Change the Equation's blog

New research suggests that students who have access to hands-on science activities may learn much more than their peers do. That raises a critical question: Do all students have ready access to very good hands-on learning opportunities? A quick review of national data suggests that low-income students in particular do not.

The most recent evidence on the impact of hands-on science comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in science (NAEP). In 2011, students who engaged in hands-on science activities at least once or twice a week in school scored 14 points higher on NAEP than students who never or hardly ever did. That amounts to roughly a grade level of learning--or more.

Skeptics charge that these NAEP findings might have more to do with correlation than causation. They speculate that wealthy students, who happen to score higher on NAEP, are most likely do more hands-on activities. That doesn't mean that the hands-on activities actually caused their higher scores.

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Bigger differences emerge, however, when we look at the kinds of resources schools have to support hands-on learning. Take, for example, the supplies schools provide for science labs. Only 32 percent of low-income students have teachers who report having "a lot" of the "supplies or equipment" they need for

A draft of new K-12 common science standards is out and ready for review. These standards follow on the heels of "Common Core" math and English language arts standards that 46 states have already adopted. Like the Common Core standards, these "Next Generation Science Standards" are emerging from a collaboration among states. If you want to offer input into the draft science standards, you have until June 1 to do so. Public input is a critical part of this process.

The draft became public on Friday, so few people have had a lot of time to dig in. Still, many have high hopes that the new standards could become game-changers for science education in this country. A recent review of current state science standards by the Fordham Institute found that most were "mediocre to awful," to quote Kathleen Porter-McGee, who oversaw the review. (Erik Robelen at Education Week includes this quotation in his terrific piece on the draft standards.)

The new standards aim to improve matters by focusing on fewer topics in greater depth. Critics of science education in the US claim that most science standards are "a mile wide and an inch deep" and stress breadth over understanding. The new standards also aim to help students

The nation’s 2011 report card in 8th-grade science was released today, and the news is, well, so-so. On the on the one hand, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in science went up in 16 states and down in none since 2009. They went up for each ethnic or racial group except Asians and Pacific Islanders, and they went up for low-income students. On the other hand, they remain much lower than they should be, they didn’t go up very much, and yawning achievement gaps still separate Black, Hispanic and American Indian students from white students.

In contrast to what you might hear, our students are actually doing better in science than they probably ever have. The real story here is that they are not improving fast enough to meet the growing demand for knowledge and skills, and much of the rest of the world is passing us by.

Here’s a brief rundown of major results:

• The “average scale score” for all students crept up from 150 to 152 out of a 300-point scale. To put that into greater context, the cutoff for “Basic” performance on NAEP is 141, and the cutoff for “Proficient” performance is 170.
• Thirty-two percent of all students were “Proficient” in science, and two percent reached the “Advanced” level. In every state, fewer than half of students were Proficient. The states that came closest were Massachusetts, Montana, and North Dakota.

Students of color made the largest gains, narrowing achievement gaps slightly.

• Black students gained three points, moving from 126 to 129.
• American Indian/Alaska native students gained four points, moving from 137 to 141.
• Hispanic students gained the most, an impressive five

Today is Teacher Appreciation Day. To mark the occasion, Several change the Equation staff members are honoring math and science teachers who changed their lives.

CTEq’s CEO Linda Rosen remembers Miss Schulman, her seventh grade math teacher at Sligo Junior High in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She can still feel her “sense of wonderment at learning the binary system and other number bases, which both challenged and illuminated everything I thought I knew about numbers.”

Claus von Zastrow, COO & director of research, recalls Mr. Bedor, his high school physics teacher at Seaholm High School in Birmingham Michigan. Mr. Bedor’s introduction to the theory of relativity made his students question everything they thought they understood about the world around them. “He was a quiet and gentlemanly presence in the classroom, but he made the earth shake with powerful ideas.”

Celia Alicata, Director of Programming, also points to a physics teacher, Mrs. Cloud, at the Gilbert School in Winsted, Connecticut. Mrs. Cloud used a trip to the amusement park to drive home lessons about kinetic energy, free fall, centripetal force and other important concepts. “Above all, Mrs. Cloud changed the way I interpreted the world by demonstrating the interconnectedness of science to everyday life.”

Rob Richardson, Director of Member Relations, remembers Mr. Daentle, his 10th grade math teacher at the Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut. Mr. Daentle brought his students outside to measure distances using angles, and he used math to demonstrate how much stronger than humans animals could be. “Small as he was, he could rivet you with a glance that said he wouldn’t take ‘I don’t know’ for an answer.  He made you dig deep into what you did know to reach true understanding.”

CTEq thanks all the teachers who educate and inspire our future citizens and innovators.

Do you have any teachers you would like to honor?

We’ve often noted an odd dynamic in U.S. education. Parents have bought into the argument that U.S. students are lagging behind their peers in other countries, but the vast majority believe that’s a problem with other people’s children. We’ve speculated that this dynamic has something to do with two major sources of information they get about student performance: state tests of their own children’s performance, which often set the bar fairly low, and more rigorous international tests of student performance, which set the bar much higher but test only a sample of students and report their results anonymously. How else to explain the pervasive “I’m Ok, you’re not” phenomenon?

Now parents in some schools may be about to get something closer to the unvarnished truth about how their children are doing. One hundred U.S. schools will take part this year in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test of how 15 year olds from some 60 countries are doing in reading, math and science. The PISA test, whose results come out every few years, fuels many headlines about the our middling to mediocre standing in math and science. In 2009, we ranked significantly behind 12 industrialized nations in science and 17 in math. Students in only 9 industrialized nations scored lower in science, and students in only four scored lower in math.

Schools that participate in PISA will be able to see how they stack up against other nations. Individual students might not get their results, but participating schools can get a much better sense of how well their students are prepared to compete in a global marketplace for skills. The news for some might

The move towards common academic standards in almost all US states may seem like pretty arcane stuff to those who don’t work in education, but it will soon have an impact on families across the country. Schools and districts will have to all they can to prepare families for the change.

A recent story in Education Week drives this point home. Here's what it reports about changes to math instruction in Maryland, for example: “In the past…kindergartners were expected to be able to count up to 31, by ones; the new standards ask them to count to 100, by both tens and ones. In addition, she said, they are asked to start counting from any number.” That’s a pretty enormous shift. In high school, “about 40 percent of concepts now taught in Algebra 2 will shift to Algebra 1.”

Parents will soon see the difference, and some districts are doing all they can to make sure they’re on board. The Education Week piece reports that Howard County, Maryland “has started to communicate with families, whether at back-to-school events, in newsletters, or on the district website, to make sure they understand the

High school science teacher Paul Anderson has turned his class into a video game. Is he capitulating to the worst aspects of the youth culture? Throwing his hands up in defeat? Not at all. Anderson says he’s exploiting a central quality of games that often goes unnoticed: Games are about learning.

In a recent TED talk, Anderson describes three of the lessons games taught him about learning:

• School should be fun.
• Failure is OK, because students learn from their mistakes. Think about students who try—again and again—to master the next level on a videogame.
• Every student should be able to move at his or her own pace from one level of mastery to the next. Students don’t all move through a game in lock step.

Anderson took a whole summer to apply these and other lessons to his science class, which now looks very different the way it did before. The class includes narrated scenarios, opportunities to apply learning, the ability to take quizzes over and over again until students master material, a “leveling system” where students begin a year with zero points and gradually advance to “grand master” status, and a “leaderboard” where students track their progress against that of other students.

Anderson notes that he is learning from the mistakes he made in his first year of teaching this

Prompted by alarm over declining student participation in math in Australia, a new study out of Sydney finds that adults have to take a two-pronged approach to boosting student engagement: They should prevent students from “switching off” of maths (as they so quaintly refer to the subject in those parts) while helping those students “switch on.” That might sound redundant, but the authors of the study insist that the strategies are quite distinct.

The press release proclaims that the study “is the first to reveal that 'switching off' and 'switching on' to maths needs to be addressed in different ways.” To prevent students from switching off, schools and parents need to “reduce the negative attitudes to maths, such as anxiety and negative parental attitudes to maths." To get students to switch on, they should promote “positive attitudes” and build up children’s “self belief.” Sure, these strategies might be distinct, but aren’t they flip sides of the same coin?

I take a somewhat different message from release. If the Australians think they're doing poorly in math, what does that say about us? Australia ranked 15th on an international test of 15 year olds' math performance. The U.S. ranked 31st. If countries that are already leaving us in the dust are intent in improving their standing, it simply raises the bar for us here at home.

What we don’t know can hurt us. For Matthew Chingos and Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institute, our “scandalous” lack of knowledge about the instructional materials teachers are using in the classroom may be doing us grave harm.

We seem to know more and more about things like standards, tests, the background of our teachers and who attends their classes. That’s good news. Yet we know little more now than we did 50 years ago about what teachers are actually teaching in those classes, Chingos and Whitehurst write.

That is an enormous blind spot, they claim, because schools and districts can get a lot of bang for their buck by choosing strong teaching materials—more bang for their buck, they maintain, than for a lot of other school reforms currently on the table.

For Chingos and Whitehurst, the success of common academic standards hinges on the quality of those materials, which help make standards real in the classroom. Poor materials can quickly dilute the power of standards, and they have little faith that many of the education publishers lining up to declare their products “aligned with Common Core State Standards” are doing more than checking off boxes, “making sure that everything listed in the standards can be found under the same name in the table of contents or index in the publisher’s materials.”

So what’s to be done? Chingos and Whitehurst believe there are

Here’s one of the biggest lessons we can draw from years of school reform. It’s not what the reform is that matters most. It’s what you do with it. All too many veteran school staff have seen waves of reform wash over them and produce so little change in the end.

Take, for example, the reform of “flipping” classrooms. It’s a very compelling idea: Let students get their lectures at home via videos, textbooks or other means, but spend valuable class time working with them one-on-one with their homework. Yet there’s a lot more to it than that. If done well, the reform will require many teachers to transform what they do in the classroom.

For an example of what the flipped classroom can look like, check out Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post interview with Jonathan Bergmann, a teacher who has become an evangelist for the reform. First, he and a colleague flipped their classrooms. Then they realized that, to give their students one-on-one attention in the classroom, they should allow each student to proceed at his or her pace. That required them to adopt a model where students must show they have mastered one unit before moving forward. Students who don't do well on one test have to try again later—after more work with the material, and with a different test. 

So what would a "flipped" classroom look like that failed to fulfill the idea's promise? It may reduce the amount of rote lecture in the classroom, but it could also miss the opportunity for one-on-one teaching. Class-time could become little more than time for "review," with students learning in lock step. Different structure, similar results.

Bergmann's vision goes far beyond structure. It requires a lot more support for teachers. It requires great materials--videos, other kinds of multimedia or text--students can watch at