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Troy Patterson

The Sabermetrics of Effort - Jonah Lehrer - 0 views

www.jonahlehrer.com/...the-sabermetrics-of-effort

msm299 blog.me

shared by Troy Patterson on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The fundamental premise of Moneyball is that the labor market of sports is inefficient, and that many teams systematically undervalue particular athletic skills that help them win. While these skills are often subtle – and the players that possess them tend to toil in obscurity - they can be identified using sophisticated statistical techniques, aka sabermetrics. Home runs are fun. On-base percentage is crucial.
  • The wisdom of the moneyball strategy is no longer controversial. It’s why the A’s almost always outperform their payroll,
  • However, the triumph of moneyball creates a paradox, since its success depends on the very market inefficiencies it exposes. The end result is a relentless search for new undervalued skills, those hidden talents that nobody else seems to appreciate. At least not yet.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  •  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.
Troy Patterson

16 Modern Realities Schools (and Parents) Need to Accept. Now. - Modern Learning - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...eed-to-accept-now-64b98710e4e9

msm332

shared by Troy Patterson on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • What’s happened to get people thinking and talking about “different” instead of “better?”
  • The Web and the technologies that drive it are fundamentally changing the way we think about how we can learn and become educated in a globally networked and connected world. It has absolutely exploded our ability to learn on our own in ways that schools weren’t built for.
  • In that respect, current systems of schooling are an increasingly significant barrier to progress when it comes to learning.
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  • The middleman is vanishing as peer to peer interactions flourish. Teachers no longer stand between the content and the student. This will change the nature of the profession.
  • Technology is no longer an option when it comes to learning at mastery levels.
  • Curriculum is just a guess, and now that we have access to so much information and knowledge, the current school curriculum bucket represents (as Seymour Papert suggests) “one-billionth of one percent” of all there is to know. Our odds of choosing the “right” mix for all of our kids’ futures are infinitesimal.
  • The skills, literacies, and dispositions required to navigate this increasingly complex and change filled world are much different from those stressed in the current school curriculum.
  • In fact, instead of being delivered by an institution, curriculum is now constructed and negotiated in real time by learner and the contributions of those engaged in the learning process, whether in the classroom our out.
  • “High stakes” learning is now about doing real work for real audiences, not taking a standardized subject matter test.
  • While important, the 4Cs of creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication are no longer enough. Being able to connect to other learners worldwide and to use computing applications to solve problems are the two additional “Cs” required in the modern world.
  • Our children will live and work in a much more transparent world as tools to publish pictures, video, and texts become more accessible and more ubiquitous. Their online reputations must be built and managed.
  • Workers in the future will not “find employment;” Employment will find them. Or they will create their own.
  • Embracing and adapting to change must be in the modern skill set.
Troy Patterson

Experts Say Measuring Non-Cognitive Skills Won't Work, But Districts Still Try | MindSh... - 0 views

ww2.kqed.org/...t-work-but-districts-still-try

studentinvolvement msm324

shared by Troy Patterson on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Federal education law now requires one non-academic measure of school progress, which has led some districts to consider including students’ social and emotional growth as a performance measure.
  • She writes that even the researchers who popularized terms like “grit” think using it to measure school effectiveness is a bad idea:
Troy Patterson

Learning Myths And Realities From Brain Science : NPR Ed : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...yths-take-our-quiz-to-find-out

msm353 brain learning

shared by Troy Patterson on 22 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The idea that individuals have different learning styles, such as auditory or kinesthetic, is a pernicious myth. Boser compares it to the flat-earth myth — highly intuitive, but wrong.
  • Almost 90 percent of respondents agreed that simply re-reading material is "highly effective" for learning. Research suggests the opposite.
  • On the topic of "growth mindset," more than one-quarter of respondents believed intelligence is "fixed at birth". Neuroscience says otherwise.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 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."
Ron King

Encouraging Students to Embrace Academic Challenges - 1 views

www.amle.org/...brace-Academic-Challenges.aspx

shared by Ron King on 11 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 11 Sep 13
     
    As I introduced a new geometry topic to my sixth grade class, one of my students immediately reacted to my mention of a new skill-classification of solid figures-by blurting out, "Again? We know everything about that. We learned it years ago."
Ron King

Teaching along the Edge - 0 views

cindirigsbee.com/teaching-along-the-edge

shared by Ron King on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Dec 13
     
    A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to serve as a discussant after a group of panelists, all teachers in the "spring" of their careers (even one first year teacher), spoke on transforming classrooms and schools. The panel discussion was part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education's symposium called "Education for a New Era." This particular session was entitled "Teaching Along the Edge," and the moderator, Dr. Jocelyn Glazier (a former high school English teacher and current associate professor at UNC), shared that she wanted "to find the places where there is light" in education. She shared that "education is a practice of freedom," and she hoped the panelists would look at current inequities and move students "beyond basic skills."
Ron King

Should Schools Teach Social Media Skills? - 0 views

blogs.kqed.org/...ools-teach-social-media-skills

shared by Ron King on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Dec 13
     
    Taking selfies at funerals. Tagging pictures of teens drinking alcohol at parties. Kids (and adults for that matter) post a lot of silly stuff online - and although most of it is chatter, some of what might seem harmless leads to tragic consequences. But is it the job of schools to teach kids the dos and don'ts of social media?
Ron King

Can't We Do Better? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...riedman-cant-we-do-better.html

shared by Ron King on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Dec 13
     
    THE latest results in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which compare how well 15-year-olds in 65 cities and countries can apply math, science and reading skills to solve real-world problems were released last week, and it wasn't pretty for the home team. Andreas Schleicher, who manages PISA, told the Department of Education: "Three years ago, I came here with a special report benchmarking the U.S. against some of the best performing and rapidly improving education systems. Most of them have pulled further ahead, whether it is Brazil that advanced from the bottom, Germany and Poland that moved from adequate to good, or Shanghai and Singapore that moved from good to great. The math results of top-performer Shanghai are now two-and-a-half school years ahead even of those in Massachusetts - itself a leader within the U.S."
Troy Patterson

The Test of the Common Core | E. D. Hirsch, Jr. - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...mmon-core-tests_b_3824859.html

msm258 commoncore

shared by Troy Patterson on 12 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Here's the follow-up post to "Why I'm For the Common Core." It explains why we should be leery of the forthcoming "core-aligned" tests -- especially those in English Language Arts that people are rightly anxious about.
  • These tests could endanger the promise of the Common Core.
  • The first thing I'd want to do if I were younger would be to launch an effective court challenge to value-added teacher evaluations on the basis of test scores in reading comprehension. The value-added approach to teacher evaluation in reading is unsound both technically and in its curriculum-narrowing effects. The connection between job ratings and tests in ELA has been a disaster for education.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • My analysis of them showed what anyone immersed in reading research would have predicted: The value-added data are modestly stable for math, but are fuzzy and unreliable for reading.
  • Math tests are based on the school curriculum. What a teacher does in the math classroom affects student test scores. But reading-comprehension tests are not based on the school curriculum. (How could they be if there's no set curriculum?) Rather, they are based on the general knowledge that students have gained over their life span from all sources -- most of them outside the school.
  • The whole project is unfair to teachers, ill-conceived, and educationally disastrous. The teacher-rating scheme has usurped huge amounts of teaching time in anxious test-prep. Paradoxically, the evidence shows that test-prep ceases to be effective after about six lessons.
  • the inadequate theories of reading-comprehension that have dominated the schools -- mainly the unfounded theory that, when students reach a certain level of "reading skill," they can read anything at that level.
  • The Common Core-aligned tests of reading comprehension will naturally contain text passages and questions about those passages. To the extent such tests claim to assess "critical thinking" and "general" reading-comprehension skill, we should hold on to our wallets. They will be only rough indexes of reading ability -- probably no better than the perfectly adequate and well-validated reading tests they mean to replace.
  • The solution to the test-prep conundrum is this: First, institute in every participating state the specific and coherent curriculum that the Common Core Standards explicitly call for. (It's passing odd to introduce "Common Core" tests before there's an actual core to be tested.)
Troy Patterson

More Than Half of Students 'Engaged' in School, Says Poll - Education Week - 1 views

www.edweek.org/...28gallup.h33.html

msm272

shared by Troy Patterson on 09 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Students who strongly agree that they have at least one teacher who makes them "feel excited about the future" and that their school is "committed to building the strengths of each student" are 30 times more likely than students who strongly disagree with those statements to show other signs of engagement in the classroom—a key predictor of academic success, according to a report released Wednesday by Gallup Education.
  • "Many, many, many teachers, principals and superintendents have known for literally decades that if we don't engage students to care about being in school, that's going to get in the way of learning," he said.
  • "One of the big problems with No Child Left Behind and even [the Common Core State Standards] is that we are only focused on students' cognitive learning,"
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • A broad focus on testing and new standards can lead schools to neglect the individualized social and emotional needs of students, the report’s authors say.
  • researchers classified 55 percent of students as “engaged,” 28 percent as “not engaged,” and 17 percent as “actively disengaged.”
  • students surveyed in 2013 who said they strongly agreed with two statements—“My school is committed to building the strengths of each student,” and “I have at least one teacher who makes me excited about the future”—were 30 times more likely to be classified as “engaged”
  • Gallup recommends that principals address teacher engagement to help students succeed.
  • The share of workers described as "not engaged" among teachers, however, was slightly larger than it was for the general workforce—56 percent versus 52 percent.
  • To build engagement among teachers, the report recommends that principals ask them questions about curriculum, pedagogy, and scheduling, and incorporate their feedback into decisionmaking. School leaders should also pair engaged administrators and teachers to collaborate and generate enthusiasm for student-centered projects, the report says.
  • Gallup report validates that a "highly skilled principal is the linchpin to schoolwide success."
  • Principal behaviors that encourage collaboration and meaningful relationships "don't happen by chance," Ms. Bartoletti said in a written statement. "They emerge from a defined set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, which requires dedicated and ongoing development."
Troy Patterson

Note Taking Skills for 21st Century Students @coolcatteacher - 0 views

www.coolcatteacher.com/g-skills-21st-century-students

msm284 notetaking notes

shared by Troy Patterson on 20 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Troy Patterson on 20 Sep 14
     
    "We want them DRAWING. Why? So they can use all parts of their brain. Using symbols and notes and such can help connect ideas in powerful ways. So, at this point, I take my students on a visual notetaking journey."
Troy Patterson

BoomWriter - Schools - 1 views

www.boomwriter.com/Schools

msm msm168 writing collaboration

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 May 11 - No Cached
  • Troy Patterson on 30 May 11
     
    Boomwiter supports creative writing, reading comprehension, peer editing and genre studies, to name just a few vital reading and writing skills.
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