Tag Archive for ‘Dan Willingham’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'Dan Willingham'

Stopping a Bad Idea In Its Tracks

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 5, 2008 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

“A lie can get half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” said Mark Twain.

Dan Willingham does the education world a good service, stopping a bad teaching idea in its tracks. If you saw yesterday’s ASCD Smart Brief newsletter, which goes out to hundreds of thousands of educators, you may have read the lead item, “Students can benefit from tackling hardest material first.” It concluded that, “while most teachers progress from easier topics to more advanced ones, that may not always be the best approach, according to a new study.” A man bites dog story if ever there was one.

There’s just one problem: That conclusion is not supported by the study, which was done by Greg Ashby, an internationally recognized expert in how people learn new categories. On Britannica Blog Willingham calls BS on this half-baked idea:

Ashby is interested in differences between two types of categories: those for which one learns an explicit rule (e.g. tricycles have three wheels, bicycles have two) and those categories that one learns almost intuitively, and for which one cannot articulate the rule by which one makes a judgment (e.g., the difference between paintings by Klee and paintings by Kandinsky). Ashby doesn’t use these sorts of categories, however. He uses more figures more amendable to experimental control such as those shown in the figure. The finding in the article is that for the intuitive categorization (like Klee/Kandinsky), subjects learn better if they get the more difficult-to-categorize stimuli first, and the easy stimuli later. For the explicit category (like the bicycle/tricycle) the order doesn’t matter.

Ashby didn’t make any claims about education, notes Willingham, who contacted him for “to be sure that I wasn’t missing something.” Ashby’s reply:

“I believe it is much too premature to apply our results to classroom instruction. First, the work needs to be generalized to natural objects and real-world information of the type encountered in classrooms. Second, we found a benefit for initial training on difficult items only for a certain specialized kind of learning that is probably rare in classroom instruction. The goal of most classroom instruction is to convey explicit knowledge to students, and our research found no benefit to training initially on difficult items when the knowledge to be gained is explicit.”

It’s not hard to imagine how this broad, unsustainable idea — tackle the hard stuff first — could be misapplied. For example, as a justification to continue to have kids attempt Algebra before mastering basic math. Kudos to Willingham.

Test Curriculum, Not Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 18, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and accountability. 0 Comments

One of President-elect Barack Obama’s education ideas is to “improve the assessments used to track student progress.” But improving the tests may be tougher than he appreciates ”and the problem may be rooted in the state standards themselves,” says UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham. ”Most people underestimate how hard it is to write good test items that are based on state standards.” Writing at Britannica Blog, Willingham notes:

If you want to assess what students know and can do, it is only reasonable to list your expectations. Make the expectations too broad and they do not help students, teachers, and parents understand what is expected. Make them too narrow and you invite teachers to teach the list of expectations at the expense of everything else.

“I don’t see how these problems can be avoided unless you make the expectations more comprehensive,” concludes Willingham. “That is, instead of writing a list of standards, specify the expectations for contents and skills in more detail—in short, base tests on a curriculum. A curriculum would differ from a list of standards because it would include both the broad conceptual ideas and the specific content, and it would describe how the abstract concepts relate to the specific content.”

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. sounded a similar call early this year in a cover story in the American Educator, which argued that reading tests should contain passages about specific topics taught not just in literature, but in all other subjects taught in that grade. It makes all the sense in the world, for the reasons Dan Willingham describes.

How Not to Evaluate Teachers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 3, 2008 in Research and Reports. 2 Comments

UVA professor and Core Knowledge board member Dan Willingham, who routinely graces this blog with his observations, is now blogging over at Britannica Blog. His first post is up today, and it’s a barn burner: How NOT to Evaluate Teachers. Plans to evaluate teachers based on standardized test scores are “fatally flawed,” he writes.

Obviously, the measure cannot be based on a one-time test score, because a student’s achievement is a product of (at least) his home environment, neighborhood, and prior schooling. So you must try to assess how much the student learns over the course of the year. But these “value added” measures bring lots of thorny statistical problems. For example, suppose your plan is to administer a test in the Autumn and one in the Spring, and to compare them to see how much students have gained. Well, some Autumn test-takers will have moved by the Spring. Can’t you just ignore those scores? No, because low-income students are more likely to move than high-income students, and low-income students tend to score lower. So if you ignore missing data, you’re biasing the estimate.

Dan lists other problems that he says are old stuff to statisticians, and concludes ”there’s nothing wrong with using value-added measures in research, with all the caveats of the method understood, as one in an array of tools to address a research question. But using it as a measure of an individual teacher’s efficacy is foolish.”

Does “Nature Deficit Disorder” Effect the Brain?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 17, 2008 in Research and Reports. 6 Comments

Richard Louv, is the author of the best-seller The Last Child in the Woods, which makes a passionate case that our children are suffering from “nature deficit disorder,” growing up disconnected from the natural world. He links this lack of contact with nature to obesity, ADD and depression. According to his website, Louv and his book have inspired “No Child Left Inside” initiatives in 27 states.

It’s easy to see why his message resonates with parents and teachers in our risk-averse and increasingly wired world. At a recent appearance described by the Providence Journal’s education columnist Julia Steiny, ”Louv was mid-sentence when an irate leader of a Girl Scout troop in the audience interrupted to complain that the scout camp forbids the girls to climb trees or walk on logs. The girls in the troop with her nodded with insulted agreement. Then a teacher piped up and said that her preschool forbids her to let the children touch fallen snow. Louv shrugged, shook his head and put his hands up in surrender.” Notes Steiny:

Most intriguing to me was his discussion of nature’s effect on our brain’s “executive function,” which he described as “the voice in your head.” I would add that executive function governs your ability to assimilate lots of different kinds of information, and to act or make choices as a result. Louv said, “The best way to develop executive function is through imaginative, made-up games. But both independent play and nature have been disappearing. From Suzuki [music lessons] to soccer to the flip-down screen in the SUV so the kids can watch nature shows on the way to the play date, kids are dramatically split from nature. As a result, a 7-year-old today has the executive function of a 5-year-old in 1940.” One reason is that “on a playground, leaders tend to be the physically strongest. But in nature, leaders are the smartest because they are the ones making up the games.” “If you really want to get into Harvard, go outside,” he intones.

Quite a bold claim. Whenever someone makes grand research-based claims about the brain, I always wonder WWDWS? Or, What Would Dan Willingham Say? I emailed Dan, the UVA professor and American Educator’s Ask the Cognitive Scientist columnist.

“It’s hard to even guess what data he thinks supports this,” he said. “I’d like to know more about what Louv has in mind, and not judge based on what someone reported he said, but this sounds unlikely.”

Reading About Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 27, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Literacy. 2 Comments

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli weighs in on the Core Knowledge reading program announcement. So does Richard Whitmire. Elissa Gootman’s longer piece in yesterday’s NY Times even manages to elicit warm words from Lucy Calkins. But especially welcome is Richard Lee Colvin’s entry at Early Stories, which concludes

“Journalists might look into pre-kindergarten programs or elementary schools in their area that are using the Core Knowledge approach. Are the kids bored? Do their heads hurt?”

If anyone wishes to take up Colvin’s suggestion, a complete list of Core Knowledge Schools can be found here. Such a visit would help counter the nonsense peddled for years by Alfie Kohn, for example, that Core Knowledge is merely a bunch o’ facts that “steal time from more meaningful objectives.”

Indeed, too many people in education still carry around the idea that reading is a content-neutral skill, and don’t appreciate the connection between background knowledge and reading comprehension. There is an assumption on the part of many teachers that the ability to decode and to apply metacognitive “reading strategies” is enough to make any text comprehensible. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Over the next couple of days, UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham and Matt Davis, who heads the Core Knowledge Reading Program will weigh in here on reading. Stay tuned.