Change the Equation Blog

Should Schools Promote at Least as Much Inspiration as Perspiration?

Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - 10:40

The headline of a recent story in The New York Times tells only part of an important story: "Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)." Yes, it can be hard, but universities can also suck the life out of it. (The Times uses "science" here as shorthand for science, technology, engineering and math, or "STEM." Here's the article's money quote: "Some of the best-prepared students find engineering education too narrow and lacking the passion of other fields." There may be a lesson here for K-12 schools, too.

Of course, difficulty and boredom can be co-conspirators in driving students out of STEM fields. If students who did well in math and science find their classes uninspiring, those with a shakier foundation in STEM don't even stand a chance.

The Times story profiles Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which has sought to make STEM more engaging through much more applied learning. In the '70s, WPI "ripped up its traditional curriculum...to make room for extensive research, design and social-service projects by juniors and seniors, including many conducted on trips with professors overseas." (The Times might also want to have a look at Olin College, which is "dedicated to the discovery and development of the most effective educational approaches and aspires to serve as a model for others.")

Traditional STEM programs are notorious for driving people out in droves. RPI seems to be charting a very different course, with 80 percent of its students earning bachelor's degrees within 6 years. (Compare that to 56 percent nationwide.)

So what's the lesson for K-12 schools? Many students get turned off of STEM when they're in middle school. That's when the material gets a good deal more challenging. Research suggests that science classes in many middle schools do little to inspire students to stick it through. According to national surveys, most 8th graders "never or hardly ever" design a science experiment, watch their teachers do an experiment, or write about science projects.

STEM can't be all fun, all the time. We won't do ourselves any favors if we give our young people that impression. But we can do more to help our schools inspire students by making teaching and learning more engaging.

Sure, STEM can be hard, but we have to show students early that it's worth the challenge.

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Failure Is an Option: The Benefits of Serial Failure

Friday, November 4, 2011 - 07:17

Dean Kaman, inventor of the Segue and Founder of FIRST Robotics:

I think teachers should encourage [their students] to work on really big, really hard, really tough problems—the consequence of which, compared to giving them the safe road, they probably will unfortunately fail, and fail again, and fail again. The teachers need to give kids enough self-confidence so that they realize it's the project that failed, and not the student.
Students need to learn enough from their failures so that they can be re-energized, refocused, and with their new knowledge and new experience and new scars on their back, they can go out and succeed.

I don't think there are any big wins that aren't the result of a lot of losses. I think teachers need to let students know that in order to make the really big wins, they're going to lose a lot of battles, but they'll win the war.

Instead, I think we've created a society that is so risk-averse that kids are taught—"Whatever you do, don't fail." A consequence of being unwilling to fail is that you'll never try really big, bold things. Once you define success as loss of failure, we've lost innovation, we've lost our edge.

(From an interview on US News & World Report.)

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Want to Get Ahead in Advertising? Better Bring Up Those Math and Technology Skills

Thursday, November 3, 2011 - 07:29

Get a load of this: "As of last week [the] company had 13 positions open and had gone to job boards, recruiters and even hosted technology-focused meet-ups to find people. In September, the company hired its first senior vice president for human capital to help with recruitment." In the current job market, that quotation sounds like a relic of the go-go 90's, a time when jobs were plentiful and people were scarce.

But it's not. It's a passage from a very recent New York Times article on the scarcity of jobs in advertising. Now don't get too excited just because you're creative and think you can write good ad copy. it turns out that ad agencies are looking for much more than just that. They're looking for people with skills in math and technology.

“The marketers, the publishers, the ad tech companies, the agencies, data management companies — they’re all going for the same type of employee," says an expert quoted by the Times. They want "someone with a combination of pure quantitative skills, applied marketing skills and an understanding of how the advertising technology business works."

The ad industry is typical of many others. People who have a command of science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) are at a premium, even in jobs that once required only a passing acquaintance with numbers or computers. A new report from Georgetown finds that demand for STEM skills "stretches across the entire job market, touching virtually every industry."

It's apparently taking quite a while for that reality to sink in. A blog posting in today's Times notes that college students aren't going into STEM fields, despite growing demand. Visual and performing arts, it seems, graduate twice as many students as "computer science, math and chemical engineering combined." The blog's author asks whether the U.S. government should stop subsidizing students in majors outside of STEM.

That might seem like a draconian solution. As Steve Jobs showed us, the arts and humanities are as important as ever, especially when wedded to technology. Even if we don't pump up the numbers of pure STEM majors in this country, we surely need many more people strong STEM skills.

More support for STEM majors or stronger distribution requirements in college may help, but the foundation we build in K-12 is most important of all. We need look no farther than our students' most recent math scores for reasons why STEM seems so déclassé in our colleges, despite all the job demand.

If she has strong STEM skills, that visual arts major might just land a plum job in advertising.

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The Bad and Good News about Math Scores

Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - 06:07

The 2011 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) just came out, and they're prompting all sorts of gloomy commentary. The lead story on the Huffington Post education page pretty much sums up what we're hearing from many pundits: "Performance Still Dismal On 2011 National Math, Reading Tests." But we shouldn't forget the bright side.

Let's start with the reasons for gloom. In math, forty percent of fourth graders and 35 percent of eighth-graders scored at or above "proficient." Gaps between low-income and higher-income students were as wide as ever. In all, these NAEP scores drive home the fact that we have far to go in math. Our nation's high schoolers do worse than their peers in 17 developed nations--and better than peers in only four others.

Now for the bright side. Math scores ticked upward in 4th and 8th grades, if only slightly. If we take the long view, things look better. As Kevin Carey notes, US students, especially students of color, have made big gains since 1990: "In 1990, 50 percent of fourth graders failed to score at the 'Basic' level of proficiency in math. They were innumerate. Today, that number is 18 percent. The percent of students meeting the much higher 'Proficient' standard has more than tripled, from 14 to 47 percent."

As Carey and others point out, we shouldn't let ourselves get too excited. Twelfth grade scores have gone nowhere for years, suggesting that students lose ground again in high school. (Some argue that the disappointing results in 12th grade have at least something to do with the challenge of getting seniors to take a no-stakes test like NAEP seriously.)

But we should take courage from the gains in 4th and 8th grades. We have not moved fast enough, but the gains have been real. Change is possible if we set our minds to it. All the more reason, therefore, to redouble our efforts.

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Life Imitates Art: Solving Crimes with Math

Monday, October 31, 2011 - 18:22

Before it got canceled in 2010, Numb3rs was a favorite TV show among math geeks everywhere. After all, the show featured a geeky mathematician who used math to solve crimes in LA. Purists could of course object that the show took more than a few liberties with the math it portrayed but, hey, beggars can't be choosers.

Now it seems life might be imitating art. A group of mathematicians at UCLA is working with the LAPD on models that can solve violent crimes. They have created an algorithm to identify which street gangs might have committed unsolved crimes. In a city where one small area is home to some 30 rival gangs, that's no small feat.

According to a UCLA press release, their algorithm is showing promise. In tests, they have "placed the correct gang rivalry within the top three most likely rivalries 80 percent of the time." They have managed to choose the top gang rivalry 50 percent of the time, which is far better than chance.

The algorithm isn't perfect yet, but its creators say they are working to refine it. As it is, it can help police narrow the field as they search for culprits.

The study's lead author, a doctoral student named Alexey Stomakhin, says he has "the best job in the world--working with great young mathematicians and having an impact on society." Just more proof--in case you needed it--that math is cool.

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Human Tutors Make a Dramatic Difference in Math

Thursday, October 27, 2011 - 18:22

Consider it a victory of man (or woman) over machine. Human tutor beat computer tutors hands down in a set of turnaround schools in Houston. Students who worked with the human tutors—one adult to two students—raised their performance in math the equivalent of five to nine extra months of schooling. The computer tutors? They didn’t come close.

Some of this stands to reason. If they’re well trained, humans can grasp and adapt to the nuances of what students need, academically or otherwise. Computers are getting very good at continuously assessing students and adapting questions accordingly, but they can’t yet build the long-term relationships that can keep struggling kids on the path to success.

Friends of technology in schools needn’t despair. Computers are coming into their own as tools that empower teachers to spend less time on lecture or drill and more time addressing their students’ diverse needs. Some teachers are “flipping” their classrooms, letting computers take care of lectures at night while spending class time doing much more applied, one-on-one work with their students.

Human tutors are no easy fix, and the Houston model isn’t your garden-variety tutoring program. The tutors work with kids every day. They’re recruited from top-performing schools, receive thorough training and earn a base salary. And the two-to-one ratio ensures that every student gets individual attention. All of that costs far more than computer tutors do.

Still, the story out of Houston is very encouraging. Success stories like that are all too rare.

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Science: the Forgotten Stepchild of School Reform?

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - 18:24

Brace yourself for some shocking statistics. In California:

Only 44 percent of elementary school principals think it is likely that their students would get strong science instruction in their schools.
Only one third of elementary teachers feel prepared to teach science.
Forty percent say they spend less than an hour a week teaching science.
A whopping 85 percent say they haven't received any professional development in science in the past three years.

These are among the findings of a new study on the state of science education in California. The authors note that the state's 4th grade science scores (PDF) place it near the bottom of the nation. They speculate that the state's accountability system, which focuses mostly on math and reading, has drawn schools' attention away from science.

The problem isn't limited to California. The national Schools and Staffing Survey found that, in the U.S. as a whole, elementary teachers on average spent 2.3 hours a week on science in 2008, a big drop from the three hour average in 1994. Parhaps not as dire as California, but bad enough.

if states adopt Common Standards in science--and if common tests follow, as many believe they will--schools may well have to reassess how much time they spend on science..

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A New Way to Judge High Schools

Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - 18:36

In the coming years, we'll judge more and more of our high schools by how well they prepare their students for college. As our data systems get better, that will become easier to do.

New York City is a case in point. This year, the city’s school report cards include three new measures: the share of students who pass college-level tests or classes, the share who enroll in college the year after they graduate, and the share who would not require remediation at any CUNY colleges. The results so far aren’t pretty: Only one in four students who enter high school are ready for college four years later, The New York Times reports, and fewer than half enroll.

Some states are making it easier to judge schools on their students’ success in college. Rather than merely predicting how their students will do, states with robust data systems are actually building the capacity to follow their high school graduates’ progress through college.

The results of such analysis can be surprising. A preliminary review of such data in Florida, for example, found that graduates from many highly-rated schools were not staying in college. By contrast, graduates of some schools that had not fared very well on state rating systems were doing better in college. The standard measures of school success haven’t always held up particularly well.

New York City is glimpsing the future. In ten years, we may well be measuring schools by how well their students actually do after they graduate, not just how well we think they’ll do.

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Two More Days to Vote for the Most Innovative Program

Sunday, October 23, 2011 - 18:37

Many of the world's most innovative people in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) live and work in the United States. It's troubling, then, that so many young people in this country never meet or learn from any role models in the STEM fields. It's downright perverse that the young people who need such role models most are least likely to have any exposure to them.

Ashoka Changemakers is trying to change that, and they're asking for your help. With their partners TheOpportunity Equation and Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ashoka challenged anyone to submit ideas for tapping "untapped talent in community partners and others...to engage students, particularly our highest-need students, in rich...STEM learning." In other words, how do we give students more access to all that STEM talent that exists outside of our schools?

The Ashoka challenge yielded ten finalists, and you can vote for the idea that you think deserves the "People's Choice Award." The winner of that award will get $20,000--with generous support from the Noyce Foundation.

You have to cast your vote by Wednesday, October 26, so act fast! (I have some favorites, but I'll keep them to myself).

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And They who Know Math Shall Inherit the Earth

Friday, October 21, 2011 - 18:38

Here's a message we should broadcast to kids everywhere: If you study science, technology, engineering or math (STEM), you'll likely earn more even if you don't end up in a STEM job.

Anthony Carnevale and his colleagues from the Center for Education and the Workforce at Georgetown just released his most recent (of many)reports on STEM and the workforce. He found what many others have found: that STEM jobs pay better than other jobs, and that many are growing faster. But the report also makes clear that STEM jobs make up only about 5 percent of all jobs. Hardly an argument to entice more people into STEM fields.

BUT--and this is a huge "but"--the standard definition of STEM is very narrow. It does not include medical jobs, finance jobs, or jobs in a host of other areas that require more than a passing acquaintance with the STEM fields.

Carnevale's report breaks new ground by showing just how far the demand for STEM skills extends. His findings should reorient the debate:

The concern for STEM shortages tends to focus on the possibility of an insufficient supply of STEM workers, but the deeper problem is a broader scarcity of workers with basic STEM competencies across the entire economy. Demand for the core competencies is far greater than the 5 percent traditional STEM employment share suggests and stretches across the entire job market, touching virtually every industry.

STEM skills are everywhere. What’s more, the demand for STEM skills has grown much more quickly than employment has. That demand fuels wages. Even when they’re not in STEM jobs, Carnevale has found, people with those skills out-earn their peers.

Sure, you have to study STEM if you want to become an engineer or an IT professional. Those jobs will stand you in good stead, even in tough times. Unemployment in the STEM fields is about half the overall rate. But the big news in Carnevale’s report is that you should build your STEM skills even if you don’t dream of having a STEM job.

Pass it on.

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