Stephen’s Untold Stories

I have seen far too many teachers either refuse to share their expertise or refuse to see the expertise of others. Hopefully this kind of research will encourage more to seek and share.

As policymakers focus on identifying and rewarding effective teaching, they should pay close attention to an important new study demonstrating the powerful effect of teacher collaboration in producing greater student achievement gains.

Using 11 years of student data in North Carolina, researchers have found that most value-added achievement gains are attributed to the make-up of teacher teams, not the traits and characteristics of individual teachers. Drawing on sophisticated analyses of this large database, they reported in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that peer learning among small groups of teachers seems to be the most powerful predictor of student achievement over time.

Researchers C. Kirabo Jackson and Elias Bruegmann found that “students have larger test score gains when their teachers experience improvements in the observable characteristics of their colleagues.” Less experienced teachers who are still acquiring “on-the-job” skills are most sensitive to changes in peer quality; teachers with greater labor-market attachment are more sensitive to peer quality; and both current and historical peer quality changes affect current student achievement.

Read the rest here.

I will be using SPSS quite a bit as I work on my dissertation. It is an amazing statistical program.

I.B.M. took a big step to expand its fast-growing stable of data analysis offerings by agreeing on Tuesday to pay $1.2 billion to buy SPSS Inc., a maker of software used in statistical analysis and predictive modeling.

Major technology companies have made a flurry of such purchases in recent years, grabbing suppliers of software that helps businesses and governments organize and analyze data to make better decisions. The industry segment is broadly known as business intelligence software. In the last couple of years, I.B.M., Oracle, SAP and Microsoft have collectively spent more than $15 billion buying makers of such software.

In the recession, corporate spending on technology is being trimmed. But business intelligence software, analysts say, stands out as an exception because it is seen as a tool to help identify cost-cutting opportunities and emerging market trends.

Read the rest here.

I think most of us already knew this, but it’s still nice to see it validated with some research.

New research suggests that more K-12 public school students will take classes online and will have longer school days in the next decade–and academic improvement and cost savings are two big benefits.

Online courses are already commonplace in higher education and are growing in popularity at the K-12 level as well. Orlando-based Florida Virtual School (FLVS) has quickly become the nation’s largest virtual school, serving nearly 65,000 students in the 2007-08 school year.

“Policy makers and educators have proposed expanding learning time in elementary through high school grades as a way to improve students’ academic performance, but online coursework hasn’t been on their radar,” said Catherine Cavanaugh, associate professor at the University of Florida’s College of Education and author of the report, “Getting Students More Learning Time Online: Distance Education in Support of Expanded Learning Time in K-12 Schools.”

Cavanaugh’s report found that the average yearly cost of online learning for a full-time student was about $4,300 in 2008, based on a survey of 20 virtual schools in 14 states.  The national average cost per student in a traditional public school in 2006, the most recent year in which data were available, was more than $9,100. Cost estimates included course development, teaching, and administrative and technical expenses.

“Online programs have little or no cost for instructional facilities, transportation, and related staff,” Cavanaugh said. “The value of distance education also increases when considering the broad range of available online courses.”

Read the rest here.

Interesting study. I expect we’ll see more of this type of research.

Virginia reportedly has become the first state to implement a pilot program using Tabula Digita’s DimensionM video games to help boost student test scores in mathematics and motivate students to learn.

DimensionM is an immersive video-game world that engages students in learning pre-algebra and algebra objectives through a series of missions. Tammy McGraw, director of educational technology for the Virginia Department of Education, read about DimensionM and its use in New York City public schools.   After seeing some empirical research on the games’ efficacy as a teaching tool, she decided she wanted to find out more.

According to a study conducted in 2008 by scholars at the University of Central Florida, DimensionM’s immersive educational video games can improve students’ understanding and raise scores significantly on district-wide math benchmark exams.

Read the rest here.

I look forward to reading the entire report when my semester is over!

The evaluation study involved 1,716 students in the treatment group and 1,622 students in the control group. In the treatment group, teachers used Promethean ActivClassroom to augment their instructional practices. In the control group, teachers used strategies and materials to facilitate instruction without the use of Promethean ActivClassroom.

This evaluation study examined the effects of Promethean ActivClassroom on student achievement. During the 2008-2009 school year, 79 teachers from 50 schools throughout the country participated in independent studies to determine the effect Promethean ActivClassroom has on students’ achievement in their classrooms.

Marzano Preliminary Report on ActivClassroom

Of course this comes as no shock to those of us who work in instructional technology. This is the kind of information that administrators and school boards need to be looking at.

Your teenage daughter is supposed to be doing homework, but you catch her chatting online. She tells you that she’s talking about the math test tomorrow. Before your eyes start rolling, listen up: teens are using social networking sites for more than just gossip, according to a new study by the National School Boards Association.

The students who participated in the online survey, ages 9 to 17, say they spend almost as much time social networking online as they do watching television. And it’s what these kids are talking about on-line that’s causing such a cheer: Education. That’s right. Of the students who participated in the study, 60 percent reported that some of the most popular social networking topics were college planning, learning outside of school, careers, and schoolwork. They also report posting writing and art projects that may have nothing to do with schoolwork.

This is exciting stuff to the National School Board Association, which has promoted the concept of online education long before google and wikipedia were household names.

Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Board Association, says incorporating social networking tools into educational curriculum is the way forward. “Learn it because I said so isn’t effective right now. We need to use the Internet to involve students in project based assignments in the real world, taking place around the world,” she says.

Read the rest here.

It’s good to see some real data that shows actual improvement.

• Of those classrooms employing these boards and using the voting technology, there was an immediate 17-percentile gain in scores.
• He also found that if a teacher were using the board for 20-30 months, there was, on average, a 20 percentile gain. Thus, proving that with time and practice, a teacher can hone his/her skills to encourage even more student success.
• The “Sweet Spot” he says, the perfect storm of student achievement according to his findings, was when the technology was used by an experienced teacher, having had it for 2 years, using it 75% of the time in class, who has had training. That teacher shows a whopping 29% gain in scores.

Read the rest here.

I hope this has the effect they are hoping for. I can’t wait to find out!

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty voted unanimously March 18 to make the school’s scholarly research available for free on the internet, joining other noted universities that hope to encourage more scholarship and expand researchers’ audiences.

MIT’s approval of open access was driven partly by the rising cost of scholarly journals. In recent years, even the richest American universities have cut back on journal subscriptions that can cost as much as $20,000 annually, open-access experts said.

The open-access movement aims to put peer-reviewed research and literature on the internet for free and remove most copyright restrictions. Advocates believe this will invigorate more research across academia.

MIT joins about 30 universities and colleges–including Harvard, Stanford, and Boston universities–that have approved some form of open-access model, said Peter Suber, an open-access advocate and national expert. MIT will institute open access university-wide, joining Boston University as the only schools to take that approach. Other campuses have implemented open access one department at a time.

The open-access mandate is not the first time MIT has grabbed attention with academic openness. MIT’s OpenCourseWare project has made classroom lectures, syllabi, and assignments available for free on the internet–a move lauded by many in higher education.

Read the rest here.