Giant Pool of Money radio program

The NPR radio program This American Life aired an update to their "The Giant Pool of Money" program from a year ago (called appropriately, Return To The Giant Pool of Money. The producers did a nice job, I think, on the details of the collapse.

The podcast is available from iTunes, and should be available from the show's website here shortly.

jd

CPS moves to online assessments

I attended a briefing for principals and test coordinators on the CPS district-wide assessment plan for the coming year. The briefing was given folks from the Department of Student Assessment, a part of the Office of Research, Evaluation and Accountability. Click here for a link to the Powerpoint presentation for elementary schools. The DoSA page also has a link to the high school strategy presentation.

I was primarily interested in Grades 3 - 8, so this summary only touches on that. CPS will administer three benchmarks assessments in reading and math this year, in October, January and May. (Here's a link for the complete assessment schedule.) The district is moving towards an online benchmark assessment, and is supposed to be working to get all schools ready to move to all-online benchmark assessments in 2010-11. Some schools (if they have the technology infrastructure) will be able to start with online assessment beginning with the winter assessment in January. (Constructed response questions will still be graded by hand, by teachers, and entered manually into CIM.)

Setting aside the tremendous limitations of multiple choice as an assessment tool (and how education, like so many things today, is inverted to serve the available technology, and not the other way round, but that's another discussion) ...

The advantage to online assessment is that multiple choice results are available immediately, instead of two to three weeks later. The disadvantages: getting the students used to the testing format and software (sigh, that this should be an issue -- we train them to be multiple-choice test-takers), scheduling test time in the computer lab, the inevitable network and software and computer problems, the extra burden on technology staff, handling accommodations in a computer lab setting, and no doubt other issues not immediately popping into my brain.

CPS is also moving to a second testing format, the Scantron Performance Series, which is a computer-based adaptive testing tool. "Adaptive" means that the testing software presents the test-taker with more difficult questions if he or she answered the previous question correctly; or an easier question if the previous question was answered incorrectly, until the testing algorithm can determine a performance level for the test taker. Students will take reading, math and science Scantron tests.

In 2009-10, Scantron is available as either an addition to the district benchmark assessment, or as a substitute. In 2010-11, students will take both tests, three times a year. This flows from the new Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman's emphasis on data collection as an education management tool. See Catalyst's 9/3/09 posting "Huberman outlines strategies to improve Chicago schools" for a brief overview.

The Benchmark Assessment is a criterion-referenced assessment, and so is intended to measure student mastery of particular skills (the criteria). [The math assessment question mix is also mapped to the Chicago Math and Science Initiative (CMSI) pacing guide for the four chosen CMSI math curricula (Trailblazers, Everyday Math, Connected Math and MathThematics).] As a performance measurement tool, the Benchmark Assessment is not so useful. The best proxy in the BA data for tracking overall performance has been the ISAT Predicted Scale Score, a guesstimate of how the student will perform on the state standardized test. The predicted score is supposedly anywhere from about 75% to 90% accurate (I just got our schools numbers so haven't seen yet how this relates to our results.)

The Scantron test is a performance measurement -- it doesn't say specifically what a student knows or needs to work on (which isn't to say necessarily that the Benchmark Assessment does, although that is its purpose), only where a student is in the mass of students, and is he or she making "progress" based on prior Scantron scores. The Benchmark Assessment is considered "low stakes" (no one's job is on the line, schools won't be closed because of scores, students won't be held back -- as opposed to "high stakes" like ISAT where all three of the above are the case).

I suspect that the Scantron test will come to be considered by school administrators and teachers as high stakes. I am guessing that the Scantron numbers will be the bottom line numbers to determine if students are "progressing", and therefore used by top-level administration to lean on principals and teachers.

jd

P.S. Writing assessments are built into the Reading Benchmark (3x a year, scored by teachers) plus one additional district-wide assessment, scored externally, that will be used for promotion determination. K-2 students will use one of three early literacy assessment tools (including DIBELS).

A couple of updates

I realize this blog has been very quiet over the past couple of years. Or rather, I have not posted very much. Despite the enormity of the financial crisis, I don't think there is anything new, or unexpected there. Yes the details of how the latest act began and played out are of some interest, and the jockeying over the possible restructuring is somewhat revealing. But overall, it was all to be expected: more and more extended speculation and risk-taking to seek historically shrinking rates of profit until the precarious structure collapsed, and set the stage for the next act.

One year after poo really hit the fan on Wall Street, it perhaps bears repeating Marx's description of financial crises: they are not the destruction of value, but a powerful (even violent) means of centralizing wealth (CW/Vol. 37, aka Capital Vol. III, p. 468). In this regard, the crisis represents a violent ratcheting up of the polarization of wealth and poverty.

There are a few threads in the recent news that highlight that stood out to me.

First, as Nasser Saber pointed out in his book Speculative Capital, an important element of speculation (Saber defines speculative capital as capital used in arbitrage), taking advantage of price differences in different markets. As speculative capital develops, the arbitrage opportunities shrink, requiring either larger sums to be committed to arbitrage to achieve the same return, or a kind of arms race to get ahead of the arbitrage crowd by shrinking the trading time through faster computers and smarter software. "Flash trading" is a way of exploiting price differences, or soon-to-be price differences by learning of upcoming (measured in milliseconds). [And today, only just today I am sad to say, I discovered Nasser Saber's blog on finance and speculative capital, and so I direct the reader to his blog for any more on speculative capital.] See e.g. NYSE's Fast-Trade Hub Rises Up in New Jersey in the July 30, 2009 Wall Street Journal. It also explains the significance of the theft of Goldman Sachs computer code used to power its trading juggernaut: see The Man Accused of Stealing Goldman's Code.

A second thread has to do with the destruction of value (as opposed to wealth), to wit the cash-for-clunkers program and the subsequent destruction of functioning automobiles to take them permanently off of the market (as automobiles, some value persists as scrap, see a YouTube video Cash for Clunkers: How to destroy an engine for instructions on how you can do this at home -- kids, ask your parents first! The video is sad in a way, and pornographic in the worst sense of the word). And the destruction of the tart cherry crop in Michigan (Bumper Cherry Crop Turns Sour: Tons of Unharvested Fruit Rots Under Government Program to Keep Prices Stable).

jd

Links on play + link on distraction

Here are a few links on the importance of play in learning, especially for younger children. The first is an op-ed piece from the New York Times about baby smarts, Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think.

And then some follow-up comments.

And there's this related 2008 NPR story, Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills by Alix Spiegel (thanks Roberta!)

Finally, apropos my earlier post related to attention / distraction, there's this link from Russ Revzan's "Thoughts of Russ" blog:

Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows

(Russ works with CUIP, the Chicago Public Schools - University of Chicago Internet Project, advising schools on how to make the most of their new technologies).

jd

Beyond textbooks

Some links from today's (8/9/09) New York Times:

In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History

Beyond Textbooks

CK-12 Foundation: "CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the 'FlexBook,' CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning."

Huh.

jd

An open-ended inquiry webquest

Webquests are typically examples of guided inquiry. The webquest defines a task for the student, and takes the student step-by-step through the quest. In the better webquests, students have some leeway in terms of outcomes and procedures. Even better webquests rely on student direct observation, perhaps through hands-on experiments or observing artifacts available on the web (e.g., investigating movies, animation, old radio programs, or even webquests).

In an earlier post, I looked at the relationship of webquests and open-ended inquiry. Open-ended inquiry looks more like real science-in-practice. It requires the student to develop their own questions and methods of investigation. It also requires a more delicate role for the teacher -- guiding the student, but not telling or directing too much. The student is on his or her own path of discovery.

The assumption then is that, all things being equal, open-ended inquiry is better than guided inquiry. With that in mind, I put together a rubric for assessing the "inquiry quotient" of a webquest. I identified five parameters to assess:

1. Allows student to generate own question
2. Uses open-ended question
3. Relies on direct observation
4. Goal is to acquire concrete concepts
5. Capable of maintaining student interest

Most webquests that I have looked at score rather low: they generally don't provide questions that aren't open-ended questions, and they often don't rely on direct observation.

Given the nature the webquest format, is an open-ended inquiry webquest possible? What would it look like?

Here is a link to my effort, called Knowledge Explorer. You also need to look at the accompanying Teaching Guide, and in particular the "Important note" to make sense of what the webquest does.

The subject matter is not so important, I don't think, as long as it is capable of attracting the interest of students. Social justice pedagogy suggests that you start with something from student popular culture (see earlier blog posting). Since the world is interconnected, the in-depth investigation of any social phenomenon will provide insight to the whole if the various connections are pursued critically. So in general terms, Knowledge Explorer is about exploring a commodity of interest to the student. In my specific case, it is a snack food of the students' choice, but I suppose this could easily be opened up to starting with any commodity of the student's choosing.

The quest begins with a focused examination of the physical commodity, allowing questions to arise from that. (This is one part of the direct observation.) This part of the investigation relates to the methods of qualitative science; you can read more about this if you want in a piece I did called Talking with History.

The student then develops his or her own questions out of the direct observation and designs a research strategy to investigate the questions. At this point the teacher must intervene in the webquest to support the student's investigation. The teacher can (and thinking about it, should) support the investigation face-to-face by asking probing questions, how-type questions and so on (see the Teaching Guide for examples taken from An Inquiry Primer by Alan Coburn).

The new part in this webquest is that support and scaffolding can also be done via the webquest. Technically this is done using a dynamic web page (specifically, some trivial PHP code). The teacher places files of HTML code snippets in folders assigned to each student group. Students select the Process page for their group; as the page loads the web server scans the group's folder for any snippet files, and displays the contents of the group-specific snippets on the group's page. Rather simple, and should not be too difficult for a teacher with moderate web page design skills. I realize that that might be too much of an assumption -- the code skills might automatically exclude most teachers from using such a webquest.

At this point, the Knowledge Explorer webquest is a hypothetical, and needs to be shaken out in the classroom. Let me know if you are interested.

I have no idea how this will go over in practice. One issue I see is true of all open-ended inquiry. Open-ended inquiry requires more effort on the part of the teacher, because it requires closer work with the students, monitoring their progress, anticipating their needs, getting into their thinking deeply enough to plant suggested avenues of investigation without explicitly telling the students. Which sounds like the way things should be. But it is a labor-intensive, time-consuming process. Time which teachers rarely, in my experience, feel like they have. The attraction, I think, of traditional guided-inquiry webquests is that they allow some measure of higher order thinking exercises with little or no extra work on the part of the teacher. Even better, teachers can use existing webquests developed by other teachers, too often I expect, with no modifications. The webquests succeed, in some little way, of automating the teaching process. To bring the teacher back to the center of the webquest in the spirit of open-ended inquiry means giving up the time-saving, automated benefit of the webquest.

This is one of the knotty dilemmas of digital technology-supported pedagogy. Digital technology offers the possibility of extending the teacher's reach (e.g., via automations like webquests), but to be used with optimal effectiveness, the wits and insights of the teacher must be brought back to the center of the teaching process.

There is no royal road -- or automated one -- to education.

jd

Virtual science education

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

So William Gibson began his classic cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. That sentence captures the inversion -- or is it sublation? or negation? of the human-nature relationship. Human-made technology is not like nature. No -- the opposite is the case. Nature is now like our technology. Our technology has become the reference point, more real than nature. Our life around and in technology has become more primary, a more recent and ready reference point, and in that sense more real, than our experience with grass, breeze, sunlight, woods, robins, etc. etc. Quick -- can you say what phase the moon is in?

River City is an interactive computer simulation application for middle school science students. The program is hosted on the ActiveWorlds virtual world platform. Students work through different stages of a simulation of an American town in the late 1870s beset with a mysterious disease. Students adopt avatars and move around the town, "interacting" with town residents, visiting town sites, collecting data, and conducting virtual experiments. Students can chat with each other in the virtual world, collect notes, make hypotheses, and test them. The simulation was developed as part of a National Science Foundation Harvard research project.

One of our 7th Grade classes did the project last year. I can't say how much their science knowledge grew by using the project, but I was impressed by how engaged students were in the project. The silence in the classroom as 30 students focused on their laptops was ... amazing. As simulations go, River City looked varied, well thought through, and fun. The students tool on new bodies, traveled through time, flew through a 19th-century town, and investigated disease without the risk of getting sick. What's not to like? I look forward to seeing the research results (the research portion of the project officially ends this month; Activeworlds is considering keeping the project alive on a fee basis).

In a world where virtual science activities are just part of an overall rich science curriculum, with lots of "wet science" and field trips and nature walks and other real world experience -- in such a world River City-type projects could be a useful addition. Virtual worlds create certain guided experiences difficult to achieve otherwise.

But... (as Pee Wee Herman famously said, "everyone I know has a Big But -- Let's talk about your Big But") In my school we don't have a rich science curriculum, and River City was the closest that that 7th Grade came to a real world in-depth scientific investigation outside of science fair projects. This is not the fault of the teacher, or the school necessarily. The ultimate factors I think are the big ones of the polarization of wealth and poverty associated with globalization, the related processes of de-industrialization, the privatization of education, the overall destruction of the working class, the war on the poor, ... As a result: the destruction of the family unit, deep social problems transferred to schools, and in the school, shorter school days, large classes, stressed teachers, crumbling infrastructure, the rule of the standardized computer-scored test, and on and on. We know this already don't we?

These desperate times become a rationale for the expansion of technology in the classroom. Save money -- do science virtually! One of the problems in this line of thinking is that virtual reality is a poor, poor replacement for real reality (somehow, perhaps sadly, I don't think that that phrase is redundant). It also makes for poor scientists. Goethe (who considered himself as much a scientist as a poet) said that "Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible." (the quote is from Douglas Miller's 1988 translation of Goethe's scientific works, p. 311) This may sound heretical to those who have been taught to mistrust their senses in favor of the cold precision of technology. But I think it gets to the notion that scientists need to be open to the sensual world to successfully investigate the world. Science has an intuitive and imaginative dimension that comes into play in the identification and the formulation of hypotheses, and this dimension is crippled when robbed of the interaction with the real world. Science cannot adequately be done in a virtual world. Too much is not there. (More on this: Maura Flannery wrote a nice article, "Goethe and the Molecular Aesthetic"; see also Stephen Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute.)

Computer applications cannot encompass (support, yes; encompass, no) an inquiry-based learning experience because computer applications are programmed experiences. They incorporate rules of the program designers, a minuscule subset of the law system of the universe. Regardless of the possible paths of investigations that programmed worlds offer, they are nevertheless impoverished representations of the world. The learner is channeled into the limited imagination of the programmer further constrained by his or her chosen technology. Inquiry-based learning -- the heart of the scientific adventure -- is supposed to avoid the "sage on the stage" teacher model; but instead, in virtual worlds, the teacher's role has been supplanted by the programmer. And worse, the supplanting is not immediately apparent. The programmer is a hidden presence, the wizard behind the curtain.

Given the dismal funding of education and the awful pressure on public schools, teachers are between a rock and a hard place. Yes a rich set of real world interactions supplemented by developmentally appropriate technology would be ideal. But the real world is more and more out of reach of the public school. We are offered up virtual experiences instead. And in the inversion (or is it sublation? or negation?) captured by Gibson, the scary part is how compelling the virtual experience can be.

Let's hear it for the negation of the negation...

jd