Group items tagged

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

1. WARM-UP/DO-NOW: In their journals, students respond to the following (written on the board prior to class): “Imagine that you are a college admissions counselor. What would you want to know about each of your potential applicants to decide whether or not you should accept them to your college? Create a list of questions.” Students then share their responses. The teacher should write students’ questions on the board under the categories “Academics,” “Extracurricular,” “Career Goals,” “Talents,” “Personal Qualities,” and “Other.”

3. Tell students that they will be writing letters to college admissions counselors to introduce themselves and to persuade the college to admit them. Students refer to the categories and questions from the initial brainstorming exercise and answer each question for themselves. This procedure will serve as pre-writing for the actual letter.

–If you were a college admissions officer, what would you want to know about each of your potential applicants to decide whether or not you should accept them to your college?

The growing enthusiasm over value-added assessment, however, belies what is actually a damaging policy for public education. Value-added assessment promises, rather, to dismantle teachers' unions, deintellectualize teachers' jobs, to refashion schools according to corporate-profit-making initiatives and to burn out experienced teachers at ever faster rates. What its proponents fail to realize is that value added contributes to the destruction of public education by 1) participating in a broader corporate reform scheme of privatization and 2) objectifying knowledge, or turning knowledge into "things," that is, units that can be measured, compared and transmitted at the expense of genuine learning.

There are two basically different ideas of educational value at play in this debate. For proponents of value-added assessment, standardized tests contain certain, verifiable and numerically quantifiable knowledge. The tests are mistakenly thought to be objective.

To date, education research shows that good teachers matter a lot, class size may be less important than once thought and nothing improves student performance as much as one-on-one human tutoring.

The potential benefits of technology are greater as students become older, more independent learners. Making that point, Mr. Gates said in an interview that for children from kindergarten to about fifth grade “the idea that you stick them in front of a computer is ludicrous.”