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Kail’s experience is instructive. As soon as she began teaching her students the Greek and Latin origins of many English terms — that the root sta means “put in place or stand,” for example, and that cess means “to move or withdraw” — they eagerly began identifying familiar words that incorporated the roots, like statue and recess. Her three classes competed against one another to come up with the longest list of words derived from the roots they were learning. Kail’s students started using these terms in their writing, and many of them told her that their study of word roots helped them answer questions on the SAT and on Ohio’s state graduation exam. (Research confirms that instruction in word roots allows students to learn new vocabulary and figure out the meaning of words in context more easily.) For her part, Kail reports that she no longer sees rote memorization as “inherently evil.” Although committing the word roots to memory was a necessary first step, she notes, “the key was taking that old-school method and encouraging students to use their knowledge to practice higher-level thinking skills.”

. A study published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching in 2010, for example, found that 10th-graders who were taught how to construct an argument as part of their lessons on genetics not only had better arguments but also demonstrated a better understanding of the material

This explosion in the technology has increased efforts to equip every classroom with computers and "wire" every school to the Internet. Between September 1984 and September 1997 alone, the number of computers in America's K-12 schools increased elevenfold to more than 8 million units.1 Educators have been forced to keep up, and some are finding themselves teaching general skills in how to use a computer while they use them to teach other subjects.

This all brings me to the Instructional Designer. It is important to understand that the raw material of knowledge is data. And we are drowning in it. And, significantly, it does not go away. Data that was not born digital is swiftly being digitized, and data that is born digital stays that way – forever. My goal in this article is to convince Instructional Designers to view data as a new natural resource, which means your job is to teach people how to adapt data and transform it into actionable intelligence. That is the key to the Fourth Industrial Revolution –sometimes called the Cyber-Physical Revolution– and the key is in the hands of the Instructional Designer community.

The point was so obvious, it was almost embarrassing. Kids stared at their teachers for hundreds of hours a year, which might explain their expertise. Their survey answers, it turned out, were more reliable than any other known measure of teacher performance—­including classroom observations and student test-score growth. All of which raised an uncomfortable new question: Should teachers be paid, trained, or dismissed based in part on what children say about them?