Robots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

Evidence of Effect from SRI: Khan Works for Math

A positive association was found between more Khan Academy use and more problem sets completed and two outcomes: (1) improvements in student test scores, and (2) improvements in tself reported non-achievement outcomes – math anxiety, math self-concept, and academic efficacy (i.e., belief in one’s ability to succeed in academic endeavors).

Evidence from exploratory analyses of data available from two sites suggested that students who spent more time on Khan Academy and successfully completed more Khan Academy problem sets to proficiency experienced more positive than expected outcomes in terms of math test scores, reduced math anxiety, and had higher confidence in their ability to do math. Prior achievement tests and attitude measures taken in the fall were used to predict end-of-year outcomes for all students, and then the sample was split into those whose end-of-year scores were better than predicted, and those whose end of year scores were less positive than expected.

SRI Analysis of Kahn Effect

Fixing Our Beliefs

From my friend Jon Haber's excellent blog Degrees of Freedom

Fixing Our Beliefs

So how is one to balance intellectual humility (which asks you to resist the urge to insist you are right, even when you might be wrong) and intellectual courage (which asks you to stick to your guns, even if your argument receives a setback)?  Fortunately, I ended up pondering this conundrum while reading some essays by Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of Pragmatism.

Pragmatism, the only school of the Western philosophical tradition to have originated in America, will be making an appearance more than once between now and Election Day.  For now, however, I just want to focus on how one of the founding documents of this philosophical movement, Peirce’s The Fixation of Belief, can help us navigate the choppy waters between intellectual humility and courage.  In that essay, Peirce proposes that doubt motivates all of our thinking and that all of us constantly generated beliefs large and small in order to dispel the discomfort of doubt.  Once generated, the author describes four ways those beliefs can become fixed in our minds.

One is an a priori method which simply involves believing (or continuing to believe) things that make you comfortable.  This fits well with the human tendency towards cognitive bias which involves only accepting information that supports current beliefs while ignoring facts that conflict with preferred storylines.

Alternatively, one’s beliefs can be established by authority, such as a priesthood (secular or religious) which establishes what is allowed vs. forbidden to think within a society.  Such authority is often challenged by free spirits, many of whom come to their beliefs through tenacity, which involves settling onto a belief system and boldly holding onto it at all costs (regardless of whether it is right or wrong).

While all three of these methods for fixing belief (a priori, authority and tenacity) have something to recommend them, none of them are of much use if your goal is getting to the truth.  If that is your purpose, Peirce proposes science as a model which treats beliefs as conditional, even as more and more experiments are performed and evidence amassed to asymptotically get us closer and closer to ideas likely to be true.

Projected Average Salary by Discipline (STEM vs Humanities

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html?_r=1

Amazon Education to Launch New Website for Open Education Resources

Amazon Education to Launch New Website for Open Education Resources

Michele Molnar

Amazon Education is working on a new platform that will allow schools to upload, manage, share, and discover open education resources from a home page that in some ways resembles the one shoppers are accustomed to accessing on the massive online retailer’s website.

School administrators learned about the site, to be called Amazon Inspire, during a “Transitioning to OER” session Friday as part of the National Conference on Education of the AASA, the School Superintendents Association, held here.

The new platform is in beta testing now, and is scheduled to be released publicly within the next two to three months, according to Andrew Joseph, vice president of strategic relations for Amazon Education.

Users of the site will be able to add ratings and reviews, and to receive recommendations based on their previous selections. Educators will be able to curate open resources, self-publish material they have developed, and put a school’s entire digital library that is open and freely available online, Joseph said.

Along the left pane of the web page, users will select categories to modify their searches for open resources, much the way shoppers on Amazon today can choose categories to filter their searches.

The company is looking for more districts to become partners for the testing phase before launch, Joseph told the audience of mostly superintendents at the session, which also featured Andrew Marcinek, who was named the first open-ed resources adviser in the U.S. Department of Education last year, and Devin Vodicka, superintendent of the Vista Unified schools in San Diego County, Calif., whose district is testing the site.

Amazon Inspire will be made available to schools for free. “We’ve made a commitment that we will never charge for this,” Joseph said, noting it will be “a completely free, open platform for free resources.”

Asked by one superintendent about the company’s financial interest in the effort, Joseph said, “Amazon is a big commercial entity and we have to make this sustainable over time. This piece we have committed to making absolutely free forever. We’re not going to lock the content up. We promised we won’t put a pay wall in front of it.”

While Joseph said the company has not decided exactly how it will achieve financial sustainability for Amazon Inspire, he said it could be in connecting users to books they might want to buy to go with a unit on Shakespeare, for instance, or in using Amazon’s capabilities in self-publishing books. “We don’t know exactly what it looks like … but we believe we have all these other paths down the road,” he said.

Vodicka said a lesson one of his educators uploaded in testing requires certain materials like batteries and coils, so he could envision that Amazon’s recommendation technology would someday surface links to whatever needs to be purchased to complete a lesson.

Amazon Education’s research indicated that “teachers spend 12 hours a week on content creation and sharing on their own,” said Joseph, using Google Drive or shared folders within a district. “If you think about those resources, they’re not all that discoverable or sharable.”

Vodicka displayed a slide showing how his district shares the OER it has discovered or that educators have created, which mirrored the description of district-created folders or documents in Google.

The OER that are added to Amazon Inspire will be assigned metadata tags identified through the Learning Registry, a federally sponsored, online information-sharing network.

“All of these groups–Amazon, Microsoft, Edmodo–they’re publishing their platforms on top of the Learning Registry,” explained Marcinek. These tags will contain the information, such as the publisher, location, subject area, and standards alignment of a piece of content, that make it searchable.

See also:
Why School Leaders Are Turning to Open Educational Resources
Flood of Open Education Resources Challenges Educators
Open Ed. Resources Would Get Boost Under Education Department Proposal
U.S. Learning Registry Aims to Tailor Online Content for Educators
First-Ever ‘Open’ Resources Adviser Named at Department of Education

Fordham Institute ESSA Accountability Design Competition Finalists

Fordham Institute ESSA Accountability Design Competition Finalists

1. Chad Aldeman, Bellwether Education Partners
2. Dale Chu and Eric Lerum, America Succeeds
3. Sherman Dorn, Arizona State University
4. Josh Boots, EmpowerK12
5. Lydia Burns et al., Student Voice Team, Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence
6. Ronald F. Ferguson, Harvard University and Tripod Education Partners, Inc.
7. Chris Hoffman et al., Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellows, Teach Plus
8. Morgan S. Polikoff, Matthew Duque, and Stephani Wrabel, University of Southern California and Baltimore County Public Schools
9. Jennifer Vranek et al., Education First
10. Richard J. Wenning, BeFoundation and SpreadMusicNow

Other ESSA accountability designs (listed alphabetically by last name)

1. Joanna Best, Scissors and Glue
2. Kristin Blagg, Urban Institute
3. Catherine Brown et al., Center for American Progress
4. Jim Dueck
5. Michael Ford, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
6. Alex Hernandez, Charter School Growth Fund
7. Ben S. Jones, MSEd, and John R. Walkup, Ph.D., Learnerati and the Standards Company
8. Nat Malkus and Max Eden, American Enterprise Institute
9. Andrew Milligan and Sarah Anderson
10. Matthew Petersen et al., Harvard Graduate School of Education
11. Randall Reback, Barnard College
12. Ryan Reyna
13. Samantha Semrow et al., Harvard Graduate School of Education
14. Joe Siedlecki and David Stewart, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and Tembo, Inc.
15. Christine Standring, North Point ESC and Huron City Schools
16. Melany Stowe

In search of on-ramps to competency-based learning

In search of on-ramps to competency-based learning

by Julia Freeland Fisher

As more and more school systems across the country explore “going competency-based,” we need to be attentive to the processes that will actually allow such innovations to thrive. Current time- and age-based accountability measures have a stronghold on schools, even those trying to break away from the factory model of education. As a result, we would predict that time-based metrics and incentives could cannibalize many efforts to reinvent learning in a competency-based manner. School systems need to heed this warning and take pains to protect innovative competency-based approaches from the tug of status-quo pressures and performance measures.

Systems will likely get into trouble if they attempt to make just a few aspects of their models competency-based, while retaining an otherwise traditional structure. Indeed, a school district may spend scarce resources building out a list of desired “competencies” that it wants students to master, but lack the resources or capacity to rethink scheduling and assessment. As a result, these competencies will end up as an iteration or improvement on standards, rather than as a new approach to teaching and learning. Other systems might invest in competency-based grading reform but retain cohort-based course and semester schedules that keep students tied to lock-step progressions. As a result, report cards may more accurately reflect what students actually know, but classroom models will be no better suited to filling in gaps reflected in those grades. In other words, efforts to transform to a competency-based system risk ending up as tweaks on the traditional factory-based approach to teaching and learning, rather than as whole-school redesign.

These challenges are highly predictable if you consider the trajectory that many innovations take. Oftentimes school systems that think they are investing in a wholly new education model are actually investing in sustaining innovations—that is, innovations that improve against existing performance metrics. There is nothing wrong with sustaining innovations—oftentimes these innovations delight customers with better features or functionalities. But sustaining innovations reinforce existing performance metrics rather than reinventing them.

By and large, school systems today remain beholden to traditional accountability and teacher evaluation performance metrics that are benchmarked against a time-based, singular, summative exam. As a result, even with the best of intentions to re-orient around competency-based metrics, like individual student mastery or rate over learning (calculated by individual mastery over individual pace), schools will tend to measure their reform efforts according to traditional time-based metrics of success.

How, then, can schools disrupt the traditional mold if they must remain accountable to that mold? According to our research, systems need to nurture disruptive efforts with new performance metrics by granting these efforts autonomy beyond the reach of traditional metrics and accountability. Otherwise, schools will find themselves innovating on top of their existing model—perhaps making that existing instructional model more efficient or differentiated, but not wholly competency-based.

Carving out autonomy for competency-based models to thrive can take various forms. Here are four trends worth watching that have the potential to allow new models to take root:

Afterschool programs.  A recent American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) publication looked at the overlap of afterschool programs and competency-based learning models. The authors posit that afterschool programs are increasingly providing academically enriching experiences that could—in a well-run competency-based model—count for credit in school. Some of the most promising efforts cited in the report, such as Chicago’s After School Matters program, allow for out-of-school learning experiences that both deliver real-world training and show measurable impact on non-cognitive skills. Although the authors call for better linking of in-school and out-of-school competency-based experiences, the more intriguing take away from the report may be that afterschool programs can offer fertile ground for honing competency-based approaches beyond the traditional system.

Supplemental online courses.  A la carte online courses can allow students to move at a flexible or individual pace. In a number of states, online course providers can now obtain seat-time waivers to avoid keeping students “on the clock.” As such, online courses offer a built-in flexibility around pacing that is trickier to pull off in traditional face-to-face cohort models. It’s worth noting that some online courses are more competency-based than others. For example, New Hampshire’s Virtual Learning Academy Charter School (VLACS) not only bundles its content by competencies (rather than courses), but also receives funding based on mastery rather than time. But districts themselves are also increasingly creating their own district-run online courses. This approach can in turn allow current teachers and administrators to design competency-based modules and courses that take advantage of flexibilities and customization that online learning offers.

Curriculum redesign.  Perhaps the most common approach I’m hearing from districts is to take a year or two to fully redesign their school model and curriculum with competency-based approaches in mind. To do this well, systems will need to take a “sandbox” approach to rethinking curriculum—that is, allow an autonomous team from the district to rethink a new curriculum from scratch that is not beholden to existing models, scope and sequence, or publisher content. For example, Fraser Public Schools in Michigan hired six of its teachers to embark on a yearlong design process. Importantly, the teachers leading the curriculum redesign are freed from the traditional constraints of age-, grade-, and accountability-based limitations. The success of such efforts, of course, will depend on the systems’ ability to implement that new curriculum with fidelity, perhaps first in untested subject areas, so that the model can thrive.

Alternative high schools. As I’ve noted before, alternative high schools, or dropout-recovery programs, are well suited to forging competency-based approaches; by design, such programs take on students with varying credit and mastery levels. Alternative high schools must meet students where they’re at and graduate them on a flexible basis. This charge inherently puts them in a more promising position to optimize for competency-based performance metrics, unlike traditional schools that by design standardize learning experiences by age- and grade-level, rather than by mastery.

All four of these examples illustrate how school systems might carve out autonomy as a critical first step to building competency-based models. (It bears noting that charter schools are not on this list—indeed, charter schools remain locked into existing accountability pressures and arguably these pressures are even more acute in some states where poor performance can lead authorizers to not renew a charter.) Without sufficient autonomy to develop, reforms we call competency-based risk falling into step with our well-established time-based designs.

- See more at: http://www.christenseninstitute.org/in-search-of-on-ramps-to-competency-based-learning/#sthash.9tqHtaOa.dpuf