the middle of international academic rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to results from the Program for International Student Assessment released last December.

“Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach, students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction throughout the semester.

- Team Salary (Similar to marketing, each soccer club must determine "ahead of time", how much they will pay each player. The base salary is determined by calculating the expected value of future revenue generated by each individual player with 90% confidence; that is to say, only 10% risk. The remaining 10% risk is not given to the player in the form of base salary, but rather as bonus incentives. "If you score so many goals, or the total games played win % is higher than X%", then a reward is given in the form of additional money. In either case, the job of a Statistician or in this case; Accountant, is to determine the probability of each player's expected preformance; then, the expected change in revenue due to such preformance; determine the risk the soccer club is willing to bear for such preformance; and then determine a fair compensation amount to each individual player.)

Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”

all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.

“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,”

a new teaching approach here called “proficiency-based education” that was inspired by a 2012 state law.

law requires that by 2021, students graduating from Maine high schools must show they have mastered specific skills to earn a high school diploma.

CompetencyWorks, a national organization t