I can't remember which of my Facebook friends the other day recommended this article, but I'm glad I read it. I read John Hattie's book Visible Learning a few years ago on the recommendation of a school board candidate (who succeeded in getting elected) in my local public school district.
As an observer of my children's learning in the local public high school (I have mostly been a homeschooler, but my second son and third son have recently been enrolled in the local high school), I see that "formative assessment" (testing learners on material they are only beginning to learn does indeed seem to be a very helpful way to prompt learners to learn more. I expect to do a lot of formative assessment for the new students I will have the week after next at a school where I am about to begin classroom teaching of middle school mathematics during the regular school day.
I have read another book by Hattie, co-authored with Richard Fletcher, called Intelligence and Intelligence Testing, which is also quite good. Those of you who find this article intriguing and would like to learn more about ideas that work in education are likely to enjoy reading the longer linked paper by John Hattie, "What Doesn't Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction,"[1] which provides more details on the ideas he thinks work and what other ideas don't work and why.
They felt like trying out the local high school. That has had some distinct trade-offs. The local high school is on an improving trend line, so it has been a better experience for my third son than it was for my second, who is now done there and about to start his university studies.
The world already has a proven educational model that works, the quarterly college system. Three 5-credit classes per day.
I wouldn't suggest it for grade school, but at least for high school, why not? No grade levels, you have 3 quarters (and use quarters, semesters are just a cost saving measure) per regular year, 4 years.
(FWIW, a quarter of math in a community college is roughly a year in high school.)
Tell students that they have 3 quarters of math to complete at minimum in 4 years. If they fail one quarter, there is lots of time to take it again. Why have the idea of grade levels at all?
Remove 80% of responsibility from teachers for passing or failing, remove all standardized tests, and let's go to a model that we know works.
Edit: To clarify, I am not suggesting we import the ivy league "Make half the students drop out through stress" system. I am proposing a quarterly system of learning where students are free to take the level of course work that is most appropriate to their needs.
1/2 students quit after the first year. 1/2 those left over never complete. yeah it works. the reason we have the modern schooling system is because most apes of our species are not meant for school or jobs. it's a way of training them for both.
> 1/2 students quit after the first year. 1/2 those left over never complete.
For what reasons though?
I am advocating a more community college model, smaller introductory class sizes, with a faster paced, but shorter term curriculums, that don't hurt as much if any one particular course is failed. A more targeted model than "grade level".
Traditional universities have a high attrition rate not just due to course work, there is a huge cultural shift, a complete loss of one's traditional support network, a lack of structure that used to be imposed by parents, and many new opportunities for distraction.
I'm not proposing we add any of that to high school! :)
I'm all for doing what works. What data tend to show that college education works better than secondary education or primary education? (For a demonstration of having received a college education, what data tend to show THE OPPOSITE, which all thinking people have to consider when deciding what policies to support?) I note that you say that your model might not work for grade school. If so, is there something else we can do at the margins to improve primary education by a little or by a lot?
> If so, is there something else we can do at the margins to improve primary education by a little or by a lot?
One thing we have done that is completely backwards is mainstreaming class rooms, for both special needs and gifted students.
I remember when I was in 1st grade, students who read a little bit slower where in a different reading group from students who read at normal speed versus students who read above expectation.
Students would get pulled out per curriculum type to different classes.
This continued in middle school, where there were 4 levels of math class (remedial, normal, and two levels of advanced), 2 levels of English and 2 levels of history. (The special needs program was separate, and I am not sure how remedial English or History worked)
This type of system works, but it is more costly and harder to manage if we treat it as a "one off".
The college model has a forced failure system. The competition model should have no place in educating children who will become working, tax paying, and voting adult citizens.
Most large universities also have their intro courses taught in huge lecture halls with 100+ students. Yeah that system fails, so don't do it.
But take the good parts. Small focused targeted quarterly classes that students can retake if they fail.
Having classes that last an entire school year (or even half a school year) is overkill.
I also like that with the quarter system in college, students typically take three 5-credit classes. That is 3 hours of instructional time per day, which at a good pace in class, is about the max an average person can learn.
With 6 hours of class instructional time, teachers have to "burn" some of that time so students don't burn out. I could not imagine sitting through 6 hours of college lectures per day, it'd be insane, because every minute spent in class is productive.
Compare that to High School, where students spend a LOT of time on busy work, or watching films, or reading entire chapters of a book out loud.
Want a recipe for success? Make a class schedule that is the equivalent of 15 college credits per quarter. 3 hours of lecture per day, intersperse lectures with dedicated study time, let students immediately apply what they just learned to solve problems.
Students will get to learn more per class, and have better adherence to homework policies.
I'm referring to "the curve" when I say forced failure. Grading models at public and private universities require that x% of students receive a failing grade. The goal is not to teach the student to be knowledgeable of subject X but to rather weed out those who do not cross a subjective proficiency threshold.
> I'm referring to "the curve" when I say forced failure. Grading models at public and private universities require that x% of students receive a failing grade. The goal is not to teach the student to be knowledgeable of subject X but to rather weed out those who do not cross a subjective proficiency threshold.
This varies by university and department.
In theory you should always have a performance curve if you have a large enough sample size.
This does not mean that 1 standard deviation away has to fail.
It does mean that some students will do better than others. You can set performance targets however you want, if we desire to create an education system that supports students so that -2σ can still perform at a competent level, well you have a system that supports 97.6% of students. (Although I'd actually say that performance target is somewhat unrealistic for a country in which only a mid 80% of students currently graduate high school.)
Universities don't have the resources, time, or motivation, to educate 97% of the population, so they are going to put policies in place such as "more than -1σ and you fail out".
There is no need to employ that en-masse to all education!
I had this basic system in high school, although it was semesters. You had to make sure that the courses you wanted were available, made more difficult for me because I decided to finish a 5 year program in 4 years (we went up to grade 13 back then). Note that this was in Canada.
We had a variant of this system where I went to school. It was enjoyable as it yielded a lot of free time and autonomy (even if taking an above average number of classes) but it's hard to say whether it had any meaningful impact on overall student performance. My school district was also reasonably wealthy, so there weren't a lot of people failing out or performing very poorly to begin with.
Actually, the world has a quite good data on what works for training. The FAA has very clear standards as to how classes teaching aviation information should be structured.
Great article and food for thought as politicians and education reformers push school vouchers, Common Core, union-busting, etc., and other theories without really measuring, testing or optimizing the option's ROI. The idea has been "well let's just try something new" without rhyme or reason.
> Hattie argues that if parents had the right to select the best teacher in a given school, that could truly be empowering. It would also be challenging to implement.
Challenging is an understatement. I suggested that once, and my what blowback I got!
Because that many students can't all be assigned to the same teacher? Because it pushes people towards making choices based on internal details vs outcomes?
There's one professor I was a TA for who was loved by the students. He taught the course more like a high school physics course than a university course. But, when his students got to higher level physics courses, they were lacking in the basic skills taught in those courses so we'd have to spend extra time covering that material. Also, to break them of bad habits they had. He was the only professor to directly contradict me in front of the students. I had been marking like I had in other courses (he hadn't given any guidelines) and students complained so he made me re-grade everything, totally undercutting me in front of them. He should have let the assignment mark stand and change the marking going forward.
I have no doubt that students would have preferred that professor, but their skills and knowledge would suffer from that choice. Taking the easy road will catch up to you eventually.
My favorite EE professor, in hindsight, was the one that had quizzes every week, and only semi-scheduled. Friends who had gone through her course before warned me about how 'awful and strict' she was.
At the time, I hated it, until I realized come the final that I'd never been permitted to slack off and so needed to do much less to get myself ready for it.
One of my favourite professors in the department was a prof who had a review on RateMyProfessors.ca as "I'd say she worships Satan, but I think Satan worships her." She was a tough but fair prof and generally only got respect from her students in her upper year elective classes.
She's fairly short and she's had some terrible disrespect from students in the past. She had a student who preceded to lecture her on how to set a midterm because they had taught swimming lessons (after they had got their midterm back and done poorly). She's even had death threats from students who were upset with her. None of this would have happened with my PhD supervisor who was about 6'5" and intimidated almost every student.
I'm sure there'll be parents who pick the "easy A" teacher, and parents who pick the "hard but worth it" teacher, and parents who pick the "most charming" teacher, "has a knack for working with challenging kids" teacher, etc.
Not every student chooses the easy road. Some of them want to learn the stuff and not waste their time. At Caltech, some of the toughest classes were the most popular.
As a former professor I used to have colleagues like this. My students would come in to my classes totally ignorant of basic material they needed to know. The missing material was in the course, but these colleagues would just not teach it because the students didn’t like it. The students all thought these professors were fantastic because they had such interesting lectures (only teach the fun stuff) and the work was so easy (give every one an A for being able to fog a mirror). That the students didn’t learn anything was just an unfortunate side effect.
>Taking the easy road will catch up to you eventually.
I know a math professor who reminds me of your physics prof. He gets the best ratings on ratemyprof, his classes always fill up, and he has the highest average grades in his department. He retired at the end of last semester after only 35 years. The college's administrators loved him as much as the students, even though the students were probably worse at any kind of math after taking his course(s).
So, how do you deal with the people who didn't get their choice?
We already know that this kind of thing doesn't work from universities. Put a known poor professor into a required class and all the students will simply skip that class that semester and flood the one the next semester and cause your scheduling to be completely screwed up.
I knew a university that once had to answer to an accreditation board for this. Not fun.
The article mentions a comparison of spending and effect on outcome. Establishing that there seems to be a decided minimum effort required to educate a child to any degree; but that past that point there are examples of other countries having /more/ success with less funding spent (than the US).
I think more granularity of data in that statistic would be useful; is this money actually being spent on the child or is it instead being squandered within a bureaucratic structure? Or does some externality that is a cost in one model but not the other left out of view?
I've long been fascinated by what does and doesn't work in classrooms. I'm a graduate student in mathematics and I end up teaching elementary calculus courses to undergrads. This also means that I tend to think about what does and doesn't work in college classrooms.
Two things stuck out to me in this article.
Firstly, Hattie says "Holding students back a grade really does hold students back, with an effect of -0.16." What does this actually mean? Does this mean that at graduation, these students perform 1/6 of a standard deviation below their peers? I'd be more interested if we were also presented with the alternative: how do students who didn't meet whatever minimal standards for grade advancement but were advanced anyway (and thus could have been held back a year, but were not) perform? As an early college math instructor, I'm very familiar with students who are incapable of performing mathematical operations from classes which they've previously passed.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder about what it means to perform at some number of standard deviations above or below others. Is this based on standardized test performance?
The second thing I wonder is related. As an alternative to the common policy of "Achievement Standards", he suggests "The alternative: a focus on growth and progress for each student, no matter where he or she starts." How might one implement this?
For instance, suppose Albert and Beth are entering basic 6th grade math. Beth performs really well and for whatever reason Albert is very distracted and learns almost nothing. The next year rolls around, and Albert and Beth are entering basic 7th grade math. The teacher cannot teach them the exact same, as Albert doesn't understand prerequisite ideas. Is the teacher to instruct normally and then devote additional time to Albert, trying to incrementally increase his understanding? Does Hattie actually advocate Montessori-style schools with self-paced work? Perhaps schools should have a lowest-tier math class which is entirely based on individual students instead of central instruction? Or in this case, should Albert have been kept back a year?
In many other ways, I like and/or understand Hattie's approach and ideas.
Alt School is shooting for personalized teaching. That's where smaller class sizes might help. Apparently each students has a "feed" of lessons to work through.
> I'd be more interested if we were also presented with the alternative: how do students who didn't meet whatever minimal standards for grade advancement but were advanced anyway (and thus could have been held back a year, but were not) perform?
From [retention]:
That is, the groups of non-promoted/retained students
scored .15 to .26 standard deviation units lower than
the promoted comparison groups on the various outcome
measures.
So it does sound like the comparison was between two groups of students that didn't meet standards.
This does make me wonder how large the opposite effect is... I had the chance as a kid to take higher level math classes at my school, but was so intimidated by the thought of not being with my peers (since Kindergarten.. small school) that I refused.
> The second thing I wonder is related. As an alternative to the common policy of "Achievement Standards", he suggests "The alternative: a focus on growth and progress for each student, no matter where he or she starts." How might one implement this?
One alternative I heard of is called "flipped classrooms". Instead of a teacher delivering a lecture and then the students doing homework at home, the students learn the material at home (via video or textbook) and then do their homework in school, where they can have the teacher give personalized instruction and help.
At a college level it's kinda like Oxford and Cambridge's tutor system.
I don't get why Americans have to reinvent the wheel here. There are countries in the world (Finland, Singapore...) who have public education figured out. Just put aside your pride and do what they do. It involves less testing, hiring and retaining better teachers, and making sure kids are not in poor broken homes.
> Income equality isn't "hard" if you look at it logically versus emotionally. Raise taxes, ensure a proper social safety net, widen the middle class.
Income equality is hard when you start tracing where the income actually comes from. Furthermore, the parent said "broken homes," not merely income inequality. A poor household can still be a stable and positive environment.
It might have to do with the difficulty of changing from a large country with somewhat varied standards of living, into a small relatively uniformly rich country.
And I suppose that trying to impose uniform policies on a not-culturally-uniform group doesn't help either, especially when you add in hypersensitivity and the polarization that comes from everyone not knowing everyone else.
The funny thing is that Finland and Singapore are not doing the same thing.
Both select for teachers of above average intelligence but the way those teachers are taught is very different.
The kids in poor broken homes thing is something Finland is having more of, due to recent not-so-sensible immigration. There's very little one can do about it without draconian measures -- handing out money doesn't help.
In all honesty, if you run an American school exactly like in the US, with American teachers, course material, homework etc, and put it in Finland and have local kids attend, guess what happens. You get much better outcomes than in the US and probably pretty similar to outcomes in Finland.
I do agree with you though, there's things that can be learned from these countries with respect to things like demanding more of teachers (master's degrees) and rewarding teachers more (not just decent, but great salaries which involves seeing teachers like you see doctors). That makes a lot of sense. Our requirements and rewards for doctors are a lot higher, despite the fact every single child is raised and educated for half of every working day's waking hours for more than a decade, teachers have absolutely insane levels of influence on something many of us value to extreme levels (children), in Finland resources are allocated accordingly, in the US not always. So I agree there, but I still think differences between e.g. Finland and the US have much more to do with your last point: making sure kids aren't in poor broken homes, which isn't a direct educational policy theme and requires mostly deep socioeconomic policy changes outside of education.
Akamai has a huge financial stake in the Internet, so do you ignore their "State of the Internet" reports? By virtue of Pearson's business they also have huge systematic insight into the education system. Not worth dismissing the results of the study simply based on that association.
There is no problem in education. Our only problem is that we keep lying to ourselves about it. Not all children are equally gifted. Not all _groups_ of children are equally gifted. The only reason we have such a hard time tackling with contemporary social problems is that their real solutions are at odds with political correctness.
The challenging task isn't coming up with solutions that will help, but finding solutions that will both help and not violate certain taboos.
Never in all of history has society ever benefited from lying to itself.
Exactly what I would have said. Most of my friends and family are teachers and the stupidity of ideas like "no child left behind"..."teach to the lowest common denominator"...are the kind of complaints I have been hearing about for quite some time.
Stop with the Orwellian political correctness and teach kids the level they are capable of. End of story.
> Not all children are equally gifted. Not all _groups_ of children are equally gifted. The only reason we have such a hard time tackling with contemporary social problems is that their real solutions are at odds with political correctness.
Not really. Most of the solutions to contemporary social problems are quite politically correct.
Universal healthcare. Decent minimum wages. Birth control. Sex education. Ending the drug war. Ending the criminalization of victimless crimes.
We have the data on many of these things. We know what works. However, it is politically unpalatable to a significant subsection of the country.
Its a list of what doesn't work and recommendations to counter them. It is giving options for what can work, but isn't practiced enough to be certain of.
Also, circumstances are different everywhere, so you can't just solve everything with an easy answer.
If you're interested in education policy and research, the Festival of Education is a great event to hear many of the leading thinkers. This year, as well as this report being given out in hard copy, we had Dylan Wiliam (referenced in the NPR article), Carol Dweck, Ken Robinson and many others speak. A definite English flavour but plenty that's entirely transferable.
One of my favorite books from the last few years is "The Smartest Kids in the World." The reporter visits three countries that do very well on the international PISA test, and talks about what can indeed work in the US and other countries.
She (and the locals) are very negative about South Korea, but very positive about Poland and Finland. And she points out that all three countries use a fraction of the budget that the US does on education, with much better results.
She also points to the fact that outside of the United States, extracurricular activities -- not to mention sports -- are not a part of the school curriculum. If you want to play basketball, then that's great, but don't expect your high school to care about it, because their job is to worry about your education, not sports.
I have a PhD in learning sciences (roughly "technology and education"), live in Israel, and have three children. And the way that the schools here run depresses me more each year. As the book points out, and as we probably already know, the forces in charge of schools (e.g., politicians, teacher unions, and taxpayers) are basically aligned against any real reform. Gimmicks such as technology look great, but are virtually useless -- a form of "education theater," as it were.
Israelis talk nonstop about class sizes, but I think that a much bigger problem is that we pay our teachers nothing, and give them no respect or power -- and are then surprised that the quality of teachers has declined precipitously.
From everything I can tell, we would do well to give teachers massive salary increases, then make it hard to become a teacher and easy to fire bad ones. Then give the teachers huge freedom to do what they want. And yes, this will cost money (which the taxpayers don't want to hear), but on balance it seems to work for most people, most of the time.
As an Israeli what effect do you think the rise of religious fundamentalism has had on education outcomes? I may be wrong, but I am under the impression that a large percentage of school age children are born into fundamentalist families that do not value a secular education.
There are two types of religious schools: One (which my children attend) requires English, math, and other subjects. I have criticisms of this school system, for sure. But there's no doubt that they generally teach their students secular subjects that'll allow students to get jobs.
A far bigger problem is indeed the "ultra-Orthodox," or "haredi," school system, in Israel, which is exempt from the core curriculum, or any real oversight by the education ministry. This is a tragedy -- one could say, of biblical proportions. These children are purposely getting an education that will not allow them to get a good job when they grow up. Many young Israelis who go through bad school systems get a second chance at a good job when they join the army, at the age of 18, and learn some practical skills -- but haredi children don't join the army, either.
Meaning that at the age of 18, they get married and start to have (large) families, basically guaranteeing that their families will be poor. And their children then go to such schools, which repeats the cycle.
It's tragic for the students, and tragic for the country. And the fact that the country allows this to happen is ridiculous, in my opinion. But it also reflects the sad fact that haredi (ultra-Orthodox) political parties are often needed to make a coalition in our parliament (the Knesset). Allowing such schools to exist, by removing regulations and giving them additional money, is one of the first demands that the haredi parties make to join the coalition.
I know that this will change at some point, because it must. But for now, it boggles my mind and boils my blood.
"From everything I can tell, we would do well to give teachers massive salary increases, then make it hard to become a teacher and easy to fire bad ones. Then give the teachers huge freedom to do what they want. And yes, this will cost money (which the taxpayers don't want to hear), but on balance it seems to work for most people, most of the time."
It may not be that expensive, if class sizes are not that important you can have fewer teachers. The problem (in the US) is that the teacher's unions are generally against performance based pay, teacher evaluations and firing bad teachers.
> The problem (in the US) is that the teacher's unions are generally against performance based pay, teacher evaluations and firing bad teachers.
For good reason: who gets to make those decisions? Parents? Imagine being a biology or history teacher in the deep South. Children? We already have data that the most effective teachers are liked least. Administration? Are those older teachers really poor are they just expensive? Are those "merit" bonuses going to the best teacher or to the one who volunteered to coach the basketball team?
The last time a teacher evaluation got implemented in Pennsylvania, they dropped it in a hurry because too many teachers couldn't pass it and they were going to have to pay WAY more to import teachers who could.
As has been pointed out previously, firing a genuinely bad teacher is generally straightforward and the procedure is well-documented. However, the administration doesn't want to put in the time or paperwork to do it. And, maybe, just maybe, that administration that's whining about firing and the overbearing paperwork really doesn't have a case and simply wants rid of the teacher for political reasons.
This is a sticky problem, no doubt. But we need to find a way to get rid of bad teachers.
Right now, in both the US and Israel (and perhaps other countries), we're in an extreme and untenable situation, in which bad teachers cannot be fired. In the elementary school that my children attended (and that my son still attends), bad teachers were sent off to teach computers. Or science. And so forth. You can imagine what this tells the children, the parents, and the teachers about how much we value these subjects.
There was a New Yorker story a few years ago that described how bad teachers couldn't be fired... and thus were sent to a building every day, where they checked in and did literally nothing all day. Yes, they received their full salary and benefits in exchange for doing literally nothing.
I'm guessing that a reasonable alternative is to have some sort of weighted system, in which the principal's evaluation, parents' complaints, and student performance all count toward whether a teacher can be fired. The biggest thing should probably be the principal's evaluation, but perhaps if a teacher gets fired, they can get another job, in a different school -- but perhaps the parents' evaluations and the students' performance can be used to determine how many other schools they can go to before being kicked out of the system entirely.
> The last time a teacher evaluation got implemented in Pennsylvania, they dropped it in a hurry because
> too many teachers couldn't pass it and they were going to have to pay WAY more to import teachers who
> could.
This is perhaps the most important point: Good teachers need to be paid well. They need incentive to become teachers, and to remain teachers. Which means that people will have to pay a fair amount in order to get a good education. In the US, this will mean taxes have to go up, which is a recipe for political suicide. In Israel, this means taking money away from other things in the education ministry (since we already pay, per capita, more for schooling than most European countries).
I don't think the money issue is a tough sell, if you can demonstrate high returns on the investment. As it is, the US spends more per student than everyone else, but gets mediocre results, so people are not confident that even more spending is going to be worth it.
I think the easiest first step is to spend more on teachers within the current budgets.
You can factor in the opinions of parents, students, fellow teachers, admin, as well as test score improvements, college admissions etc.
I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.
At my high school we had a mix of good & bad, as you'd expect. Everyone knew which teachers knew their subject, could communicate well, was more dedicated etc. Some of the most engaging teachers were the least liked because they graded harder, but if you had a rubric that included "grades fairly", "not boring" etc, students would be able to correctly assess them.
Of course some would be dishonest, but noise will cancel itself out, by and large.
> I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.
You significantly overestimate the goodwill of everybody involved.
I had a butch, lesbian English teacher. Most of the community had "issues". Students hated her because she was a ferocious grader. Without tenure, she would have been gone.
However, her results were amazing. If you took her AP English class and got a B or above, you were getting a 5 on the AP exam.
So, what counts? Community? Administration? Parents? Students? How do you square the fact that everybody wanted her gone, but her results were stellar?
She was extremely effective. Her students knew English and English Literature very well after her class. They tended to win writing awards as well as stomp the AP test flat. However, very few students and parents liked her (oddly, I did, but my father was an English teacher so I had already been brainwashed that English wasn't easy and to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite), and, consequently, neither did the administration as they had to deal with complaints.
She's clearly a domain expert and way more competent at teaching English than anybody judging her. Why do you think that the community at large has any competence to judge her as a teacher? Of course, many of her students were were much happier with her once they hit college and found that composition was easy, but, unfortunately, very few of them ever came back to the area.
The high-tech equivalent is allowing an HR person on your engineering interview loop (never do this, by the way). Since they can't judge them on engineering, they will wind up rejecting candidates based upon their handshake, their clothes, or a hundred other things completely irrelevant to being an engineer.
Pay teachers based on performance and you eliminate the incentive for them to challenge the students. There would be a certain "classroom management" style of teaching that would become dominant and really force out the little bit of engaging and challenging content left in there.
The Finish model seems to be the best. Introduce this competitive element not on the job but on the way to the job. Pay for a teacher's education, right up to a required Masters degree, and attract ambitious bright young minds to the profession. Combine that with paid time in which teachers must consult with each other regarding in need individuals so as to handle disturbances and distractions from learning as best as possible. Toss in a breakfast program while you're at it and lets light up some young minds!
Precisely: Part of Finland's genius was in realizing that you can't easily get rid of bad teachers. So they created big incentives for potentially good teachers to consider teaching, and blocked potentially bad teachers from entering.
For example, they shut down teacher's colleges, and mandated a university degree for all teachers. This took political guts, but it has paid off.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadAs an observer of my children's learning in the local public high school (I have mostly been a homeschooler, but my second son and third son have recently been enrolled in the local high school), I see that "formative assessment" (testing learners on material they are only beginning to learn does indeed seem to be a very helpful way to prompt learners to learn more. I expect to do a lot of formative assessment for the new students I will have the week after next at a school where I am about to begin classroom teaching of middle school mathematics during the regular school day.
I have read another book by Hattie, co-authored with Richard Fletcher, called Intelligence and Intelligence Testing, which is also quite good. Those of you who find this article intriguing and would like to learn more about ideas that work in education are likely to enjoy reading the longer linked paper by John Hattie, "What Doesn't Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction,"[1] which provides more details on the ideas he thinks work and what other ideas don't work and why.
[1] https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html
Just curious, but why the change? (if not due to Life)
Am I missing something? This PDF was very long on political rhetoric and short on actual concrete advice to improve things.
I wouldn't suggest it for grade school, but at least for high school, why not? No grade levels, you have 3 quarters (and use quarters, semesters are just a cost saving measure) per regular year, 4 years.
(FWIW, a quarter of math in a community college is roughly a year in high school.)
Tell students that they have 3 quarters of math to complete at minimum in 4 years. If they fail one quarter, there is lots of time to take it again. Why have the idea of grade levels at all?
Remove 80% of responsibility from teachers for passing or failing, remove all standardized tests, and let's go to a model that we know works.
Edit: To clarify, I am not suggesting we import the ivy league "Make half the students drop out through stress" system. I am proposing a quarterly system of learning where students are free to take the level of course work that is most appropriate to their needs.
For what reasons though?
I am advocating a more community college model, smaller introductory class sizes, with a faster paced, but shorter term curriculums, that don't hurt as much if any one particular course is failed. A more targeted model than "grade level".
Traditional universities have a high attrition rate not just due to course work, there is a huge cultural shift, a complete loss of one's traditional support network, a lack of structure that used to be imposed by parents, and many new opportunities for distraction.
I'm not proposing we add any of that to high school! :)
I'm all for doing what works. What data tend to show that college education works better than secondary education or primary education? (For a demonstration of having received a college education, what data tend to show THE OPPOSITE, which all thinking people have to consider when deciding what policies to support?) I note that you say that your model might not work for grade school. If so, is there something else we can do at the margins to improve primary education by a little or by a lot?
One thing we have done that is completely backwards is mainstreaming class rooms, for both special needs and gifted students.
I remember when I was in 1st grade, students who read a little bit slower where in a different reading group from students who read at normal speed versus students who read above expectation.
Students would get pulled out per curriculum type to different classes.
This continued in middle school, where there were 4 levels of math class (remedial, normal, and two levels of advanced), 2 levels of English and 2 levels of history. (The special needs program was separate, and I am not sure how remedial English or History worked)
This type of system works, but it is more costly and harder to manage if we treat it as a "one off".
Only at the upper tiers of elite universities.
Most large universities also have their intro courses taught in huge lecture halls with 100+ students. Yeah that system fails, so don't do it.
But take the good parts. Small focused targeted quarterly classes that students can retake if they fail.
Having classes that last an entire school year (or even half a school year) is overkill.
I also like that with the quarter system in college, students typically take three 5-credit classes. That is 3 hours of instructional time per day, which at a good pace in class, is about the max an average person can learn.
With 6 hours of class instructional time, teachers have to "burn" some of that time so students don't burn out. I could not imagine sitting through 6 hours of college lectures per day, it'd be insane, because every minute spent in class is productive.
Compare that to High School, where students spend a LOT of time on busy work, or watching films, or reading entire chapters of a book out loud.
Want a recipe for success? Make a class schedule that is the equivalent of 15 college credits per quarter. 3 hours of lecture per day, intersperse lectures with dedicated study time, let students immediately apply what they just learned to solve problems.
Students will get to learn more per class, and have better adherence to homework policies.
This varies by university and department.
In theory you should always have a performance curve if you have a large enough sample size.
This does not mean that 1 standard deviation away has to fail.
It does mean that some students will do better than others. You can set performance targets however you want, if we desire to create an education system that supports students so that -2σ can still perform at a competent level, well you have a system that supports 97.6% of students. (Although I'd actually say that performance target is somewhat unrealistic for a country in which only a mid 80% of students currently graduate high school.)
Universities don't have the resources, time, or motivation, to educate 97% of the population, so they are going to put policies in place such as "more than -1σ and you fail out".
There is no need to employ that en-masse to all education!
Challenging is an understatement. I suggested that once, and my what blowback I got!
I have no doubt that students would have preferred that professor, but their skills and knowledge would suffer from that choice. Taking the easy road will catch up to you eventually.
At the time, I hated it, until I realized come the final that I'd never been permitted to slack off and so needed to do much less to get myself ready for it.
She's fairly short and she's had some terrible disrespect from students in the past. She had a student who preceded to lecture her on how to set a midterm because they had taught swimming lessons (after they had got their midterm back and done poorly). She's even had death threats from students who were upset with her. None of this would have happened with my PhD supervisor who was about 6'5" and intimidated almost every student.
Not every student chooses the easy road. Some of them want to learn the stuff and not waste their time. At Caltech, some of the toughest classes were the most popular.
I know a math professor who reminds me of your physics prof. He gets the best ratings on ratemyprof, his classes always fill up, and he has the highest average grades in his department. He retired at the end of last semester after only 35 years. The college's administrators loved him as much as the students, even though the students were probably worse at any kind of math after taking his course(s).
Even so, there are lots of reasonable and workable methods of allocating scarce resources.
> Because it pushes people towards making choices based on internal details vs outcomes?
I don't see how it pushes anyone. Parents would make choices based on what is important to them.
We already know that this kind of thing doesn't work from universities. Put a known poor professor into a required class and all the students will simply skip that class that semester and flood the one the next semester and cause your scheduling to be completely screwed up.
I knew a university that once had to answer to an accreditation board for this. Not fun.
Because there is hardly any topic more intricately entangled with politics and emotions.
I think more granularity of data in that statistic would be useful; is this money actually being spent on the child or is it instead being squandered within a bureaucratic structure? Or does some externality that is a cost in one model but not the other left out of view?
Two things stuck out to me in this article.
Firstly, Hattie says "Holding students back a grade really does hold students back, with an effect of -0.16." What does this actually mean? Does this mean that at graduation, these students perform 1/6 of a standard deviation below their peers? I'd be more interested if we were also presented with the alternative: how do students who didn't meet whatever minimal standards for grade advancement but were advanced anyway (and thus could have been held back a year, but were not) perform? As an early college math instructor, I'm very familiar with students who are incapable of performing mathematical operations from classes which they've previously passed.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder about what it means to perform at some number of standard deviations above or below others. Is this based on standardized test performance?
The second thing I wonder is related. As an alternative to the common policy of "Achievement Standards", he suggests "The alternative: a focus on growth and progress for each student, no matter where he or she starts." How might one implement this?
For instance, suppose Albert and Beth are entering basic 6th grade math. Beth performs really well and for whatever reason Albert is very distracted and learns almost nothing. The next year rolls around, and Albert and Beth are entering basic 7th grade math. The teacher cannot teach them the exact same, as Albert doesn't understand prerequisite ideas. Is the teacher to instruct normally and then devote additional time to Albert, trying to incrementally increase his understanding? Does Hattie actually advocate Montessori-style schools with self-paced work? Perhaps schools should have a lowest-tier math class which is entirely based on individual students instead of central instruction? Or in this case, should Albert have been kept back a year?
In many other ways, I like and/or understand Hattie's approach and ideas.
From [retention]:
So it does sound like the comparison was between two groups of students that didn't meet standards.This does make me wonder how large the opposite effect is... I had the chance as a kid to take higher level math classes at my school, but was so intimidated by the thought of not being with my peers (since Kindergarten.. small school) that I refused.
[retention]: http://intranet.niacc.edu/pres_copy(1)/ILC/The_Retention_Deb...
One alternative I heard of is called "flipped classrooms". Instead of a teacher delivering a lecture and then the students doing homework at home, the students learn the material at home (via video or textbook) and then do their homework in school, where they can have the teacher give personalized instruction and help.
At a college level it's kinda like Oxford and Cambridge's tutor system.
ah, hide the hard one at the end :)
Income equality isn't "hard" if you look at it logically versus emotionally. Raise taxes, ensure a proper social safety net, widen the middle class.
Then again, this is America. We try everything else first before the right way (apologies to Churchill).
Income equality is hard when you start tracing where the income actually comes from. Furthermore, the parent said "broken homes," not merely income inequality. A poor household can still be a stable and positive environment.
And I suppose that trying to impose uniform policies on a not-culturally-uniform group doesn't help either, especially when you add in hypersensitivity and the polarization that comes from everyone not knowing everyone else.
Both select for teachers of above average intelligence but the way those teachers are taught is very different.
The kids in poor broken homes thing is something Finland is having more of, due to recent not-so-sensible immigration. There's very little one can do about it without draconian measures -- handing out money doesn't help.
I do agree with you though, there's things that can be learned from these countries with respect to things like demanding more of teachers (master's degrees) and rewarding teachers more (not just decent, but great salaries which involves seeing teachers like you see doctors). That makes a lot of sense. Our requirements and rewards for doctors are a lot higher, despite the fact every single child is raised and educated for half of every working day's waking hours for more than a decade, teachers have absolutely insane levels of influence on something many of us value to extreme levels (children), in Finland resources are allocated accordingly, in the US not always. So I agree there, but I still think differences between e.g. Finland and the US have much more to do with your last point: making sure kids aren't in poor broken homes, which isn't a direct educational policy theme and requires mostly deep socioeconomic policy changes outside of education.
So the NPR piece is based on a publication from Pearson, who has a huge financial stake in the US education market.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-1150...
How curious.
If the publication is based on data and the method is open, the source doesn't really matter.
I'm going to assume they have an agenda and keep an eye out for it, but Pearson is not inherently anti-education.
The challenging task isn't coming up with solutions that will help, but finding solutions that will both help and not violate certain taboos.
Never in all of history has society ever benefited from lying to itself.
Stop with the Orwellian political correctness and teach kids the level they are capable of. End of story.
Not really. Most of the solutions to contemporary social problems are quite politically correct.
Universal healthcare. Decent minimum wages. Birth control. Sex education. Ending the drug war. Ending the criminalization of victimless crimes.
We have the data on many of these things. We know what works. However, it is politically unpalatable to a significant subsection of the country.
See the recent kerfuffle over thre Colorado teenage pregnancy reduction program (http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/04/30/colorado-republ...)
When a significant chunk of your people are willing to ignore the facts and reject something known to work, it's hard to make progress.
There's a definition of some of the terms here: http://visible-learning.org/glossary/
Also, circumstances are different everywhere, so you can't just solve everything with an easy answer.
http://www.festivalofeducation.com/
She (and the locals) are very negative about South Korea, but very positive about Poland and Finland. And she points out that all three countries use a fraction of the budget that the US does on education, with much better results.
She also points to the fact that outside of the United States, extracurricular activities -- not to mention sports -- are not a part of the school curriculum. If you want to play basketball, then that's great, but don't expect your high school to care about it, because their job is to worry about your education, not sports.
I have a PhD in learning sciences (roughly "technology and education"), live in Israel, and have three children. And the way that the schools here run depresses me more each year. As the book points out, and as we probably already know, the forces in charge of schools (e.g., politicians, teacher unions, and taxpayers) are basically aligned against any real reform. Gimmicks such as technology look great, but are virtually useless -- a form of "education theater," as it were.
Israelis talk nonstop about class sizes, but I think that a much bigger problem is that we pay our teachers nothing, and give them no respect or power -- and are then surprised that the quality of teachers has declined precipitously.
From everything I can tell, we would do well to give teachers massive salary increases, then make it hard to become a teacher and easy to fire bad ones. Then give the teachers huge freedom to do what they want. And yes, this will cost money (which the taxpayers don't want to hear), but on balance it seems to work for most people, most of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Israel#Educationa...
A far bigger problem is indeed the "ultra-Orthodox," or "haredi," school system, in Israel, which is exempt from the core curriculum, or any real oversight by the education ministry. This is a tragedy -- one could say, of biblical proportions. These children are purposely getting an education that will not allow them to get a good job when they grow up. Many young Israelis who go through bad school systems get a second chance at a good job when they join the army, at the age of 18, and learn some practical skills -- but haredi children don't join the army, either.
Meaning that at the age of 18, they get married and start to have (large) families, basically guaranteeing that their families will be poor. And their children then go to such schools, which repeats the cycle.
It's tragic for the students, and tragic for the country. And the fact that the country allows this to happen is ridiculous, in my opinion. But it also reflects the sad fact that haredi (ultra-Orthodox) political parties are often needed to make a coalition in our parliament (the Knesset). Allowing such schools to exist, by removing regulations and giving them additional money, is one of the first demands that the haredi parties make to join the coalition.
I know that this will change at some point, because it must. But for now, it boggles my mind and boils my blood.
It may not be that expensive, if class sizes are not that important you can have fewer teachers. The problem (in the US) is that the teacher's unions are generally against performance based pay, teacher evaluations and firing bad teachers.
For good reason: who gets to make those decisions? Parents? Imagine being a biology or history teacher in the deep South. Children? We already have data that the most effective teachers are liked least. Administration? Are those older teachers really poor are they just expensive? Are those "merit" bonuses going to the best teacher or to the one who volunteered to coach the basketball team?
The last time a teacher evaluation got implemented in Pennsylvania, they dropped it in a hurry because too many teachers couldn't pass it and they were going to have to pay WAY more to import teachers who could.
As has been pointed out previously, firing a genuinely bad teacher is generally straightforward and the procedure is well-documented. However, the administration doesn't want to put in the time or paperwork to do it. And, maybe, just maybe, that administration that's whining about firing and the overbearing paperwork really doesn't have a case and simply wants rid of the teacher for political reasons.
Right now, in both the US and Israel (and perhaps other countries), we're in an extreme and untenable situation, in which bad teachers cannot be fired. In the elementary school that my children attended (and that my son still attends), bad teachers were sent off to teach computers. Or science. And so forth. You can imagine what this tells the children, the parents, and the teachers about how much we value these subjects.
There was a New Yorker story a few years ago that described how bad teachers couldn't be fired... and thus were sent to a building every day, where they checked in and did literally nothing all day. Yes, they received their full salary and benefits in exchange for doing literally nothing.
I'm guessing that a reasonable alternative is to have some sort of weighted system, in which the principal's evaluation, parents' complaints, and student performance all count toward whether a teacher can be fired. The biggest thing should probably be the principal's evaluation, but perhaps if a teacher gets fired, they can get another job, in a different school -- but perhaps the parents' evaluations and the students' performance can be used to determine how many other schools they can go to before being kicked out of the system entirely.
> The last time a teacher evaluation got implemented in Pennsylvania, they dropped it in a hurry because > too many teachers couldn't pass it and they were going to have to pay WAY more to import teachers who > could.
This is perhaps the most important point: Good teachers need to be paid well. They need incentive to become teachers, and to remain teachers. Which means that people will have to pay a fair amount in order to get a good education. In the US, this will mean taxes have to go up, which is a recipe for political suicide. In Israel, this means taking money away from other things in the education ministry (since we already pay, per capita, more for schooling than most European countries).
I think the easiest first step is to spend more on teachers within the current budgets.
I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.
At my high school we had a mix of good & bad, as you'd expect. Everyone knew which teachers knew their subject, could communicate well, was more dedicated etc. Some of the most engaging teachers were the least liked because they graded harder, but if you had a rubric that included "grades fairly", "not boring" etc, students would be able to correctly assess them.
Of course some would be dishonest, but noise will cancel itself out, by and large.
You significantly overestimate the goodwill of everybody involved.
I had a butch, lesbian English teacher. Most of the community had "issues". Students hated her because she was a ferocious grader. Without tenure, she would have been gone.
However, her results were amazing. If you took her AP English class and got a B or above, you were getting a 5 on the AP exam.
So, what counts? Community? Administration? Parents? Students? How do you square the fact that everybody wanted her gone, but her results were stellar?
She was extremely effective. Her students knew English and English Literature very well after her class. They tended to win writing awards as well as stomp the AP test flat. However, very few students and parents liked her (oddly, I did, but my father was an English teacher so I had already been brainwashed that English wasn't easy and to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite), and, consequently, neither did the administration as they had to deal with complaints.
She's clearly a domain expert and way more competent at teaching English than anybody judging her. Why do you think that the community at large has any competence to judge her as a teacher? Of course, many of her students were were much happier with her once they hit college and found that composition was easy, but, unfortunately, very few of them ever came back to the area.
The high-tech equivalent is allowing an HR person on your engineering interview loop (never do this, by the way). Since they can't judge them on engineering, they will wind up rejecting candidates based upon their handshake, their clothes, or a hundred other things completely irrelevant to being an engineer.
The Finish model seems to be the best. Introduce this competitive element not on the job but on the way to the job. Pay for a teacher's education, right up to a required Masters degree, and attract ambitious bright young minds to the profession. Combine that with paid time in which teachers must consult with each other regarding in need individuals so as to handle disturbances and distractions from learning as best as possible. Toss in a breakfast program while you're at it and lets light up some young minds!
For example, they shut down teacher's colleges, and mandated a university degree for all teachers. This took political guts, but it has paid off.