TLT 471. TQ#2. “A Perfect Storm of Mindlessness”(1)

As an indentured investor in the public school system of this country, all I can do is express my absolute dismay after reading the US Department of Education’s two executive summaries assigned this week. (2,3) Unfortunately, individually I lack the power to redirect the juggernaut of academic “mindlessness” expressed in the research that was reviewed in these two summaries. But perhaps, collectively, we can influence future efforts to improve student outcomes by demanding revolutionary change around the following four key initiatives.

• Meaningful accountability for educational leaders and classroom teachers
• The blended integration of technology into the curriculum
• Focused experiential learning through problem solving that requires significant effort
• A student assessment strategy that measures relevant knowledge application

Given the time, effort and money it took to execute the Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products research, I find it absurd that school principals and classroom teachers were “encouraged” by vendors to use the software products under investigation, but teachers could arbitrarily decide not to do so. Once recruited for the study, school districts top down, from the superintendent to the classroom teacher, should have been required to utilize the software – otherwise, why bother conducting the research at all? The ability of individual teachers in the intervention group to opt out “whenever” is a major flaw of this study, but consistent with Wenglinsky’s observation that a culture of learning is not valued and nourished in many school environments in which many teachers are indifferent and educational leadership is absent.(1) In my view teacher indifference won’t be eradicated until there is truly meaningful accountability for lack of performance. If optimal student performance isn’t evident, opting out of trying new methodologies should not be an option. School districts should be able to quickly remove any principal or teacher (regardless of tenure) who “opts out” of trying potentially new methodologies if the students they are tasked to teach are substandard performers.

The reading and mathematics software products used in this research were essentially drill and practice tutorials that supplemented the teacher and were not an integrated part of the curriculum. In addition, the software under investigation was used by the students less than 11% of the allocated and applicable instructional time. As a fervent believer in Ericsson’s deliberate practice methodology, I am not surprised that instructional interventions used less than 11% of the time result in no statistically significant change in student achievement.(4) There was no significant investment in either time or effort to truly test the potential impact of these software programs. In addition, these software programs did not seem to add any depth to the existing curriculum. I imagine that these drill and practice software programs probably replaced drill and practice print-based work sheets. Wenglinsky suggests that technology like this should never stand alone. He advocates a blended integration of technology into the curriculum that leverages multiple tools. His view is that technology should be imbedded and inseparable from creative teaching that has students spending significantly more time on less. He refers to one such creative teacher who said, “I would rather have my students spend an entire period on one problem, coming up with multiple ways of solving it, many of them dead ends, than have them solve 15 problems without engaging their brains.” (1)

This last comment leads us to the subject of attention and the fact that the temporary memory of our students is fleeting. Limited temporary memory capacity leaves us with students who selectively choose to attend to certain incoming information while simultaneously choosing to ignore other information. Selective attention is the only way that instruction reaches conscious thought. Wenglinsky, Driscoll, and Linn et al advocate student-centric instructional content that is presented in ways that are personnally meaningful or aligned in some way to student’s existing concepts or anchoring ideas (certainly not drill and practice software programs used in isolation). When a student’s existing long term cognitive files are connected in meaningful ways instruction being processed in short term memory will be relevant to the student and provide entry points for the new information to be permentantly filed, or encoded for later recall and application. When students encounter content that is not student-centric (drill and practice programs used in isolation) they are more apt to reherse or memorize the new ideas. Since these isolated, rehersed new ideas are not connected to existing ideas the instruction results in little to no cumulative learning and rapid forgetting. Using technology that is an integrated part of a curriculum, which is directed towards student-centric, relevant, experiential and demanding problem solving will increase their knowledge acquisition and application around more focused content.(1,4,5,and 6)

Finally, standardized tests that measure isolated student knowledge acquisition is just as uninteresting and irrelevant to students as the curricular content and teaching methodologies that they are forced to endure in most classrooms. The drill and practice software programs described in the IES executive summaries were certainly not interesting nor were they personally relevant to the students in these study populations. The software programs did not require any meaningful effort. These programs did not immerse students in an experiential and demanding problem solving process, and yet the IES embarks on this study expecting a lame standardized test to validate a lamely executed technology intervention. Nothing will improve in our public schools until we demand a student assessment strategy that measures relevant knowledge application. Performance assessments need to replace standardized multiple choice knowledge assessments because at the end of the day what students know is irrelevant – what students can do is everything. (1) A student may have memorized an extensive vocabulary (knowledge), but can he or she leverage that knowledge by articulating a compelling and persuasive argument in writing (applied knowledge)?

There are voices crying in the wilderness who are advocating the revolutionary changes reviewed here. For example, Professor Robert Sternberg’s alternative SAT (Rainbow Project) is more focused on having students describe their solutions to relevant problems than answer multiple choice knowledge assessment questions. Even though it has been shown to be twice as successful than the traditional SAT in predicting how well students will perform in college it has not been adopted (Pink, 2005).(7) And even though the SAT introduced a writing component to their multiple choice test in 2005 it is still not being used by most colleges in the evaluation of student applicants. Although I applaud the efforts of pioneers like Dr. Sternberg, I wonder if revolutionary change can ever happen when we can’t even adopt a small incremental improvement to student assessment like writing an essay on the SAT.

The Chinese characters at the beginning of this blog are translated as “Fu bu guo san dai”, or “wealth only lasts three generations.” The proverb is often expressed when discussing the United States because the Chinese believe that we lack the determination and discipline to fundamentally change any of the challenges described above.

Are they right?


References

1. Wenglinsky H. (2005) Using Technology Wisely: The Keys to Success in Schools. Teachers College Press. Columbia University. New York. pp. 43-59
2. Institute of Educational Sciences (2007) Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings from the First Student Cohort. Executive Summary. US Department of Education. Washington, DC.
3. Institute of Educational Sciences (2008) Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report. Executive Summary. US Department of Education. Washington, DC.
4. Ericsson K.A. (2004). Deliberate practice and acquisition and maintenance of expert performance in medicine and related domains. Academic Medicine. Vol. 79, No.10:S70-S81.
5. Discoll, M.P. (2005) Psychology of learning for instruction (Third edition). pp. 111-152: Pearson Education, Inc
6. Linn, M.C., Davis, E.A., & Eylons, B-S. (2004). The scaffolded knowledge integration framework for instruction. In M.C. Linn, E.A. Davis, & P. Bell (Eds.), Internet environments for science education (pp. 47-72). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
7. Pink D.H. (2005) A Whole New Mind. Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Riverhead Books. New York. pp. 39