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Nearly 60 percent argued that quizzes are not an effective way to gain new skills and knowledge. In fact, quizzing yourself on something you've just read is a great example of active learning, the best way to learn.

More than 40 percent of respondents believed that teachers don't need to know a subject area such as math or science, as long as they have good instructional skills. In fact, research shows that deep subject matter expertise is a key element in helping teachers excel.

"Parents' opinions are important, but teaching is a real craft," Boser says. "A lot of science goes into it. And we need to do more to respect that."

 One study found that baseball players significantly improved their performance in the final year of their contracts, just before entering free-agency. (Another study found a similar trend among NBA players.) What explained this improvement? Effort. Hustle. Blood, sweat and tears. The players wanted a big contract, so they worked harder.

If a player runs too little during a game, it’s not because his body gives out – it’s because his head doesn’t want to.

despite the obvious impact of effort, it’s surprisingly hard to isolate as a variable of athletic performance. Weimer and Wicker set out to fix this oversight. Using data gathered from three seasons and 1514 games of the Bundesliga – the premier soccer league in Germany – the economists attempted to measure individual effort as a variable of player performance,

So did these differences in levels of effort matter? The answer is an emphatic yes: teams with players that run longer distances are more likely to win the game,

As the economists note, “teams where some players run a lot while others are relatively lazy have a higher winning probability.”

There is a larger lesson here, which is that our obsession with measuring talent has led us to neglect the measurement of effort. This is a blind spot that extends far beyond the realm of professional sports.

Maximum tests are high-stakes assessments that try to measure a person’s peak level of performance. Think here of the SAT, or the NFL Combine, or all those standardized tests we give to our kids. Because these tests are relatively short, we assume people are motivated enough to put in the effort while they’re being measured. As a result, maximum tests are good at quantifying individual talent, whether it’s scholastic aptitude or speed in the 40-yard dash.

Unfortunately, the brevity of maximum tests means they are not very good at predicting future levels of effort. Sackett has demonstrated this by comparing the results from maximum tests to field studies of typical performance, which is a measure of how people perform when they are not being tested.

As Sackett came to discover, the correlation between these two assessments is often surprisingly low: the same people identified as the best by a maximum test often unperformed according to the measure of typical performance, and vice versa.

What accounts for the mismatch between maximum tests and typical performance? One explanation is that, while maximum tests are good at measuring talent, typical performance is about talent plus effort.

In the real world, you can’t assume people are always motivated to try their hardest. You can’t assume they are always striving to do their best. Clocking someone in a sprint won’t tell you if he or she has the nerve to run a marathon, or even 12 kilometers in a soccer match.

With any luck, these sabermetric innovations will trickle down to education, which is still mired in maximum high-stakes tests that fail to directly measure or improve the levels of effort put forth by students.

After all, those teams with the hardest workers (and not just the most talented ones) significantly increase their odds of winning.

Old-fashioned effort just might be the next on-base percentage.

How to use the iPad in the Congregational & Personal setting

In another example, third grade math students in the hybrid learning program at Pennsylvania's Indiana Area School District outperformed students in traditional classes by 10 percentage points on the PSSA exams.

scored proficient or advanced on PSSA tests at a rate 23 percent higher than the previous year with gains in all subjects: reading (up 20 percent), math (up 24 percent) and science (up 27 percent).

"We use a rigorous accountability system that helps us measure and report on hybrid classroom outcomes," said Dellicker President and CEO Kevin Dellicker.

The cost of implementing hybrid learning through the Institute's model could be considered modest. During the 2013-2014 school year, according to the report, the schools spent an average of $220 per student (not including computing devices) to transform their learning models.

The absence of images in podcasts seems to be a source of their creative potential. Without visuals, listeners are required to fill the gaps—and when these listeners are children, the results can be powerful.

Not only are children listening and responding creatively, observations suggest they’re also learning.

When it comes to using public radio in the classroom, Brady-Myerov believes three-to-five-minute segments are most effective, leaving the teacher significant time to build a lesson around the audio.

That said, a number of schools have already begun incorporating longer podcasts into their curricula, to great success.

high-school teachers in California, Connecticut, Chicago, and a handful of other states have been using Radiolab, This American Life, StoryCorps, and, overwhelmingly, Serial.

TeachersPayTeachers.com (a site where educators can purchase lesson plans) saw a 21 percent increase in downloads of plans related to podcasts in 2014, and a 650 percent increase in 2015.

Research further supports the benefits of audio learning for children. When words are spoken aloud, kids can understand and engage with ideas that are two to three grade-levels higher than their reading level would normally allow.

Aural learning is particularly helpful for students who have dyslexia, are blind, or for whom English is their second language, who might struggle with reading or find it helpful to follow a transcript while listening.

They initiated their study in 1979, and have been assessing the participants based on a wide range of variables (e.g., school performance, IQ, leadership, happiness) across multiple contexts (laboratory and home) since.

Cognitive giftedness matters.

While intellectually gifted children were not different than the comparison group with respect to their temperament, behavioral, social, or emotional functioning, they did differ in regards to their advanced sensory and motor functioning starting at age 1.5, their ability to understand the meaning of words starting at age 1, and their ability to both understand and communicate information thereafter.

Parents of intellectually gifted children reported similar observations and were more likely than those of average children to say that their kids actively elicited stimulation by, for example, requesting intellectual extracurricular activities.

The researchers also measured what they described as academic intrinsic motivation and identified the top 19 percent of the 111 adolescent participants as “motivationally gifted,” displaying extreme enjoyment of school and of learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks and an orientation toward mastery, curiosity, and persistence.

Interestingly, they found very little correspondence between intellectual giftedness and motivational giftedness.

Students with gifted curiosity outperformed their peers on a wide range of educational outcomes, including math and reading, SAT scores, and college attainment. According to ratings from teachers, the motivationally gifted students worked harder and learned more.

suggest that gifted curiosity is a distinct characteristic that contributes uniquely to academic success.

“Motivation should not be considered simply a catalyst for the development of other forms of giftedness, but should be nurtured in its own right,”

All in all, the Fullerton study is proof that giftedness is not something an individual is either born with or without—giftedness is clearly a developmental process.

“giftedness is not a chance event … giftedness will blossom when children’s cognitive ability, motivation and enriched environments coexist and meld together to foster its growth.”

Regents Diploma serves as a motivator for our students while providing an objective (though imperfect) measure of accomplishment.

If they do not pass a test the first time, it is not awful if they take it again—we use it as a diagnostic, help them fill the learning gaps, and only the passing score goes on the transcript

in Mary’s case, to ask her to take that test yet once again would have been tantamount to child abuse.

Mary’s story, therefore, points to a key reason why evaluating teachers and principals by test scores is wrong.

It illustrates how the problems with value-added measures of performance go well beyond the technicalities of validity and reliability.

The basic rule is this: No measure of performance used for high-stakes purposes should put the best interests of students in conflict with the best interests of the adults who serve them.

I will just point out that under that system I may be penalized if future students like Mary do not achieve a 65 on the Regents exam.

Mary and I can still make the choice to say “enough”, but it may cost me a “point”, if a majority of students who had the same middle school scores on math and English tests that she did years before, pass the test.

But I can also be less concerned about the VAM-based evaluation system because it’s very likely to be biased in favor of those like me who lead schools that have only one or two students like Mary every year.

When we have an ELL (English language learner) student with interrupted education arrive at our school, we often consider a plan that includes an extra year of high school.

last few years “four year graduation rates” are of high importance

four-year graduation rate as a high-stakes measure has resulted in the proliferation of “credit recovery” programs of dubious quality, along with teacher complaints of being pressured to pass students with poor attendance and grades, especially in schools under threat of closure.

On the one hand, they had a clear incentive to “test prep” for the recent Common Core exams, but they also knew that test prep was not the instruction that their students needed and deserved.

in New York and in many other Race to the Top states, continue to favor “form over substance” and allow the unintended consequences of a rushed models to be put in place.

Creating bell curves of relative educator performance may look like progress and science, but these are measures without meaning, and they do not help schools improve.

We can raise every bar and continue to add high-stakes measures. Or we can acknowledge and respond to the reality that school improvement takes time, capacity building, professional development, and financial support at the district, state and national levels.

Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively.

It's an extreme example of what economists call "opportunity hoarding."

It's not quite a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose game where rich kids get better educations, yet still get ahead even if they don't—but it's close enough.