Dear all,
As you have probably guessed now I try to send you all an
email each weekend that will make you think about what you are doing in your
classroom and our thinking about 21st century education. Firstly I
hope that you find time to take a minute or two to read them and that you find
them interesting. I know this is an old fashioned way of sharing and a link to
a blog might be better but this way you only have to open one thing to get to
the content.
If you read an article/ blog post or something that you feel
I should read and share please do not hesitate to share with me.
This link below is a little sentimental but hopefully
reminds us of our social and emotional side as we are away from home and often
neglect those who are closest to us in our daily rush. It is a nice reminder
and I know it is something that I regret in my life with my father.
The article below is my educational thought for the week. It
comes from the newly formed school of researches linking MIND, BRAIN and EDUCATION
and raises the question about what is the objective of homework we set and what
form should it take to achieve the our objective.
Making homework smarter
Do American
students have too much homework, or too little? We often hear passionate
arguments for either side, but I believe that we ought to be asking a different
question altogether. What should matter to parents and educators is this: How
effectively do children’s after-school assignments advance learning?
The quantity of students’
homework is a lot less important than its quality. And evidence suggests that
as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Although surveys show that the
amount of time our children spend on homework has risen over the last three
decades, American students are mired in the middle of international academic
rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to the
most recent results from the Program for International Student Assessment
(PISA).
In a 2008 survey, one-third of
parents polled rated the quality of their children’s homework assignments as
fair or poor, and 4 in 10 said they believed that some or a great deal of
homework was busywork. A new study, coming in the Economics of Education
Review, reports that homework in science, English and history has “little to no
impact” on student test scores. (The authors did note a positive effect for
math homework.) Enriching children’s classroom learning requires making
homework not shorter or longer, but smarter.
Fortunately, research is
available to help parents, teachers and school administrators do just that. In
recent years, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational
psychologists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human
brain learns. They have founded a new discipline, known as Mind, Brain and
Education, that is devoted to understanding and improving the ways in which
children absorb, retain and apply knowledge.
Educators have begun to
implement these methods in classrooms around the country and have enjoyed
measurable success. A collaboration between psychologists at Washington
University in St. Louis and teachers at nearby Columbia Middle School, for
example, lifted seventh- and eighth-grade students’ science and social studies
test scores by 13 to 25 percent.
But the innovations have not
yet been applied to homework. Mind, Brain and Education methods may seem
unfamiliar and even counterintuitive, but they are simple to understand and
easy to carry out. And after-school assignments are ripe for the kind of
improvements the new science offers.
“Spaced repetition” is one
example of the kind of evidence-based techniques that researchers have found
have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it works: instead of
concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as many homework
assignments currently do—reading about, say, the Civil War one evening and
Reconstruction the next—learners encounter the same material in briefer
sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach, students are
re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction throughout the
semester.
It sounds unassuming, but
spaced repetition produces impressive results. Eighth-grade history students
who relied on a spaced approach to learning had nearly double the retention
rate of students who studied the same material in a consolidated unit, reported
researchers from the University of California-San Diego in 2007. The reason the
method works so well goes back to the brain: when we first acquire memories,
they are volatile, subject to change or likely to disappear. Exposing ourselves
to information repeatedly over time fixes it more permanently in our minds, by
strengthening the representation of the information that is embedded in our
neural networks.
A second learning technique,
known as “retrieval practice,” employs a familiar tool—the test—in a new way:
not to assess what students know, but to reinforce it. We often conceive of
memory as something like a storage tank and a test as a kind of dipstick that
measures how much information we’ve put in there. But that’s not actually how
the brain works. Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more
lasting, so that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply
reading over material to be learned, or even taking notes and making outlines,
as many homework assignments require, doesn’t have this effect.
According to one experiment,
language learners who employed the retrieval practice strategy to study
vocabulary words remembered 80 percent of the words they studied, while
learners who used conventional study methods remembered only about a third of
them. Students who used retrieval practice to learn science retained about 50
percent more of the material than students who studied in traditional ways,
reported researchers from Purdue University earlier this year. Students—and
parents—may groan at the prospect of more tests, but the self-quizzing involved
in retrieval practice need not provoke any anxiety. It’s simply an effective
way to focus less on the input of knowledge (passively reading over textbooks
and notes) and more on its output (calling up that same information from one’s
own brain).
Another common misconception
about how we learn holds that if information feels easy to absorb, we’ve
learned it well. In fact, the opposite is true. When we work hard to understand
information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals the brain that this
knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known as cognitive disfluency,
promotes learning so effectively that psychologists have devised all manner of
“desirable difficulties” to introduce into the learning process: for example,
sprinkling a passage with punctuation mistakes, deliberately leaving out
letters, shrinking font size until it’s tiny or wiggling a document while it’s
being copied so that words come out blurry.
Teachers are unlikely to start
sending students home with smudged or error-filled worksheets, but there is
another kind of desirable difficulty — called interleaving — that can readily
be applied to homework. An interleaved assignment mixes up different kinds of
situations or problems to be practiced, instead of grouping them by type. When
students can’t tell in advance what kind of knowledge or problem-solving
strategy will be required to answer a question, their brains have to work
harder to come up with the solution, and the result is that students learn the
material more thoroughly.
Researchers at California
Polytechnic State University conducted a study of interleaving in sports that
illustrates why the tactic is so effective. When baseball players practiced
hitting, interleaving different kinds of pitches improved their performance on
a later test in which the batters did not know the type of pitch in advance (as
would be the case, of course, in a real game).
Interleaving produces the same
sort of improvement in academic learning. A study published last year in the
journal Applied Cognitive
Psychology asked fourth-graders to work on solving four types of
math problems and then to take a test evaluating how well they had learned. The
scores of those whose practice problems were mixed up were more than double the
scores of those students who had practiced one kind of problem at a time.
The application of such
research-based strategies to homework is a yet-untapped opportunity to raise
student achievement. Science has shown us how to turn homework into a potent
catalyst for learning. Our assignment now is to make it happen. (You can browse
past issues of the Brilliant Report by clicking here.)
Finally I have started a blog for ISHCMC parents to try to
update their thinking about education from posts I have read or been sent. It
is not provocative in that it shares articles that they might find interesting
and think about at home. I make no comment in anyway about the content. If you
are interested here is the link.
Have a good weekend,
Yours
Adrian
No comments:
Post a Comment