Group items tagged

No Child Left Behind also let states use statistical gimmicks to report performance

” federal financing should be conditioned on truth in advertisin

To shed light on equity and cost-effectiveness, states should be required to report school- and district-level spending; the resources students receive should be disclosed, not only their achievement.

Lower-tier colleges and universities in both India and China suffer from passive learning styles. Design and project work is typically absent, the curricula do not focus on problem solving or building project management and communication skills, and there are no internships or other work experience. ”Engineering education is much more theoretically oriented, and students don’t really get this fully blended education that allows them to think outside the box,” says Denis Simon, a professor at the Pennsylvania State University School of International Affairs, who focuses on technology and education in China. ”They haven’t had the interaction with real live engineering that grads here have, so they’re very green when they come into the workplace.”

The main problem, though, is the sheer mass of students enrolled in engineering classes. ”When you have 100 students per teacher, you really can’t get hands-on and be interactive,” he says.

The use of smarter technology in assessments,” Mr. Duncan said, “makes it possible to assess students by asking them to design products of experiments, to manipulate parameters, run tests and record data.

not only end-of-year tests similar to those in use now but also formative tests that teachers will administer several times a year to help guide instruction

In performance-based tasks, which are increasingly common in tests administered by the military and in other fields, students are given a problem — they could be told, for example, to pretend they are a mayor who needs to reduce a city’s pollution — and must sift through a portfolio of tools and write analytically about how they would use them to solve the problem.

“I constantly see kids playing through levels, and they see this amazing trap, and they want to create it in game level,” Li recently told Spotlight. “And they will spend time figuring out how to make them—how to apply joints and motors to these same structures so [they] can create exactly the same thing that [they] saw in the game. Kids are willing to spend time learning themselves.”

Lastly, toward the end of the video Khan talks about his surprise that it's not just him and other math geeks who want to learn and understand these concepts -- and get pleasure from it. He reads a letter about someone who solves a derivative and smiles. This resonates and matches our new chapter in the new edition of Disrupting Class -- that a fundamental job people have to do is to feel successful and achieve.

more flexible set of "educators," including teachers, parents, experts, and mentors outside the classroom.

The opportunity to harness this interest and access in the service of learning is huge.

The challenge for our education system is to leverage technology to create relevant learning experiences that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures.