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Avatar of Rob Kadel

by Rob Kadel

Educational Technology Leadership Matters. (But it’s not a panacea.)

February 13, 2013 in Data and Technology, Educator and Leader Effectiveness

A few years ago, I was wending my way through Ohio on what I liked to call “the evaluator’s road trip.” At the time, I worked with a couple dozen K-8 schools, evaluating the effectiveness of educational technology grants they had received. I remember one school in particular because of what I did not see — any real use of technology. This school had a two-year grant, and I was visiting them during the school year following the expiration of that grant. The reason: to determine if the grants had long-term impacts on the use of technology in each school. Fortunately, most schools that I visited were chugging along quite well. But at this particular school, I walked into an empty, darkened computer lab with 20 or so desktop PCs all powered off. Many were unplugged — from power, from keyboards, from monitors, or from the LAN. There was a laser printer sitting on a mobile cart in the middle of the room connected to…nothing.

My surprise aside, I was not there to judge. My goal was to understand what had happened to the school’s educational technology program. I sat down with the A hand holding a lit match, which illuminates words such as create, inspire, and leadprincipal and simply asked what kind of use the computer lab had been getting. “None,” he replied. “We just don’t have the time.” He told me about the problems he faced coming into the school as a new principal just that year: a higher-than-average truancy rate, a lack of basic school supplies and textbooks, major disciplinary problems, and a lack of parent participation in the educational process. Then we started to talk about his use of technology as the school principal. All communication with teachers and parents took place through printed memos and newsletters. Face-to-face staff meetings were required regularly for announcements and Q&A. Student grades and teacher performance evaluations were all kept on paper, despite having access to the district’s online portal for such information.

I walked back to the EvalMobile (read: rented minivan) in astonishment. Look at all he has access to that he’s not using, I thought. And if he would use that technology, his teachers would do the same. This man needs to lead!  Was I right? Well, yes and no.

On the one hand, this principal was old school, as evidenced by how much information and communication took place on paper even though he had access to email, a school Web site builder, and online tools for data management. I visited many schools facing similar challenges to those listed above where the principal led by example. And you know what? It caught on. Teachers began building class Web pages, even recruiting students to help, who could then learn HTML and Web design skills. Students’ study materials, performance and attendance data were kept online, and parents had access to that information so that they could more regularly participate in their children’s education.

On the other hand, the problems this principal faced were not just excuses for avoiding the time investment to get up-to-speed with his school’s technology resources. They were real, and they were staring him in the face every day. For example, email and Web-based communication with parents wasn’t going to go very far when a large percentage of those parents (possibly a healthy majority) didn’t have Internet access or a computer at home. Supplemental learning materials provided via the computers wouldn’t do much if there were not enough primary resources, i.e.,  textbooks, to supplement. And it would have been darn difficult to get students excited to use the computer lab if many of those students weren’t even coming in the front door.

In short, there is much that this principal, indeed any school leader, can do to encourage relevant and effective technology use in schools. But there are also social-structural problems that must be addressed (particularly in schools in low-income areas) that stand in the way of change — any change — that could have a positive impact on learning.

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Avatar of Jeff Borden

by Jeff Borden

The MOOC heard around the world…

February 13, 2013 in Data and Technology, Educator and Leader Effectiveness, Next Generation Assessment, Next Generation Learning

Title page to Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning...

Title page to Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I just returned from London where I spoke at the OBHE conference: “Online and open-access learning in higher education: MOOCs, new pedagogies and business models.”  It was actually a fairly lively discussion, debate, and driving conversation about the massive online courses coming out of North America and now beginning to come out of other parts of the world.

What interested me most was what seemed to be about 80% fear and 20% excitement by the gathering of educators (mostly faculty).  It was also interesting that most of those who were currently building MOOCs were doing so under some kind of duress.  From pressure of being left behind to mounting pressure from administrators to even financial pressure to grab a “piece of the MOOC pie,” it seemed rare to find a MOOC builder who was doing so because of the innovation or excitement over the possibilities of helping facilitate learning for so many potential students.

Instead, much of the conversation surrounded problems with the MOOC concept.  Primary to this was concern over the educational efficacy of these experiences.  Most educators seem to understand that ALL eLearning will be judged on the effectiveness of MOOCs….right or wrong, these massive courses are going to be our litmus test.  Obviously this is problematic – imagine evaluating the safety of driving based solely on studying Nascar races.

The next concern was typically voiced with an idiom that I previously assumed to be from American football.  The term “end around” was used consistently as another reason that MOOCs had to be constructed by faculty.  Not new to me was the voiced feeling / assumption by some faculty that administrators would love nothing more than to find a way to provide education without the need to deal with teachers.  I think back to a Chronicle of Higher Education article I read a few years back which described faculty behavior as anything from “eccentric” to “combative” – behavior that would not be tolerated in any other context but higher education.  And so, some faculty believe MOOCs are seen by administrators as a potential way to rid themselves of faculty altogether.

Finally, there was a sense of being “left behind” by many educators and schools.  The assumption was that because X or Y University was launching a MOOC, that our institution should also build one.  Many speakers and delegates noted Teresa Sullivan’s firing last year as a sign that Universities needed to “do or die” in the MOOC game.

But at the heart of the conversation about the efficacy (or at least potential efficacy) of MOOCs were some important questions and concerns.  Many issues that even Coursera and Udacity advocates have noted are still relevant and should not only be discussed, but ultimately figured out.  MOOCs as they exist today are not very engaging.  Unless you are auto-didactic learner (think Abe Lincoln) who can take a piece of content, internalize it, and not only retain it but apply it, MOOCs are likely problematic for you.  That likely leads to another problem – 5-8% retention rates.  Couple that with weak (aka unauthentic) assessments, basing so much feedback on peer evaluation and assessment (even when the peers are unmotivated or so under-educated regarding the content that they have literally nothing which adds value to a conversation), and finding a way to associate credit with MOOCs makes it all that much more challenging.  Then, at least in the states, there are even more accreditation concerns with so much content being provided by outside organizations, which is why most accrediting agencies have a 25% rule.  In MOOCs today there is almost zero student choice, no curriculum integration, no sense of brain-learning interjected into the curricula, a lack of modeling or showcasing creativity and/or critical thinking, and the top-down model promotes a sterile, impersonal experience.  Finally (at least for this list), is the data captivity by MOOC platforms.  While most believe the data will soon be available for a price, most have made it clear that the data is THEIRS and not a school’s.

So what do we do?  I’ve blogged before about possible options and models for the 2nd generation MOOC, but more than that, I just would urge calculated strategy here.  Be thoughtful about the entirety of the process and try not to get caught up in the hoopla.  Build your own (2nd GEN!) MOOC with purpose, solid learning design, and good pedagogical / andragogical models.  Include neuroscience in the conversation as well as what we have learned from Education Psychology.  And don’t forget about 2 decades of learning about how to best deliver eLearning.  In other words, let’s make sure the driver of MOOCs is not solely about money and/or size.  Let’s make it about quality and learning too.  Build a MOOC because you are excited to innovate, not because you are feeling pressured to do something…anything!  Build a MOOC to show the world how to do it right.

Good luck and good teaching.

Dr. Jeff D Borden
VP of Instruction & Academic Strategy
Director of the Center for Online Learning (http://researchnetwork.pearson.com/online-learning)

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Avatar of Rob Kadel

by Rob Kadel

Social Media for Sharing Science Content

January 15, 2013 in Data and Technology, Next Generation Learning

On Dec. 31, 2012, Mary Ann Giordano of the New York Times wrote a piece reflecting on the growth of social media over the course of 2012 for sharing breakthroughs in science:

New Frontier for Topics in Science: Social Media

(It starts with a discussion of Felix Baumgartner’s jump from a capsule 24 miles above the New Mexico desert, parachuting to the ground, including a YouTube video. If you haven’t seen that, it’s amazing, and well worth a look.)

What I love about this article isn’t so much the science topics discussed and shown — though they are awesome! — but two other topics:

  1. The sharing – The trend we’re seeing is that the public is using social media to share educational content. It doesn’t matter whether the reader/viewer is a scientist, a student, or John Q. Public. People think what they’re seeing is neat, and so they want so share that experience with others. If you’re an educator — and particularly if you have an online component to your teaching — this is a bandwagon worth jumping on. It’s Gemeinschaft for the new age of online learning (but that’s a topic for another time).
  2. The data – Giordano’s article is filled with information on numbers of hits and tweets and likes as well as rankings of topics shared in 2012. This is another growing trend in our use of social media which has the potential to alter education in radical ways. Having easy access to data (and analyses of those data) will allow educators to know what their students are up to, what they’re learning, and what they’re not learning. The benefit of this is twofold: first, as you might expect, if an educator finds that students are missing the point of a particular topic or learning outcome, he or she can alter the learning plan to provide extra time for discussion and/or new ways of describing key concepts. Second, if an educator finds that students have already mastered a particular learning outcome — but the syllabus dictates another, say, two weeks on that topic — the educator can change the learning plan to move on to something else. In short, you can use those two weeks to cover new material, rather than wasting them hammering away on a point that students have already mastered.

This is great stuff that excites me about the future of education. Students can learn more effectively and more efficiently while also sharing those learning experiences with others.

So grab yourself some shared media and have fun!

 

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Avatar of Kristen DiCerbo

by Kristen DiCerbo

Look at Your Data: Administrator Salary and Tuition

January 14, 2013 in Data and Technology

Visualizing your data gives you clues about how two variables relate to each other. Ignoring clues from the visualization can you lead to potentially inaccurate conclusions.

Last week Education Sector, a nonprofit education think tank announced something they are calling “Higher Ed Data Central.” They have taken a bunch of publicly available data sets and combined them into a database.

On their blog, the Quick and the Ed, they started showing examples of what they could do with this data. On Friday they published a post including the graph below of the number of administrators who make over $100k per 1,000 students versus tuition at private non-profit 4 year universities.

Nice graph. Then they say this:

“Each additional highly compensated administrator per 1,000 students is correlated with $1,120 higher tuition (R^2 = .42). (Of course, this doesn’t prove that higher administrative staffing causes higher tuition, merely that they are correlated – a deeper analysis would be needed to determine if there is causation.)”

Oh boy, a big reason to visualize your data in the scatterplot is so you can see things like that fact that this data is nonlinear.  See how there seems to be a big curve up and to the right? It looks more like a lower case letter “r.” than a straight line. However, they have used a line to summarize the data.

At first I thought Education Sector was making Data Central publicly available. Unfortunately, when I went to look for it this morning, I find that it isn’t. Also, they don’t tell me the original sources of the data used to create their graph. So, I created some simulated data in the pattern of the data they display. Here is a scatterplot of my data. I also added a linear regression line. Then I created a logarithmic curve as well… which one seems to be closest to the pattern of the data?

What this curve tells us is that we can’t give a single value of how much tuition goes up per compensated administrator because the relationship varies depending on where you are on the scale. Based on the equation for this curve, moving from 1 highly compensated administrator to 2 would be related to a $6,114.76 increase, while moving from 25 to 26 would “just” be a $345.99 increase.

This model still isn’t great.; it will underestimate tuition at those schools in the upper left, for example. It would be interesting to see if there are other things in common among the schools out to the far right on number of highly compensated administrators (remember all these schools are private, non-profit). We might also want to think about transforming these non-normal variables prior to the analyses. However, this is as far as I’ll go with my “simulated” data for now.

One of the emphases of the research center I’m part of at Pearson is data visualization. This isn’t just for purposes of communication to others, but for your own understanding of the data. It should lead you to better models of relationships.

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Avatar of Mike Evans

by Mike Evans

Middle Schoolers in a Common Core World

November 19, 2012 in Data and Technology, Next Generation Learning

Photo of students learning with SuccessMakerSchool districts across the country are facing unprecedented challenges. As states move toward implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), they find themselves presented with increasing academic demands, while their available resources are constant, at best, and in many cases are diminishing. The assessments being created to determine student attainment of these standards rely heavily upon technology for administration of the tests, so schools find themselves being asked to prepare students for more rigorous academic standards at the same time they need to prepare to them to thrive in an increasingly digital environment. The stakes become even higher for those districts which are composed of student populations that lack technical assets in the home. For these students, schools may be the only place where they have access to these tools.

While these challenges cut across the school curriculum, mathematics adds an additional layer of complexity; nowhere in the school curriculum is the proficiency gap as high as in this subject. Nationally, sixty-one percent of eighth graders are not proficient in math, and with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards this number is expected to rise. Middle school teachers will find themselves under increasing pressure to cover Common Core content, even if the majority of students in their classrooms have significant gaps in foundational skills.

The need to deliver grade-level content that aligns with the CCSS, monitor student progress, and deliver individual assistance or enrichment activities where needed while also preparing students for a digital world, will have many school districts across the nation searching for creative ways to deliver on the promise of effectively teaching the nation’s students.

School districts will need CCSS-aligned curriculum that can assist teachers in providing the necessary learning to their students. Any curriculum that would also increase the amount of class time spent on teaching will deliver better results by simply making it possible for teachers to do what they do best.

To help meet these challenges, and ease the many transitions educators and students face, Pearson is partnering with districts to deliver digital math curriculum that provides flexibility, reach, and personalization capabilities. One such middle grades program, digits, was written to adhere to the Common Core State Standards, and built to incorporate the tools educators need for day-to-day success.

For example, teachers often spend a lot of time searching through print materials to find level-appropriate responses. digits eliminates that process, instead automatically grading homework, providing reports to monitor progress, and analyzing data so teachers have more time to do what they do best…teach.

As classrooms, and the world, become progressively more digital, students need to master the 21st century skills that will help them thrive in technology-rich environments. Programs like digits, and others that are completely digitally-driven, deliver the tools educators need to provide instruction, remediate/enrich those who need it, and prepare students for success in the classroom and in life.

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Avatar of Kristen DiCerbo

by Kristen DiCerbo

Analyzing Education: What We Can Learn From Nate Silver

November 9, 2012 in Data and Technology

If you’ve been following the results of the U.S. election, you know that it wasn’t just Barack Obama who won. As Jon Stewart opined, it was a victory for the President of the United States of Arithmetic, Nate Silver, whose algorithmic analysis of presidential polls led to correct predictions in 50/50 states (although Florida may still not be official). The election is being held up as a triumph for empirical results and data analysis; nerds (like me!) everywhere are hailing their new hero.

Here’s the thing… what he does for politics is exactly what we want to do in education. He combined a lot of data in meaningful ways to make a judgment about the likelihood of a win. We want to combine data from students’ interactions with digital technology to make a judgment about the likelihood of mastery of a given topic. If a student gets a score on the Newton’s Playground game, a number of scores on Mastering Physics problems over the course of a number of weeks, and has spent a given amount of time on a simulation site, what is the probability that they have mastered concepts of Force and Motion? And how does all of this relate to performance on high-stakes standardized tests?

Here are some key points about Nate Silver that apply to the effort around education:

1. As he said in a Charlie Rose interview, no one poll is right. Getting more information from more polls leads to more accurate predictions. As we think about gathering data from digital interactions, no one piece of data is going to be totally right. The more data we have, the more accurate we can be.

2. But he isn’t just throwing all the data into a big black box and he is not just “averaging the polls.” He has done a lot of hard work and analysis to determine how to adjust each poll based on its predictive power based on factors from recency to historical accuracy to methodology. He brings in data from outside the polls, like state party identification and individual contributions. The decisions about all of these adjustments and other variables took thought, effort, and human judgment to make. Similarly, we can’t just average all the test scores. We need to do the analyses to determine what is important in the predictions. Should we include this piece of data in our prediction of mastery? Does this test result need to be adjusted?

3. He uses probability. He didn’t say “Obama will win.” On the morning of the election, he had the probability of Obama winning at 90.9%. Basically, he was saying, “Based on the evidence, I think Obama will win, but there’s a 10% (well 9.1%) chance that I’m wrong.” He makes the point in The Signal and the Noise that if you try to go for absolute certainty, you will likely be wrong.

So, it’s not just baseball and politics. We can and should be thinking about the same methods to understand what our students know and can do.

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Avatar of Jonathan Harber

by Jonathan Harber

Datapalooza: A game changer for education?

November 9, 2012 in Data and Technology

Datapalooza! A cool name for what has the potential to transform education as we know it.

“Datapalooza” is what the White House dubbed an event held in Washington last month that focused on the use of open data to improve education.  It was one of several the White House has held to explore ways data can be used to solve social problems in various realms, such as health care, energy, and public safety.

I had the exciting opportunity to present on behalf of Pearson at the event and talk about the many ways data is solving real world education problems. There, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan postulated that data might just be the “game changer” for education.

At his annual State of Education speech in October, Secretary Duncan said “we absolutely have to be moving from print to digital as fast as we can over the next couple of years. Textbooks should become obsolete.”

To the surprise of many at Datapalooza, I asserted that Pearson is the largest textbook publisher in the U.S., but nonetheless, that we agree.  Textbooks are heavy, they quickly become outdated, and they symbolize a one-size-fits-all education model that is ill-suited to the needs of 30 students in a classroom, each learning at his/her own pace and own style.

The Secretary has also said, “the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century…our schools must…do far more to personalize instruction.”

We agree on that as well, and that’s one of the main reasons we’re so excited about using education data to truly personalize learning at scale—just like Amazon uses data to recommend books and Pandora uses data to suggest music.

Let’s look at what this really means. Take Benjamin and his mother Kelly, who live in Northern California. Benjamin loves sports – especially baseball – riding his bike, and dogs. His favorite subject is math. Benjamin’s class is learning about global warming. Because of Benjamin’s advanced math skills, his teacher sees an opportunity to challenge and engage him. She needs to find resources to help her do that.

It turns out that the most compelling content on global warming sits in the annals of NASA, funded by taxpayer dollars.

In the Old School model, there might have been a reference in the textbook to another book or article and Benjamin or his teacher could go to the library to find them—or they could search the Internet and try to comb through the NASA site.

Now, the power of open data makes the connection directly. Pearson has been partnering with organizations like NASA to tag its open education resources with open tagging schemes and the Common Core academic standards. We are indexing our learning object repositories in the government’s new Learning Registry.

As a result of these innovative alliances, Benjamin’s teacher can search the NASA annals from her teacher portal to find free open education resources on global warming.

But even more compelling is the fact that data on Benjamin’s academic accomplishments are mashed up with data about the class curriculum and educational resources available via the Internet to deliver a recommendation from NASA directly to Benjamin’s teacher.

Instead of searching for content, the content is searching for Benjamin!

Benjamin’s teacher then gives him a homework assignment based on those materials. Even if Benjamin is out sick, the NASA resource appears on his smart phone or computer. Such is the transformation of the static nature of textbook learning into a dynamic, personalized, and connected experience.

To top it off, Benjamin’s mom Kelly likes to keep track of Benjamin’s progress at school, even when she’s on the move and not at her home computer.  Open data protocols and the free downloadable PowerSchool mobile app allow her to check on his homework and see how he’s doing in class. Kelly says she “feels good knowing that Benjamin is making great progress each week.”

If the family were to move to another school or state, Benjamin’s records would automatically follow. For students who attend Department of Defense schools, the data will even travel with the family from country to country and student records remain accessible via the parent data portal.

Another problem that we are trying to tackle with open data is bullying. About 160,000 students miss school each day because they’re afraid of being bullied.  CyberReach, one of our data partners, has created the CyberBully Hotline to address the issue.

Imagine …a child is witnessing kids harassing one of his classmates on the school bus. With a click of his phone he reports what’s going on anonymously and gets an instant response. The system alerts the bus driver, and arranges for a counselor to meet the bus when it arrives.

Finding the right college is another challenge for our high school students.  Endless information and forms for financial aid make the task of finding the right fit daunting.  And even worse, the average high school student gets only 38 minutes of college counselor time.  38 minutes for what might be one of the most important decisions of their lives.

We’re working with PossibilityU, also in our data partner network, to mash up data about students’ grades and test scores with admissions information from colleges to give students and their parents instant feedback. The system will create an “admissions heat map” showing the likelihood of getting into colleges on the y-axis and the likelihood of receiving financial aid on the x-axis. When students express an interest in a particular school, the tool sends text messages to make sure they don’t miss important application deadlines.

These are only a few examples of how we are gathering, mashing up, and communicating open data to solve real problems in education, transform the textbook to personalized learning, transport student records for mobile families, prevent bullying, and optimize college counseling.  But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Our open data partners program already has more than 50 partners in the network, and it’s growing fast.

I closed at Datapalooza by reflecting that not only are we the largest textbook publisher, but also the largest trustee of student information in the U.S.  As student records have moved from print to the PC to the Internet, we have seen the explosive growth of our PowerSchool web-based student information system reaching the ten million student mark this year.  In addition, our recently released PowerSchool free mobile app has quickly seen over half a million downloads and has become one of the most popular apps on the iTunes app store.

Finally, we announced at the White House Pearson’s launch of our PowerSchool MyData button, allowing an open, machine readable version of a student’s record to download to the parents’ computer.  We believe that this will lead to even more innovation, more innovative partnerships, and more education problems addressed by open data.

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Avatar of Katherine Bassett

by Katherine Bassett

The State of Teaching: Educators Speak Out On Best Practices

October 26, 2012 in Data and Technology

A teacher-led network of some of the nation’s most recognized educators, the National Network of State Teachers of the Year, NNSTOY, is focusing on professionalizing teaching and advocating for teacher voice in policy decisions that impact the classroom.

We are partnering with Pearson to amplify the voice of educators in the following ways:

  • Conduct classroom-based research,
  • Provide policy-based webinars to share insights and best practices, and
  • Share what State Teachers of the Year are saying on key topics related to effective education.

In line with these goals, I’m happy to introduce a series of blog posts authored by State Teachers of the Year.

Our first featured blogger is Curtis Chandler, 2011 Kansas State Teacher of the Year.  An eighth grade Language Arts teacher, Chandler says that he teaches to help students discover the joy of exploration.  His students spend more time away from their desks than at them, and he uses technology as an integral part of their learning.  Chandler is featured here speaking about why he teaches.

Chandler recently wrote a piece entitled, “Lessons From Subway Zombies and their Mini-Games,” in which he shared his thoughts and observations about how games can make a difference in education, going as far as saying, “I am now convinced that game designers are much more adept at supporting learning than most teachers are.” Chandler’s post encourages all teachers to take some time and assess what can be learned from game designers.  Check out the full original post on his blog, Better Learning For Schools.

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Avatar of Kristen DiCerbo

by Kristen DiCerbo

Go With The Flow

October 8, 2012 in Data and Technology

Has “gamification” jumped the shark (moved beyond what made it a good idea in the first place)?

Originally conceived as the use of game features and mechanics in non-game contexts in order to engage and motivate, gamification continues to hold promise as an educational tool, but it seems to have shifted focus from its original intent and thereby somewhat lost its way. The graph below, from Google Insight, shows the pattern of searches for “gamification” from Jan. 2011 to Aug. 2012 (the numbers are a normalized scale that Google uses). The big spike you see at the end corresponds to the announcement of Badgeville for Drupal, through which any website powered by the open source platform can use pre-packaged badges.

 

This announcement is what prompted my concern about gamification, which now has turned into “badgification” or, as game designer Margaret Robertson calls it, “pointsification.” The focus on points, levels and badges misses the largest component of what makes games really engaging and “sticky.” In fact, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal work on “flow,” or a single-minded immersion in an activity, suggests that part of getting in the “flow” state is ceasing to worry about whether an activity will be rewarded.

Now, outside of the education environment, if the goal is to, say, get people to fly your airline, you aren’t worried about people getting into a state of focused motivation, so those silver, gold, platinum, and chairman levels with points and perks is absolutely sufficient to meet those goals. But, in education, we need to get people more engaged and capture some of that essential flow state.

So, what features and elements of games should we look at to inform student engagement? First, one of Csikszentmihalyi’s findings is that getting into a state of completely focused motivation is all about working through a series of challenges at just the right level, to the point of challenge without frustration. Game designers are experts at presenting challenges at just the right time to meet a particular skill level. Other factors that make games engaging include: a perception of player control and choice, curiosity/mystery, fantasy, and competition (Malone, 1981, Cordova & Lepper, 1996).

So, I would argue that if the term “gamification” evolves to mean just “badgification,” it is going to lose its relevancy to education; in other words, it has jumped the shark. We need to look more deeply at what games teach us and not just go for the easy win.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear from you.

References:

Cordova, D.I. & Lepper, M.R. (1996), Intrinsic Motivation and the Process of Learning: Beneficial Effects of Contextualization, Personalization, and Choice. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, 715-730.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper.

Malone, T.W. (1981). Toward a theory of intrinsically motivating instruction, Cognitive Science, 4, 3330-370.

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Avatar of Kimberly O'Malley

by Kimberly O'Malley

Back-to-School “Homework” for Mom

August 30, 2012 in Data and Technology, Next Generation Assessment

It’s that time of year again — back-to-school. The backpacks are ready to go and, soon, my two sons will head out for their first day of school here in our hometown of Cedar Park, Texas, a suburb of Austin. Each year, I’ve happily sent my boys to our public schools, confident that their local school will teach them important new skills, allow them to exchange ideas with classmates, and help them reach new standards that will prepare them for the challenging road ahead.

Each year also brings an understanding that my kids will be held accountable for the progress they make toward these new skills and standards. Like all moms, I want the best for my children – this means doing all I can to gain insights into their learning. By meeting with their teachers, reviewing notes and papers that come home in their backpacks, attending school meetings, and following their progress on the Texas statewide STAAR assessment, I can stay involved in their educations. My oldest, Jace, will be in fourth grade this year. He took the STAAR last year and will take it again this year. His scores on the state assessment are one important way for me to understand and measure his learning progress. But, they are just one of many ways.

As I said in a previous post, “the assessment results help a busy parent understand what’s happening in the classroom because we can’t be there every day.  More importantly, they round out the wider scope of information gathered at the local school level to help us understand how our children are progressing.”

With the new school year on the horizon, I’m committing to some homework of my own. I plan to actively engage with my sons’ teachers from the get-go. I want to understand what my boys are expected to accomplish by the year’s end and how their development will be shared with me. I will ask about how the instruction they will see in the classroom prepares them for a future we haven’t defined yet—how they are learning problem-solving skills and critical thinking skills. I will find out how I can support their learning at home. My open dialogue with my boys’ teachers and with my sons will make the learning process stronger.  These conversations, along with good data from their assessments, can help me understand how my sons are doing at certain points in time.  I can see how they are progressing throughout the year, encourage them when they struggle, and – I think – be an all-round better mom.

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