Want to be smarter? Heredity is not the barrier you might think it is, says University of Michigan social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, PhD. After analyzing decades of intelligence research, Nisbett maintains that past studies give too much credit to heritability’s role in intelligence. Culture, social class and education, he argues, matter more, and explain racial gaps in IQ.
++++++++++++++++
What’s The Difference Between Children’s Books In China And The U.S.?
psychologist Cecilia Cheung, a professor at University of California Riverside.
Cheung notes that children in China consistently score higher on academic tests compared to children in the U.S. and Mexico. But she says more research is needed to determine how much of that is due to the storybooks or even to the larger differences in cultural values that the books reflect. Other completely unrelated factors, such as different teaching techniques could be at work.
In the meantime, Cheung says her study suggests all three cultures might have something to learn from each other.
For instance American parents might want to take a cue from Chinese storybooks and supplement their children’s reading with more tales that promote a view of intelligence as changeable.
After all, says Cheung, if you think intelligence is gained through effort, then when you’re confronted with a challenge or even an outright failure, “you just put more effort into it. You try to learn from the experience and you think about different ways of approaching the problem rather than saying, ‘No, I’m just not smart and I’m just going to give up right away.'”
Managing projects is the most common task instructional designers undertake during their days, followed by technology and pedagogical training. Their biggest obstacle to success on the job is faculty resistance. The most important expertise they possess as a whole is the ability to learn new technologies, followed by project management and learning science or theory. Their favorite tools to work with are Camtasia and Adobe products; their least-favorite are Blackboard and learning management systems in general.
Consider adding more resources in the area of instructional design. If that isn’t possible, at least consider involving instructional designers “early” and “often” during technology transitions.”
“Incentivize” faculty to work with instructional designers “from the get-go” in order to help them learn how to engage with their students and expand class time through the use of online tools.
Technology providers should work closely with instructional designers in the selection of digital tools.
p. 4 Graph: median number of instructional designers by type of institution. According to the graph, SCSU must have between 3 and 16 instructional designers.
p. 10.“While a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ can get by in instructional design, the best instructional designers are ‘aces-of-many-trades’,with authentic experience and training in all aspects of the process.”
p. 12“Management choose[s] tools that are cheap and never ask[s] about integration or accessibility.Then we spend enormous amounts of time trying to get them to work.”
Instruct students to include a brief memo of guidance with the work they would like others to review. The memo includes two components: a context paragraph and a list of questions.
Recommendations for Revitalizing the Student Peer Review Process
Have a candid discussion about students’ experiences with peer review.
Emphasize the broad range of peer review.
Make students accountable for accurate, useful feedback.
Model these practices in your feedback to students.
Require students to write memos when they ask for your feedback.
Every professional needs feedback to succeed in their work. These skills can set the foundation for how to ask for, receive, and provide useful feedback.
References
Simmons, J. (May 2003). Responders are taught, not born. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy46(8), 684–693.
VanDeWeghe, R. (September 2004). “Awesome, dude!”: Responding helpfully to peer writing. English Journal 94(1), 95–99.
After surveying more than 4,650 educators, we learned that teachers are essentially trying to do three things with data—each of which technology can dramatically improve:
The U.S. Department of Education has increasingly encouraged and funded states to collect and analyze information about students: grades, state test scores, attendance, behavior, lateness, graduation rates and school climate measures like surveys of student engagement.
The argument in favor of all this is that the more we know about how students are doing, the better we can target instruction and other interventions. And sharing that information with parents and the community at large is crucial. It can motivate big changes.
what might be lost when schools focus too much on data. Here are five arguments against the excesses of data-driven instruction.
The National Education Policy Center releases annual reports on commercialization and marketing in public schools. In its most recent report in May, researchers there raised concerns about targeted marketing to students using computers for schoolwork and homework. Companies like Google pledge not to track the content of schoolwork for the purposes of advertising. But in reality these boundaries can be a lot more porous. For example, a high school student profiled in the NEPC report often consulted commercial programs like dictionary.com and Sparknotes: “Once when she had been looking at shoes, she mentioned, an ad for shoes appeared in the middle of a Sparknotes chapter summary.”
4) Missing What Data Can’t Capture
Computer systems are most comfortable recording and analyzing quantifiable, structured data. The number of absences in a semester, say; or a three-digit score on a multiple-choice test that can be graded by machine, where every question has just one right answer.
5) Exposing Students’ “Permanent Records”
In the past few years several states have passed laws banning employers from looking at the credit reports of job applicants. Employers want people who are reliable and responsible. But privacy advocates argue that a past medical issue or even a bankruptcy shouldn’t unfairly dun a person who needs a fresh start.
There are two types of Lexile measures: a person’s reading ability and the text’s difficulty. Students who are tested against state standards receive a Lexile reader measure from the Kansas Reading Assessment. Books and other texts receive a Lexile text measure from a MetaMetrics software tool called the Lexile Analyzer, which describes the book’s reading demand or complexity. When used together, the two measures are intended to help match a reader with reading material that is at an appropriate difficulty or will at least help give an idea of how well a reader should comprehend text. The reader should encounter some level of difficulty with the text, but not enough to get frustrated. The Lexile reader measure is used to monitor reader progress.
My note: is this another way / attempt to replace humans as educators? Or it is a supplemental approach to improve students’ reading abilities.
