In+the+news

The press conference announcing edX - a new partnership between Harvard and MIT for online education - can be seen at the edX website.

Pre-schoolers' reading skills benefit from one modest change by teachers

A for-profit university sets tuition at $199 a month - the story is at the Chronicle of Higher Education. This is another example of entrepreneurs developing new ways of delivering education using technology. Too soon to tell how it will turn out, of course, but something like this is undoubtedly going to be important in the near future. With students coming out of regular undergraduate programs deeply in debt, and often with negligible marketable skills, anyone who can offer training that will lead to a decent job and offer that training at a small fraction of the cost of traditional university education, will have the proverbial better mousetrap.

A new study suggests that non-fiction reading produces greater gains in reading competence than the standard reading curriculum.

University of North Carolina Education professor Gregory Cizek is interviewd on standardized testing in The Economist. Here's an interesting passage from Dr. Cizek's ringing endorsement of testing:

"The typical statewide NCLB tests administered today in every American state are far and away the most accurate, free-of-bias, dependable, and efficient tests that a student will encounter in his or her schooling. They routinely measure whether students have learned important knowledge and skills, and they provide high-quality, useful information to students, parents, educators, and policymakers about achievement in core subjects."

In the United Kingdom, a revolution in education is underway in the move to "academies". What are academies? Here's the UK government's answer:


 * "Academies are publicly funded independent schools, free from local authority and national government control. Other freedoms include setting their own pay and conditions for staff, freedoms concerning the delivery of the curriculum, and the ability to change the length of their terms and school days."

More on the UK's move to academies - which sound very much like North American charter schools - here and here.

Should parents ask their three-year olds to "cram" nightly for a kindergarten entrance exam? Or is that child abuse?

There's even a website (TestingMom) and a book called Testing for Kindergarten available there. But this is problematic, in my view. The Boston Globe wrote about "pressure-cooker kindergarten" two years ago: "Pressure? This is kindergarten, the happy land of building blocks and singalongs. But increasingly in schools across Massachusetts and the United States, little children are being asked to perform academic tasks, including test taking, that early childhood researchers agree are developmentally inappropriate, even potentially damaging. If children don’t meet certain requirements, they are deemed “not proficient.” Frequently, children are screened for “kindergarten readiness” even before school begins, and some are labeled inadequate before they walk through the door."

Dr. Elizabeth Graue, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education traces this new approach to kindergarten to two influences:

"Two movements prompted these shifts. First, as the number of women in the workforce increased, so did the number of children in child care. Kindergarten's traditional role of socializing children into group experiences seemed less relevant. Second, the notion of early intervention captured the interest of policymakers and the public. When Hart and Risley (1985) noted that middle-class children typically heard 8 million more words in a year than children living in poverty did, investing in preschool programs seemed just the right solution. Justified as a way to close the achievement gap; reduce special education referrals, teen pregnancy, and incarceration rates; and enhance earning power in adulthood, these early intervention programs evolved over time to be more literacy and mathematics focused. Child outcomes, rather than children's experiences, became the major element of program evaluation."

Nicholas Negroponte of //One Laptop per Child// plans to throw tablets out of helicopter windows to children in remote villages - in the hope that the children will then be able to use the tablets to teach themselves. This follows earlier efforts to provide laptops to children, that Negroponte says have been successful: "The ability for children to teach themselves, and others, had been one of the most surprising aspects of the OLPC project to date. There are now around 500,000 children in Peru who are teaching their parents to read using OLPC and that was a stunning achievement, Negroponte said." Negropont refers to a field experiment in India in 1999 in which Professor Sugata Mitra put a computer in a hole in the wall in a slum. Within 25 minutes, without instruction, children who had access to the computer had figured out how to get online. You can read Professor Mitra's report on that project here. There is a talk TED talk by Professor Mitra, that is very much worth your time, on the videos page