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Tracy Tuten

The Irascible Professor on "The SAT that isn't (the death of aptitude.)" - 2 views

irascibleprofessor.com/comments-08-11-12.htm

education essay SAT 2012 esteem objectivism

shared by Tracy Tuten on 13 Aug 12 - Cached
  • It used to be that the SAT was distinguished from its competitor the ACT by the fact that the former was seen as measuring aptitude and being effectively un-coachable, while the latter was a gauge of achievement in learning.
  • At the risk of sounding pejorative, I'd say that I was expecting the test to be a measure of who I was, while some of my fellow students and their parents treated it more as a test of how they could present themselves to admissions officers.  And while I wouldn't suggest that people tend to think of it in these terms, I believe that the latter perception relies on the academically damaging belief that an individual student's capabilities need not matter to what goals he sets for himself.  That perception leads people to believe that there is something inherently unfair about a test that you can't study for.
  • And if after four years of high school they haven't developed much skill for reasoning, that's okay – they can take preparatory courses to learn how to fake it for an exam, and let that be their stepping stone toward academic accomplishment.  As a society that values the promise of formal education more than the satisfaction of actual learning, we have precipitated the death of aptitude.  We are afraid to acknowledge that it exists, because aptitude, whether the product of inborn talent or effective rearing, makes some people better suited than others for certain goals.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem.  As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average."  To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance.  Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.
  • But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering.  College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people.  The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it.  By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.
  • We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level.  Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college.  But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.
  • We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem.  It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.
  • Tracy Tuten on 13 Aug 12
     
    An essay on what the SAT says about society's view of education, accomplishments, aptitude, and self-esteem. 
Amy Roediger

INeedAPencil.ck12.org | Free SAT Prep - 48 views

ineedapencil.ck12.org

SATprep sat education resources

shared by Amy Roediger on 10 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Amy Roediger on 10 Mar 13
     
    Free SAT prep!
Mary Beth Messner

Grading essays: Humans vs. machine - USATODAY.com - 28 views

www.usatoday.com/...-automated-grading-essay_N.htm

Computer Grading Essays Writing English

shared by Mary Beth Messner on 22 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The testing service compared the results of E-Rater evaluations of students' papers to human grading, and to students' scores on the SAT writing test and the essay portion of the SAT writing test (which is graded by humans). ETS found very high correlations between the E-Rater grades and the SAT grades and, generally, to the human grades of the placement test.
  • In fact, Ramineni said, one of the problems that surfaced in the review was that some humans doing the evaluation were not scoring students' essays on some prompts in consistent ways, based on the rubric used by NJIT.
Martin Burrett

What is the lived experience of the child? by @PaulStrange - 4 views

ukedchat.com/...lived-experience

shared by Martin Burrett on 06 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 06 Oct 18
     
    "Something that has struck me as vitally important in the realms of education at the moment is the lived experience of the child. Now, you may be sat there thinking, 'Isn't this stating the absolutely obvious?' I hear it said so often that underpinning every decision made in schools is a focus on the children. Please don't misunderstand me at this point; I am not calling into question the motives of educators and leaders. I just thought it pertinent to bring this to the fore in the wake of the myriad of difficulties schools face in relation to increased budget strain and stretched services."
Steve Ransom

'What's Wrong With Education Cannot Be Fixed with Technology' -- The Other Steve Jobs |... - 4 views

www.wired.com/...apple-education-jobs

stevejobs education technology change reform business etextbooks

shared by Steve Ransom on 18 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.
  • It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy.
  • You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.
  • The trouble is that education’s sociopolitical problems — its bureaucracies, its stakeholders, its poverty, as well as the sheer mass of the industry — are exactly what makes building a disruptive business around education so difficult.
Mark Gleeson

The iPad competition: sell us the educational advantage, not the tech specs - 70 views

mgleeson.edublogs.org/...l-advantage-not-the-tech-specs

ipad competition android windows8

shared by Mark Gleeson on 10 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Gleeson on 10 Nov 12
     
    As I sat there respectfully paying attention, I spent most of my time thinking why do proponents of iPad alternatives spend so much time selling the technical specs that outmatch the iPad and so little time telling us how their preferred product will improve the way our students will learn compared to the iPad.
Sarah Schaller Welsh

Freakonomics » What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Q... - 42 views

www.freakonomics.com/...ed-tests-a-freakonomics-quorum

education

shared by Sarah Schaller Welsh on 08 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Gaston Caperton
  • Standardized tests have much in common with French fries. Both of them differ in composition as well as quality. French fries are available in numerous incarnations, including straight, curly, skins-on, skins-off, and, in recent years, with sweet potatoes. Regarding quality, of course, the taste of French fries can range substantially – from sublime to soggy. It’s really the same with standardized tests.
  • Take the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, a federal accountability law requiring scads of standardized tests to be used in evaluating schools. Do you know that almost all of the standardized tests now being employed to judge school quality are unable to distinguish between well taught and badly taught students?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • all schools – kindergarten through college – should employ exit exams allowing us to determine what students have actually learned. We owe it to our students to make sure that they’ve been properly taught.
  • Then there are the questions of what to do with the results. I have actually sat through an extended discussion of how we could use regression analysis to parse out the contribution different teachers made to a group of students’ performance on a set of standardized tests. The answer was, yes it was possible, and could in fact be used to award merit pay increases. But nobody left the room feeling very comfortable that there would be any gain in what we knew made for good teaching.
  • Roughly half of the nation’s students are taking tests under NCLB that are completely free of open-ended questions.
  • educators have a strong incentive to “teach to the test.” In this case, that means teaching low level skills at the expense of the more demanding material that everyone says students need to master in today’s complicated world.
  • But is it fair to give students what amounts to a counterfeit passport to college or work? And do such tests spur high school teachers and principals to aim high with their students? To both questions, the answer is, “No.” In most states today, high school exit tests serve the same role as the standardized tests mandated by NCLB: they try to jack up the floor of student achievement in the nation’s schools. The best high school exit tests would be end-of-course exams akin to the “comprehensive” exams that many colleges and universities require students to pass in their majors before graduation – tests, that is, that would raise the ceiling of student achievement.
  • High-stakes testing has narrowed and dumbed down curricula; eliminated time spent on untested subjects like social studies, art, and even recess; turned classrooms into little more than test preparation centers; reduced high school graduation rates; and driven good teachers from the profession. Those are all reasons why FairTest and other experts advocate a sharp reduction in public school standardized testing and a halt to exit exams.
  • igh school grade
  • point average is a better predictor of college success than either the SAT or the ACT.
Judy Robison

Free Practice Tests - Varsity Tutors - 44 views

www.varsitytutors.com/practice-tests

Assessment teachers socialstudies english science math

shared by Judy Robison on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Judy Robison on 08 Nov 13
     
    Assessment | News Varsity Tutors Debuts Free Test Question Site By Dian Schaffhauser 11/07/13 Varsity Tutors, a providor of private tutoring to students online, has launched a new, free service with the intention of becoming the "Khan Academy" of practice tests. The company has introduced a Web-based assessment system intended to replace other forms of educational content such as SAT or ACT preparation books or online subscriptions to assessment materials. Varsity Learning Tools, as it's called, makes hundreds of free practice tests available in 95 subjects. Currently in open beta testing, the site lists assessment tests by subject and allows the user to choose to answer a single test, flashcards, or a question of the day. Each question can be shared through social network services. When the student answers it, a second page displays with an assessment and explanation and data on how much time was spent on the question, and how many others answered it correctly." (Read more at http://thejournal.com/articles/2013/11/07/varsity-tutors-launches-free-test-question-site.aspx?=THEEL#8hQzr0oig6X2IZmS.99)
Maggie Tsai

MyWeb4Ed: Diigo- A regular educators look at why Diigo is a teacher's friend - 55 views

www.myweb4edblog.com/...lar-educators-look-at-why.html

diigo education

shared by Maggie Tsai on 05 Jul 11 - Cached
  • I sat today using Diigo to bookmark, annotate, highlight, capture pages and pictures, and do just about anything I needed to do effortlessly.  Ya'll, this is straight from this educator's heart:  Diigo is amazing! Now look, my thinking about tech tools is that they have to serve everyone:  teachers --administrators, students, parents -- basically all stakeholders to be truly of value.  I'm into the reality of teaching which means if it is not going to improve the outcome for students academically by supporting their learning, most teachers just don't have the time to deal with it.  But, I'd like to think I'm a realist and if there's a tool that makes a teacher's life easier, then preparing for lessons, classes, professional developments and, yes, our other life is easier, and that translates to a happier educator who has more time to work on supporting those students learning
  •  Diigo has to be the single most valuable tool that I have on my computer.
Jon Dorbolo

The World's Richest College Dropout Urges Colleges to Stop Dropouts - Jordan Weissmann ... - 22 views

www.theatlantic.com/...265251

shared by Jon Dorbolo on 18 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gates sees this problem largely as a matter of incentives. Publications such as U.S. News and World Report reward colleges for the resources they spend on students and their exclusivity, but not necessarily for their results. High SAT scores will move a colleges up in the rankings (and so, it should be noted, will having a high graduation rate). Making sure your alums have a well-paid job, or a job at all, will not. To begin fixing this problem, we need need flip U.S. News' logic, Gates said, and reward schools that "take people with the low SAT and actually educate them well."  
    • Jon Dorbolo
      Jon Dorbolo on 18 Nov 12
       
      Taking in less qualified students in order to bring them up to speed is part of the the Land Grant University mission. Sal Khan (Khan Academy) recently observed that for students who take longer to master fundamental math skills, once they do so they accelerate faster such that they catch up to those who are ahead. Ubiquitous learning is species survival.
Linda Morosko

iPads help Salem County students learn | NJ.com - 36 views

www.nj.com/..._help_salem_county_studen.html

ipads students help salem Student Engagement Elearning education student student success effective teachers

shared by Linda Morosko on 18 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Linda Morosko on 18 Apr 11
     
    Third-grade students at the Upper Pittsgrove School mastered fractions in Mrs. Markert class Friday afternoon not by memorization or flash cards, but with Apple iPads. School districts throughout Salem County have now entered the age of technology using the touch sensitive innovative device as a learning tool for students. Superintendents say they are attracted to the devices for two reasons: It's user friendly and inexpensive compared to other technology like laptops.
  • Linda Morosko on 18 Apr 11
     
    Kidd, who also moderates a district-wide blog, said he was amazed with how user friendly the technology is, even for severely challenged students. He said he remembered the first time he let one of the autistic students in the school use the iPad. "One of the students showed interest and when I gave it to her she sat for over 20 minutes engaged in the device," said Kidd. "Her teacher said she has never sat for that long in the classroom."
Clayton Mitchell

Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic - 28 views

www.newrepublic.com/...rated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

ivy league education

shared by Clayton Mitchell on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • What an indictment of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word.
  • Clayton Mitchell on 22 Jul 14
     
    What the real costs are of sending students to ivy league universities. 
Tony Baldasaro

Inversions - Practical Theory - 1 views

practicaltheory.org/...index.php

VLE education chris_lehmann

shared by Tony Baldasaro on 15 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Then, class, rather than being a time when all kids sat and received the instruction, could be the time when they reinforce skills by doing problem sets, worked on real-world application projects, collaborated with teachers to reinforce concepts, etc... in some ways, it's an inversion of what we traditionally think of as a math class.
  • If we use technology to invert that idea, so that kids could watch the teacher's demonstration of the skills and concepts at home (and with the ability to rewind when necessary,) we could allow kids the opportunity to apply and practice their knowledge in the space where they can get help, collaborate, etc... doesn't that make more sense? (Interestingly, I was trying to imagine what that would look like in an English classroom, and I realized that is, in many respects, similar to what we do already when we ask kids to read the book at home, and then come in and interact with the community to uncover the deeper aspects of the text. Hm.)
  • Tony Baldasaro on 15 Sep 09
     
    I'm about 80% of the way through Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn. (Yeah, I know... I'm the last one to read it.) There's a lot that's very interesting about the book, and while we should critically examine the book, it is still a fascinating read. If nothing else, it is continuing to make me think about how much more could happen in our classrooms if we created more opportunities for students to learn basic skills and content outside of class, rather than inside class. I've been thinking a lot about math class. How many students would learn math more efficiently if they could watch math videos, narrated by a teacher with problems done "on the board" as they watched with multiple examples of concepts (think geometry here, as an example) that speak to different learning modalities.
Christian Howd

How to Make American Teens Smarter - The Daily Beast - 51 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...what-teens-are-really-reading

reading reading strategies language arts

shared by Christian Howd on 21 Jul 10 - Cached
  • "People don't really understand the nature of reading. They feel that reading is a skill, that it's transferable, so once you're a good reader, you can read anything that's put in front of you," says Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist who focuses on K-12 education. "But that's only true for decoding—what you learn until grade three or four. After that, when you see good readers versus poor readers, what you're looking at is mostly differences in the knowledge that kids bring to the reading. It's easy to read something when you already know something about the topic. And if you don't know about the topic, it's utterly opaque to you."
  • That's why children should read newspapers and magazines, texts about nature and technology, and biographies—genres that increase real-world knowledge. This is especially important for poor children, who may not be exposed to as much "background" information at home: the random vocabulary, facts, and associations that make it easier to do well on tests like the NAEP and SAT, and to succeed in the workplace.
  • Christian Howd on 21 Jul 10
     
    Americans may be reading more words today than ever before, but the content is less challenging. Dana Goldstein on kids' dismal reading scores-and a movement to get them to put down Twilight and pick up nonfiction.
  • Joyce Uglow on 23 Jul 10
     
    You're absolutely right! Our students need to be provided opportunities to read a variety of text!
Maggie Tsai

McCunications: The power of Diigo - 0 views

mccunications.blogspot.com/...power-of-diigo.html

diigo education review

shared by Maggie Tsai on 24 Oct 08 - Cached
  • What I like is that Diggo not only lets you easily save items, it lets you highlight the "good parts" so that when you go back to the article you can easily find them. That turned out to be a real asset when I was working on my part of the JACC Norcal keynote a couple weeks ago.It's been a real pressure cooker of a semester, so I had very little time to put my JACC presentation together. However, I'd been bookmarking, highlighting and saving relevant blog posts and articles into my JACC list on Diigo (yes, you can categorize what you save) for weeks. So when I finally sat down to create a presentation, I had everything I needed at my fingertips. I was able to put it all together in a day. (By the way, you can view that presentation, Journalism in the Starbucks Era, on SlideShare, another great online tool.)But after downloading a Diigo update this morning, I realized I'm just scratching the surface of what you can do with Diigo. For example, my previous blog post on Greenspan's sudden epiphany...well, I posted it direct from Diigo while reading and bookmarking the article. Pretty cool, huh?When I ran through Diigo's "how-to" overview this morning, I found several other things I didn't know. In addition to using the one-click "Send to Blog" feature, you can also use Diigo's "send" feature to:send annotated and highlighted pages by emailpost to other websites such as twitter, facebook, delicious, etc.Cool! I'm using it for a tweet next.
  • But what really caught my attention was the idea of using Diigo as a hub for group research projects. You can set up a group Diigo account to share bookmarks, and make it public, private or semi-private. This has real potential for students working on group projects, especially since Diigo's "sticky note" feature also lets you add comments to the material you save, in addition to highlighting key passages.OK, I'm sold! I'm going to start demo-ing Diigo for my students.
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