Skip to main content

Home/ Middle School Matters/ Group items tagged preparing

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Ron King

CCSS Toolbox - 1 views

ccsstoolbox.agilemind.com/index_flash.html

shared by Ron King on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 23 Apr 13
     
    T he Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM), the product of a major, multiyear state-led initiative coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), present an extraordinary opportunity for districts across the country to move to higher levels of achievement for all students. These rigorous standards will require that districts reexamine what it means for all students to understand and to do mathematics in ways that prepare them for success in a rapidly changing world.
Ron King

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium - 0 views

www.smarterbalanced.org

shared by Ron King on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 23 Apr 13
     
    Smarter Balanced is a state-led consortium developing assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts/literacy and mathematics that are designed to help prepare all students to graduate high school college- and career-ready.
Troy Patterson

Want Kids to Win the Future? Turn Them Into Makers - and Sci-Fi Fans | Underwire | Wire... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...maker-faire-nolan-bushnell

msm msm167 creativity future innovation

shared by Troy Patterson on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • Troy Patterson on 24 May 11
     
    "When I hired engineers and people on the creative side, I never looked at their grades," he said, referring to the teams he built at Atari and beyond. "I interviewed them strictly on their hobbies, and if they did not have a hobby in technology I wouldn't hire them…. Kids, when they make, are actually preparing themselves better for the jobs they'll have in the future than [they are by] getting straight A's."
Ron King

Ethical & Effective Ways to Prepare Students for Testing (MiddleWeb) - 0 views

www.middleweb.com/...ethical-effective-test-prep

shared by Ron King on 13 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 13 Apr 13
     
    "So much rides on the results of standardized tests these days. They're even talking about making student scores worth 50 percent of my own evaluation and using them to determine my pay! I don't want to spend weeks "drilling and killing" my students with test-prep work sheets. What am I supposed to do?" - A teacher's question
Troy Patterson

Homework: An unnecessary evil? … Surprising findings from new research - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-findings-from-new-research

msm286 homework

shared by Troy Patterson on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  •  A brand-new study on the academic effects of homework offers not only some intriguing results but also a lesson on how to read a study — and a reminder of the importance of doing just that:  reading studies (carefully) rather than relying on summaries by journalists or even by the researchers themselves.
  • First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school.  In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement.  If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.
  • Second, even at the high school level, the research supporting homework hasn’t been particularly persuasive.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • It’s easy to miss one interesting result in this study that appears in a one-sentence aside.  When kids in these two similar datasets were asked how much time they spent on math homework each day, those in the NELS study said 37 minutes, whereas those in the ELS study said 60 minutes. 
  • it was statistically significant but “very modest”:  Even assuming the existence of a causal relationship, which is by no means clear, one or two hours’ worth of homework every day buys you two or three points on a test.
  • There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”
  • The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework.
  • you’ll find that there’s not much to prop up the belief that students must be made to work a second shift after they get home from school.  The assumption that teachers are just assigning homework badly, that we’d start to see meaningful results if only it were improved, is harder and harder to justify with each study that’s published.
  • many people will respond to these results by repeating platitudes about the importance of practice[8], or by complaining that anyone who doesn’t think kids need homework is coddling them and failing to prepare them for the “real world” (read:  the pointless tasks they’ll be forced to do after they leave school).
Troy Patterson

Message to My Freshman Students | Keith M. Parsons - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-my-freshman-st_b_7275016.html

msm306 students education

shared by Troy Patterson on 18 May 15 - No Cached
  • Your teachers were not allowed to teach, but were required to focus on preparing you for those all-important standardized tests.
  • Your teachers were held responsible if you failed, and expected to show that they had tried hard to avoid that dreaded result.
  • First, I am your professor, not your teacher. There is a difference.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Teachers are evaluated on the basis of learning outcomes, generally as measured by standardized tests. If you don't learn, then your teacher is blamed.
  • We should not foolishly expect them to listen to us, but instead cater to their conditioned craving for constant stimulation.
  • Hogwash. You need to learn to listen.
  • Critical listening means that are not just hearing but thinking about what you are hearing. Critical listening questions and evaluates what is being said and seeks key concepts and unifying themes. Your high school curriculum would have served you better had it focused more on developing your listening skills rather than drilling you on test-taking.
  • For an academic, there is something sacred about a citation. The proper citation of a source is a small tribute to the hard work, diligence, intelligence and integrity of someone dedicated enough to make a contribution to knowledge.
  • For you, citations and bibliographies are pointless hoops to jump through and you often treat these requirements carelessly.
  • Your professor still harbors the traditional view that universities are about education. If your aim is to get a credential, then for you courses will be obstacles in your path. For your professor, a course is an opportunity for you to make your world richer and yourself stronger.
Troy Patterson

Trouble with Rubrics - 0 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...rubrics.htm

blog.me rubrics msm290 assessment education rubric

shared by Troy Patterson on 07 Dec 14 - Cached
  • She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now seemed “unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value.  Worse than that,” she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”[5]
  • This is the sort of outcome that may not be noticed by an assessment specialist who is essentially a technician, in search of practices that yield data in ever-greater quantities.
  • The fatal flaw in this logic is revealed by a line of research in educational psychology showing that students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • it’s shortsighted to assume that an assessment technique is valuable in direct proportion to how much information it provides.
  • Studies have shown that too much attention to the quality of one’s performance is associated with more superficial thinking, less interest in whatever one is doing, less perseverance in the face of failure, and a tendency to attribute the outcome to innate ability and other factors thought to be beyond one’s control.
  • As one sixth grader put it, “The whole time I’m writing, I’m not thinking about what I’m saying or how I’m saying it.  I’m worried about what grade the teacher will give me, even if she’s handed out a rubric.  I’m more focused on being correct than on being honest in my writing.”[8]
  • she argues, assessment is “stripped of the complexity that breathes life into good writing.”
  • High scores on a list of criteria for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the essay is any good because quality is more than the sum of its rubricized parts.
  • Wilson also makes the devastating observation that a relatively recent “shift in writing pedagogy has not translated into a shift in writing assessment.”
  • Teachers are given much more sophisticated and progressive guidance nowadays about how to teach writing but are still told to pigeonhole the results, to quantify what can’t really be quantified.
  • Consistent and uniform standards are admirable, and maybe even workable, when we’re talking about, say, the manufacture of DVD players.  The process of trying to gauge children’s understanding of ideas is a very different matter, however.
  • Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they’re doing is exact and objective. 
  • The appeal of rubrics is supposed to be their high interrater reliability, finally delivered to language arts.
  • Just as it’s possible to raise standardized test scores as long as you’re willing to gut the curriculum and turn the school into a test-preparation factory, so it’s possible to get a bunch of people to agree on what rating to give an assignment as long as they’re willing to accept and apply someone else’s narrow criteria for what merits that rating. 
  • Once we check our judgment at the door, we can all learn to give a 4 to exactly the same things.
Troy Patterson

BBC - Future - Psychology: A simple trick to improve your memory - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-hack-your-memory-learn-faster

msm291 studying studyskills

shared by Troy Patterson on 20 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • One of the interesting things about the mind is that even though we all have one, we don't have perfect insight into how to get the best from it.
  • Karpicke and Roediger asked students to prepare for a test in various ways, and compared their success
  • On the final exam differences between the groups were dramatic. While dropping items from study didn’t have much of an effect, the people who dropped items from testing performed relatively poorly: they could only remember about 35% of the word pairs, compared to 80% for people who kept testing items after they had learnt them.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • dropping items entirely from your revision, which is the advice given by many study guides, is wrong. You can stop studying them if you've learnt them, but you should keep testing what you've learnt if you want to remember them at the time of the final exam.
  • the researchers had the neat idea of asking their participants how well they would remember what they had learnt. All groups guessed at about 50%. This was a large overestimate for those who dropped items from test (and an underestimate from those who kept testing learnt items).
  • But the evidence has a moral for teachers as well: there's more to testing than finding out what students know – tests can also help us remember.
1 - 13 of 13
Showing 20▼ items per page