What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success - Anu Partanen The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence. Sergey Ivanov/Flickr Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. And yet it wasn't clear that Sahlberg's message was actually getting through. Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. For starters, Finland has no standardized tests.
Ordo Amoris: Norms and Nobility Prologue IV: I Am, I Can, I Ought, I Will Some 100 years before David Hicks penned Norms and Nobility , in the Lake District of England, Charlotte Mason wrote these words as an educational philosophy: "I am, I can, I ought, I will." We moderns like to say," I am and I can," but we lose even the little we have by not adding, "I ought and I will." From those 4 phrases we can move towards a philosophy of education as Charlotte Mason did in her original series and as David Hicks does in Norms and Nobility. It is appropriate that Hicks ends his prologue with that nasty word "ought." I don't mean to embarrass anyone but we have the great fortune to have picked up Krakovianki for some of this study. Also please link to your posts in the comments. I will end this section with a couple of quotes from section IV. "David Halberstan (The Best and the Brightest )warns against the pride and blindness that operational brilliance is heir to. Question: Does it?
Intro Curriculum Update « Existential Type In previous posts I have talked about the new introductory CS curriculum under development at Carnegie Mellon. After a year or so of planning, we began to roll out the new curriculum in the Spring of 2011, and have by now completed the transition. As mentioned previously, the main purpose is to bring the introductory sequence up to date, with particular emphasis on introducing parallelism and verification. A secondary purpose was to restore the focus on computing fundamentals, and correct the drift towards complex application frameworks that offer the students little sense of what is really going on. (The poster child was a star student who admitted that, although she had built a web crawler the previous semester, she in fact has no idea how to build a web crawler.) The solution was a complete do-over, jettisoning the traditional course completely, and starting from scratch. The main parallelism example is the Barnes-Hut algorithm for solving the n-body problem in physics. Like this:
This is your brain on Jane Austen, and researchers at Stanford are taking notes Stanford Report, September 7, 2012 Researchers observe the brain patterns of literary PhD candidates while they're reading a Jane Austen novel. The fMRI images suggest that literary reading provides "a truly valuable exercise of people's brains." By Corrie Goldman The Humanities at Stanford L.A. Researcher Natalie Phillips positions an eye-tracking device on Matt Langione. The inside of an MRI machine might not seem like the best place to cozy up and concentrate on a good novel, but a team of researchers at Stanford are asking readers to do just that. In an innovative interdisciplinary study, neurobiological experts, radiologists and humanities scholars are working together to explore the relationship between reading, attention and distraction – by reading Jane Austen. During a series of ongoing experiments, functional magnetic resonance images track blood flow in the brains of subjects as they read excerpts of a Jane Austen novel.
Diane Ravitch's blog Project Based Instruction in STEM Education The Case Against Grades November 2011 The Case Against Grades By Alfie Kohn [This is a slightly expanded version of the published article.] "I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing….Suddenly all the joy was taken away. -- Claire, a student (in Olson, 2006) By now enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when you stop to think about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. You say the devil is in the details? Why tests are not a particularly useful way to assess student learning (at least the kind that matters), and what thoughtful educators do instead, are questions that must wait for another day. The Effects of Grading Most of the criticisms of grading you’ll hear today were laid out forcefully and eloquently anywhere from four to eight decades ago (Crooks, 1933; De Zouche, 1945; Kirschenbaum, Simon, & Napier, 1971; Linder, 1940; Marshall, 1968), and these early essays make for eye-opening reading.
Learning and thinking - World History & Geography Learning and thinking: what science tells us about teaching Editor's Note: According to a 2012 Education Week report* about "brain-based education," the situation has changed little since the following article was published in 2001. Two kinds of research Learning implies the acquisition of knowledge from experience, while thinking involves the conscious processing and use of knowledge. In recent years there has been a great deal of interest among educators in a newer kind of research coming from a branch of the biological sciences called neuroscience. Brain research and education Based on pure science, and possessing the potential to transform our understanding of the brain, brain research was quickly embraced by many in the education community. A minor industry grew up around brain research to bring its purported benefits to the classroom. "Companies sell learning kits 'based on the latest brain research,' and professional development consultants peddle the concept to teachers. John T.
The 10,000 Hour Elite Excellence Dilemma 10,000 Hours is a Lot of Hours The 10,000 Hour Rule, as it applies to gymnastics, stated simply, is that to become an excellent gymnast and successful Elite athlete, gymnasts must have completed 10,000 hours of practice. 10,000 hours of practice is normally stated, in this context, as being equivalent to working full-time, 8 hours per day for five years or working 20 – 25 hours per week for ten years. Where Did the 10,000 Hour Rule Come From? Anders Ericsson was, apparently, the first to develop the 10,000 Hour Rule. He correlated excellence with hours of practice, in a study of three groups of students, ranked at the Berlin Academy of Music. He discovered the elite group of students had all put in approximately 10,000 hours of practice. The 10,000 Hour Rule Applies in a Wide Variety of Areas of Excellence Ericsson researched his rule, in relation to other areas of expertise, and found that it proved valid in all of them. Talent is Overrated Belief in “Natural” Talent Remains Widespread
The Theory of Change Last week, we kicked off Measurement Month with a discussion of why measurement matters. This week, we’ll dig into connecting measurement and design to build the metrics in from the beginning. Throughout this post I’ll use an example from a training program I worked with earlier in my career to illustrate how the measurement models can be put to work in training. The Alaska Example: Job Training for Teens In a my last job, I worked with Anchorage Youth Employment in Parks (YEP), a program hiring Anchorage teens to complete park improvement projects while learning job skills in trail building, construction, and habitat restoration. As program partners secured public job training funds for this program, it was essential to ensure YEP was successfully developing employment-ready teens. YEP used the Theory of Change model to guide the development of program metrics and evaluation. Step One: Identify GoalsStart your program design with the basics: Goals. Further reading:
Udacity in partnership with Pearson VUE announces testing centers At Udacity, we continue to create classes that are available to anyone, anywhere, for free. The next step in making the Udacity experience even better for our students is to make our classes count towards a credential that is recognized by employers. Today, we’re excited to announce a partnership with Pearson VUE, a worldwide provider of testing services. Again, this is strictly optional and you can still participate in our job placement program without taking a proctored exam. Each exam will be 90 minutes and will be composed of multiple choice and short answer questions. There will be a nominal fee required to take the exams, which will offset the cost of physical testing centers and staff. We will keep you updated on testing center locations and costs, but, in the meantime if you have any questions about Udacity exams in testing centers, please leave them in the comments below.
The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever | Wired Science Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig in the basement of Thrun's guesthouse, where they record class videos.Photo: Sam Comen Stanford doesn’t want me. I can say that because it’s a documented fact: I was once denied admission in writing. I took my last math class back in high school. Which probably explains why this quiz on how to get a computer to calculate an ideal itinerary is making my brain hurt. Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. People around the world have gone crazy for this opportunity. Aside from computer-programming AI-heads, my classmates range from junior-high school students and humanities majors to middle-aged middle school science teachers and seventysomething retirees. Solid understanding? Apply this rule to a computational problem and you can make efficient predictions based on otherwise unreliable data.
MOOCs—Implications for Higher Education “MOOCs,” an acronym for “massive open online courses,” denotes an important, possibly a revolutionary, development ineducation. These courses are online, free of charge, open to anyone in the world who has a laptop and an Internet connection, and offered by entities with strange names such as coursera, codeacademy, edX, khanacademy, and udacity. The offerors are mainly university consortia or university-affiliated. Moreover, and critically, the universities are elite universities like Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia. Not that online education is new; there are adult-education online courses such as are sold by The Teaching Company; there are even online college degree programs, offered mainly by for-profit colleges. The courses, like conventional college courses, are sequenced by difficulty, enabling the student to progress from beginner to advanced. The format seems superior to the conventional lecture. It may help to see this by thinking of MOOCs in demand and supply terms.