achievement gap

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How Educators Can Help Close the Achievement Gap With Simple Tactics

February 25, 2013 | 11:03 AM | By
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A new study from Stanford shows that a simple teaching tactic may help close the achievement gap between Latino American students and their white peers. Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of education and psychology at Stanford, and David Sherman of the University of California-Santa Barbara, and their fellow researchers explored the negative effects of “stereotype threat,” and came up with a finding, published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The article below by Marguerite Rigoglioso explains in detail.

The matter comes down to overcoming the negative effects of “stereotype threat,” a phenomenon that researchers have identified and documented over the last two decades. What they have found – in numerous studies – is that the stress and uncertain sense of belonging that can stem from being a member of a negatively stereotyped group undermines academic performance of minority students as compared with white students.

“Small gestures of affirmation can have lasting consequences, especially when they are woven into the student’s daily experience.”

Cohen and his colleagues have been looking for remedies to stereotype threat. In the first study described in the article, the researchers devised well-timed “values-affirmation” classroom assignments given to both Latino and white students as a part of the regular classroom curriculum. In one exercise, middle schoolers were given a list of values, such as “being good at art,” “being religious” and “having a sense of humor.” They were asked to pick the ones that were important to them and write a few sentences describing why. In a second exercise, they reflected in a more open-ended manner on things in their life that were important to them, and in a third they were guided to write a brief essay describing how the things they most consistently valued would be important to them in the coming spring.

Students completed several structured reflection exercises in their class throughout the year. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, achievement gap, stereotypes

Finding Money for Technology: “Where Do I Start”?

August 18, 2011 | 2:59 PM | By

Flickr: Kenteegarden

In the past two days, I’ve received a few comments and emails from readers about different articles that all point to the same problem: frustration over lack of money to take advantage of all these transformational tech tools that we write about here.

In response to The Most Anticipated Tech Tools of Back to School, reader Noi Schoch writes:

“All this tech is great! IF you have the cash for it! Most schools can’t afford it, and most can’t afford the staff development to train everyone how to use it and keep up with the newest uses for it.”

In reference to the article Math and Science: Out of the Classroom, Into the World, which describes why new technology makes this an exciting time to be a student, reader “mjamerson” says:

“This really sounds like a wonderful expansion of educational possibilities. But there is a potential downside. This new technology will depend on two things: teacher ability and access. As we know, in poor communities there are less seasoned teachers and less access, both at school and at home. So as much as I love the idea of using technology to widen the educational experience, this seems to widen the technology/educational opportunity divide at the same time. It makes me wonder; How many people will be left behind?”

And yesterday, I received an email from Shelley Tingle, with the subject head “Where do I start?”:

“I’m a parent of an 8th grader, 4th grader and 2nd grader.  I’m also a research civil engineer at the Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi.  My junior high student goes to a school with virtually no technology!  Vicksburg is an odd society since it is home to many engineers and scientists but also has an extremely high level of poverty with the majority of the students on reduced or free lunches. See our district’s report card. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, achievement gap, digital-divide, Donors Choose, funding

Can Tech Help Preschoolers Catch Up to Their Peers?

April 13, 2011 | 4:00 PM | By

Flickr:KidPerez

We hear a lot about the promise of technology closing the achievement gap, but few studies have definitively shown this to be true. In this article in Spotlight on Digital Media & Learning by Sara Jackon, a recent study by the Center for Children and Technology delves into how digital media can make an impact on the preschool set.

By Sara Jackson

“We have some children who can operate a computer, enjoy reading books and have an extensive vocabulary,” said Rosalie Moran, curriculum director for two Head Start centers based in Harlem and the Bronx. “And we have others who have never been around other children before and need a lot of help with the social emotional skills.”

Complicating classroom education further, some of the children speak limited or no English; some have special needs, including language or learning delays.

“Those kids in the bottom fifth who knew the fewest numbers of letters, ended up learning the most letters.”

As a group, preschoolers from low-income families are often behind on fundamental literacy skills. Studies show these children arrive for their first day of kindergarten with less emergent literacy skills than children from higher-income families.

Several years ago, four of Moran’s classrooms participated in an evaluation of how well video and interactive games produced as part of PBS’s Ready to Learn initiative could teach early literacy skills to children from low-income families.

The randomized control study of 398 children from 80 preschool classrooms, found that when coupled with professional development, a media-rich curriculum could improve early literacy skills. The 4- and 5-year-olds from low-income families who had been taught with the media curriculum showed increases in letter recognition, sounds associated with letters, and understanding basic concepts about stories and print.

“The reason it worked is that we had at our disposal high-quality media content,” said Shelley Pasnik, director of the Center for Children and Technology at the Education Development Center in New York City and an author of the study. “We placed an emphasis on high quality media and professional development for educators.”

The curriculum included intensive professional development and teacher-led activities with video and interactive games from the PBS television shows “Super Why!,” “Between the Lions” and “Sesame Street.”

Through training and coaching visits to the classroom, the teachers were given instruction on how and when to stop the videos and guide children’s learning.

“What was different with this study,” Moran told Spotlight, “was that the teacher was actually viewing the episode with the children and interacting with the children, stopping to ask questions, pausing in certain places.”

Moran said teachers were very enthusiastic about the curriculum and the support they received. Several of the participants have continued to use it in their classrooms after the study’s conclusion.

Pasnik said that the kids who had the most to learn made the greatest gains: “Those kids in the bottom fifth who knew the fewest numbers of letters, ended up learning the most letters.”

She points out that these results are particularly significant because literacy curricula doesn’t have a great success rate. A recent U.S. Department of Education review of experimental studies of literacy curricula found only two that had significant positive effects.

The latest round in PBS’s Ready to Learn Television grant competition awarded funding to support “transmedia storytelling” for children age 2 to 8, with the goal of producing stories that children can watch and interact with across multiple forms of media – including TV, websites, online games and mobile apps. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, achievement gap, digital media, literacy, preschool

How Do We Address the Needs of Kids Without Mobile Access?

April 4, 2011 | 3:00 PM | By

Flickr:Shlala

The $64,000 question in education: Does access to mobile technology actually help close the achievement gap?

Bill Ferriter, a sixth-grade teacher in North Carolina, has been thinking about this issue, and writing about it on his blog, The Tempered Radical.

In this recent post, he addresses a question from one of his readers, who sites Ferriter’s source, about how to address the needs of the minority of kids who don‘t have mobile access?

“75% of students are good to go, but do you just leave the other 25% to “fin for themselves”, leave them out of the equation all together, or do you do something to supplement such as the school providing a temporary cell phone” the reader asks.

Here’s his response.

One of the stumbling blocks to almost every reform initiative in schools is our stubborn refusal to move forward until the conditions are perfect for change.

The result: Change never happens.

“If I can have kids work in groups of three—something that I do 9 days out of 10 anyway– I only need one student to have a cell phone with unlimited texting.”

Some of the leading thinkers on change in organizations argue that you have to take the first step somewhere. You can’t let perfection stand in the way of innovation.

For schools considering the use of cell phones, that means taking action and taking action now.

I don’t care if one out of 10 students in your school has a cell phone. That’s still one more device for learning than your teachers had before–and it is one more tool for learning that many schools don’t have to provide.

In most middle and high schools, though, the rates of cell phone penetration really are much higher.  To ignore the fact that 3 out of every 4 kids in our middle and high schools is bringing their own device to school is just plain crazy.

Think about it this way:  If you were a science teacher—which is what I teach—and I told you that I could instantly put 20 dictionaries, calculators, student responders and timers into a classroom of 30 students without costing a dime, you’d jump at it, right? If you were working in most classrooms, you would!

You see, the typical science classroom in most schools has one working computer, no calculators, no timers and about 15 antiquated dictionaries that are really hard to use. That’s a resource failure on the part of schools and it keeps teachers from being effective in their classrooms.

What’s worse–almost unforgivable in my opinion–is that it is a resource failure that can be resolved if our schools didn’t ban cell phones during the school day. Now as far as the nitty gritty details of equitable use go, the fact that the vast majority of kids with cell phones have unlimited texting plans is key.

“They can text Google for definitions and facts. They can text Poll Everywhere with responses to classroom questions so that I can gather formative assessment results. They can use timers for labs.”

What that means for me as a classroom teacher is that if I can have kids work in groups of three—something that I do 9 days out of 10 anyway–then I really only need one student to have a cell phone with unlimited texting. The odds of that are pretty high in most middle schools.

From there, groups can do anything.

They can text Google for definitions and facts. They can text Poll Everywhere with responses to classroom questions so that I can gather formative assessment results. They can use timers for labs.

And if I wanted every child to respond to individual questions, I’ll bet that the students with unlimited text plans—and their parents—would be more than happy to let student with no cell phones use theirs as long as I explained what we were doing and why it mattered. Who is going to argue about sharing a few extra texts when you have an unlimited plan?

I guess what I’m saying is that the majority of teachers will spend the majority of their careers working in classrooms that are under-supplied.

Take my school—which is in an affluent suburb—as an example: The budget for our entire science department—which serves almost 400 students and has to cover consumables for the labs that we like to teach—is $600 in a good year, less in most.

I’ve got one working computer in my room. My academic team—-which includes about 120 sixth-graders—-has close to 70 “working computers” in their lockers that we’re not allowed to use because cell phones are banned during the school day—a policy that is really common in middle and high schools everywhere.

That’s got to change—-especially if people are as hell bent as they say they are to hold teachers accountable for student performance.

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, achievement gap, digital-divide, Mobile Learning

Can a Smart Phone Program Really Close the Achievement Gap?

March 29, 2011 | 11:00 AM | By
Students from different geographic regions communicate socially, but also to help each other achieve the common goal of succeeding at Algebra 1.

Flickr: from_ko

When asked what tech tools students would like to use in learning science and math, their reply was no surprise: “They said they wanted something that would utilize social networking technology — something portable. Overwhelmingly, they wanted to use a smart phone,” said Project K-Nect founder and director Shawn Gross about his interview with  Washington, D.C. area- kids five years ago.

“Students told us that the subject matter was too abstract, there wasn’t enough [real-world] application, that they were having difficulty with the instructional methods. They thought technology might be a way to change that,” says Gross.

With that directive in mind, Project K-Nect’s social-media-based curriculum combines project and collaborative learning with new media learning for the 3,000 high schoolers in three states who currently participate.

The initial goal of the nonprofit — launched in North Carolina in 2007 with the support of Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach Initiative and other organizations and now also in place in Ohio and Virginia — was to increase student performance in STEM subjects, particularly in low-income areas. The requirement, therefore, for Project K-Nect’s participating schools, is that at least 50 percent of the student body qualify for free or reduced lunch.

“The majority of the students we started with in 2007-2008 school year went on to take an AP Calculus course or are currently enrolled in AP Statistics.”

Do smart phones help low-income, at-risk student populations learn math? Yes, most definitely, says Gross. The majority of participating students scored 20 percent higher on standardized tests than their peers in the same school and 30 to 40 percent higher than students in the district and state after a single year. (Click here to see a full research report on the program in Onslow County, North Carolina).

But for very high-risk students — such as those who are homeless or are attending school primarily for a free lunch — the technology-integrated math class is not as likely beneficial, Gross says. There is a lot more going on in that student’s life than academia, and curriculum alone won’t change that.

“It’s hard to just say ‘at-risk students,’ — there are different categories of at-risk students,” he says. “The bottom line is we see increased student achievement and engagement because this is a media that students feel comfortable utilizing. It’s an outlet to be able to express themselves in a totally different fashion.”

ON HOW IT WORKS:

“Initially, we partnered with Drexel University and Florida State University to create the curriculum. We built a comprehensive set of Algebra 1 resources: all the components related to instant messaging and blogging, assessment tools for teachers, supplemental activities, project-based learning components, problem sets, and cartoon animation. There are basically mini apps for every unit of instruction that get pushed out to a student’s device.

Teachers speak for 10 or 15 minutes about the fundamentals of the unit and give some instruction, then pass it to students who work in teams to create videos that describe the steps students need to take to arrive at proficiency [in Algebra 1]. Then, teachers ask the kids to apply the math to something. They post the videos up into the blogs [that all Project K-Nect's participating students share]. When they run into stumbling blocks they create a video and tag it with ‘SOS.’ One of the schools will pick up an SOS tag within a matter of minutes and will respond back, either using instant messaging or a video response.

[Visit Project K-Nect's blog to see example videos of what students are doing.]

WHY IT WORKS:

“Social networking is heavily questioned by adults, so at first, no one thought students were going to be using blogs to actually do math. It turned out that those adults were dead wrong. Students from different geographic regions were communicating socially, sure, but they were also communicating to help each other to achieve this common goal of succeeding at Algebra 1. They were taking control of the learning process and creating personalized learning communities.

And what has been really dramatic are the changes in instructional strategies in the classroom. Teachers have gone from lecture-style textbooks to a completely different approach: It’s project-based learning design that they’re doing, now.

What’s surprising — in a good way — is that the majority of the students we started with in 2007-2008 school year went on to take an AP Calculus course or are currently enrolled in AP Statistics. In this district [Jacksonville, North Carolina], typically only about 2 percent of Algebra 1 students will go on to take AP math course. Now, those students are sitting in an AP class in their senior year.”

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, achievement gap, digital-divide, Mobile Learning, personalized learning, Project K-Nect, STEM

Can Video Games Help Close the Digital Divide?

March 23, 2011 | 10:54 AM | By

Applying African-American boys’ passion for sports video games toward building confidence in a learning environment.

Image credits: Betsy James DiSalvo, Glitch Game Testers and Georgia Institute of Technology

This fascinating article by Liz Losh on Digital Media & Learning looks at how video games as learning motivator can be a completely different experience for different cultures.

A recent report on educational achievement among young black males describes a “national catastrophe” in primary, secondary, and higher education that is reinforced by policy failures and funding shortfalls. “A Call for Change: The Social and Educational Factors Contributing to the Outcomes of Black Males in Urban Schools” uses data largely from the U.S. Department of Education to paint a grim picture of an achievement gap between black and white students, reinforcing the message of recent books like Pedro Noguera’s The Trouble with Black Boys: Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education.

“Game consoles often are the most powerful computational devices and the only Internet-enabled devices in our participants’ homes.”

While the Obama White House has become known for promoting video games as a way to teach science, technology, engineering, math, and as a method to promote healthier eating and exercise among kids with sedentary lifestyles and pop culture habits, often the Presidential message targeted to African-American urban youth emphasizes traditional print culture literacies in reading and writing. Researcher Betsy James DiSalvo from the Georgia Institute of Technology is taking a different approach to the achievement gap. Her work is focused on understanding the role that video games play in urban African-American youth culture.

DiSalvo engages African-American teenage boys with video game design and seeks to provide them intensive college and career counseling that “A Call for Change” argues they might not be getting in school despite a desperate need for intervention. She also takes advantage of the fact that video games can bridge the digital divide in African-American homes, because “game consoles often are the most powerful computational devices and the only Internet-enabled devices in our participants’ homes.”

UNUSUAL APPROACH

Unlike other after-school programs with technology labs, DiSalvo’s “Glitch Game Testers” treats students as paid employees rather than charity cases. Participants have part-time jobs during the school year and full-time jobs during the summer that provide economic as well as educational incentives to pursue careers in computer science and other STEM-related fields. The program makes a long-term commitment to mentoring and economic support and tries to tailor services around stated needs. According to DiSalvo, other programs “parachute-in” with a rescue mentality that shows little respect for existing attitudes in African-American communities.

“Going to a whole classroom of people and assuming that you will find something that everyone likes” is naïve. You have to think about the culture that people come from first.”

DiSalvo has come up with a pragmatic series of solutions designed around symbiotic relationships between corporate products and consumer populations to foster STEM learning around sports video games that are usually not seen as particularly educational. She recruits Atlanta-area youth attending schools that are 99% African-American and where most students are well below the poverty line as play testers for commercial video game companies to search for bugs in new video games. Local mentors from Georgia Tech and historically black Morehouse College are also part of the Glitch Game Testers team and serve as both coaches and role models.

In her work, DiSalvo finds that video game play practices such as “hacking, cheating, and modding,” which provide powerful informal learning practices among self-described “geeks” destined for careers in technology, are often treated with disdain by African-American teenagers. For many black urban youth, DiSalvo says, their notions of masculinity are defined by codes of idealized sportsmanship and pure physical embodiment, rather than the so-called “hacker ethic” that emphasizes subverting systems and authority.

GENDER, IDENTITY AND TECHNOLOGY

DiSalvo’s advisor, Professor Amy Bruckman, has been known for her research on gender and computer gaming that stretches back for more than a decade. (Bruckman also wrote seminal essays questioning cyber-utopianism that were written in the nineties, such as “Finding One’s Own in Cyberspace” and “Cyberspace is Not Disneyland“).

In an interview for DML Central, Bruckman praises DiSalvo’s work because it is “specifically targeting African-American teenage boys” in a larger research environment in which the discussion about gender and technology has often been focused on “women and this, and women and that” without enough serious research on masculinity and how “cultural groups have unique challenges.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Teaching With Tech, achievement gap, digital media, digital-divide, video games