This week was a cracker for articles!

To start us off I was really excited by Adam Boxer’s post on taking a content focussed approach to unifying the approach of a science department, developing ‘key questions’ that students are to be able to answer at each level, building these questions into retrieval practice so that the students retain the information, and explaining how this work can be built upon to scaffold higher order thinking (takeaway 1 below). I love detailed and practical posts like this! This one is complemented by takeaway 2, which is more detail on how exactly Adam and his team are doing their retrieval practice.

Next up, takeaway 3 was an exquisite article by Scott Barry-Kaufman on the role of luck in success. In this article Scott outlines how researchers have used computer models to stimulate lucky and unlucky interactions throughout people’s lifetimes, and how talent and luck interact to produce overall success. Aside from the findings on whether luck or talent are more important, I was also really interested in the implications of these studies on funding and grants, which is outlined towards the end of the article.

Takeaway 4 is about how parents can talk in such a way as to boost the linguistic abilities of their children later on. Turns out its more about turns of talk, rather than talking AT them. This links well to current work on oracy by Oracy Cambridge as well as to my ERRR interview with James Mannion. Well worth a listen. I’m really interested in developing my skills as a teacher to better foster what Jenny Gore calls ‘substantive communication’ in the classroom. Discussions where each contribution adds to the previous one. Watch this space.

Takeaways 5 through 7 are fun little titbits.

Takeaway 8 consists of my notes from a fascinating paper on measuring teacher impact, and how we’ve been missing the main point with an overemphasis on considering test-score value-added measures. I’ve included quite a few notes on this one, hope you enjoy 🙂 (all past TOTs here), sign up to get one of these emailed to you each week here.

Unifying a science department around content, via @adamboxer1

Scheduling and organising retrieval practice (short quizzes) with excel, via @adamboxer1

What's luck got to do with success? A systematic analysis of the subject, via @sbkaufman

Study on the importance of turns of talk to brain development, implications for teaching, via @wef

Some pithy comments on metacognition, via @kccresearch

Teaching comprehension has very limited effects, via @DTWillingham

Here's a related excerpt from Dan Willingham's ‘The Reading Mind', which I'm currently making my way through (slowly).

Is reading on a screen better or worse than paper?

Not a definitive answer here, but an interesting little bit of info.

Here's how the quote continues in the book…

Although it has not been fully investigated yet, researchers suspect that the three‐dimensionality of paper books may be important— it's easier to remember an event as occurring at the end of a book with the spatial cue that it happened on a page near the back of the book. These small effects seem to add up to a slight knock to comprehension when reading from a screen. If comprehension is compromised when reading on a screen, why do people love their Kindles? There are a couple of possibilities. First, it may be that the deficit to comprehension is smaller when reading narratives and light nonfiction (which is what people mostly read on e‐readers) than it is when reading the sort of challenging material found in textbooks. Second, the deficit may be equivalent for these two types of material, but people don't much care if they don't understand every last bit of a novel they read, whereas they know they must master details of textbooks. And indeed, people may like Kindles, but surveys show that consistent majorities of students prefer paper textbooks to their electronic counterparts.

Willingham, Daniel T.. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads (p. 163). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

To this I'd like to add that I've been very surprised that none of these paper vs. screen research studies seem to take into account the note-taking benefits of reading digitally. Whatever comprehension cost I bear by reading on screens (I personally don't buy hard copy books at all any more), to my mind is greatly outweighed by the benefits of having my whole library at my fingertips whenever I've got my laptops, having that entire library key word searchable, and having my workflow greatly improved through the use of digital tech. Long live screen reading I say…

When we measure teachers by test score value added, what do we miss?

In education it’s tempting for us to fall back upon easily collected metrics, such as test scores, and to mistakenly make what’s easily measured matter, rather than spending more time trying to work out how to measure what matters. Over time, we’ve made this mistake when trying to measure teachers by their student’s test scores. This paper, ‘What do test scores miss? The importance of teacher effects on non-test score outcomes’. Takes a new approach. () (ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/d…)

Fundamentally, Jackson wants to know which teacher impacts most influence high-school dropout, & high-school graduation. We've traditionally just considered test scores, could including behavioural impacts improve predicting power? Here are some of the metrics that Jackson uses:

That said, there is some overlap between test scores and these proxies for non-cognitive skills. And Jackson found the behavioural scores and test scores to be correlated.

Notwithstanding that, turns out the behavioural growth to the model worked wonders. Compared to a model only including academic growth, the inclusion of behavioural growth as a variable tripled the the identifiable teacher effect on high-school graduation.

But the inclusion of behavioural growth to the model added even more when it comes to predicting dropouts. This inclusion increased the explained variability of teacher effects on dropout by over five times.

Later on in the paper, Jackson explores causal interactions between a teacher’s increased behavioural effect, and increasing high-school graduation. Here’s a fun ‘back of the envelope calculation’.

That said, I know that Bryan Caplan would have some things to say about the causal link between high-school graduation and higher earnings (interesting podcast here: ) (econtalk.org/archives/2018/…)

Jackson also considers the subject dependency of these teacher effects. Turns out there’s a reason that pretty much every inspiring teacher movie is about an English teacher… Maths teachers tend to reduce dropout rates by simply making their students better at maths!

I personally have a natural tendency towards metricophilia, and am often tempted to unduly focus on test scores when considering the efficacy of my own teaching. I value this paper as a reminders that the impact of a teacher/my impact, depends on more than my impact on grades.

Related

One Reply to “TOT037: Unifying a science department, the role of luck in success, the importance of oracy, + more Twitter Takeaways”

Comments are closed.