What do you think about Education at this point?

"With all thy learning get understanding."

As a doctoral student in the school of education the number of opinions I have about education has increased dramatically.  Some opinions come experientially from sitting in so many classes (I'm pushing 100 credits in my degree).  One of the most common representations of a class is to describe the teacher.  The teacher is fun, or hard.  Or the workload is high.  Or, the tests are easy.  As learners are we too quick to rely on the quality of instruction as the metric of a class or learning experience?  How would our educational descriptions change if we were instead to talk about education in terms of the goals we set as learners and how well we individually accomplished our goals by overlaying the course objectives with our individual goals?

Recently, I was asked what I think about education, generally.  I have had some more thoughts come to mind since we had the conversation and wanted to write these thoughts down.

One of the best descriptions of the how the purposes of education have changed over time is from Christensen, Horn, and Johnson:

1. Preserve the Democracy and Inclucate Democratic Values
• needed to teach the "basics"--reading, writing, arithmetic
• teaching...social norms and assimilating them into a common American culture
• only an elite group of students continued education beyond grade school
2. Provide Something for Every Student
• 1890s and early 1900s,
• prepare everyone for vocations
• goal was to produce a sound workforce
• needed to extend high school to everyone
• 1954, Brown v. Board of Education - desegregation of schools
• 1957, following Sputnik, an outcry for more rigorous science and math courses
• 1960s, 1970s, schools provided enriching experiences: AP courses, art, music theory, Japanese, more than one band/choir, painting, photography, art appreciation, sports.
• High school graduates: 1900-8%, 1960-69%
• High school Course offerings: 1890-9, 1973-2100
• Four tracks in high school: college, commercial, vocational, and general
• 1973, 60% children enrolled in Kindergarten
3. Keep America Competitive
• US students not performing as well as other countries on certain standardized tests
• Average SAT scores on decline since 1963
• New focus - improve average test scores
• 1981, National Commission on Excellence in Education produced:
• 1983, "A Nation at Risk":
• Report identified several shortcomings in test scores
• Quantifiable outputs mattered more than inputs
• Japan disrupted America's manufacturing
• Comparison of schools was based on students' average test scores
• Interestingly, NAEP scores since 1980s have improved (by 2004)
4. Eliminate Poverty
• No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (pronounced: nickle-"B") places highest priority on average test scores as THE performance metric.
• In addition, not just average test scores for each school, but every child in every demographic must improve their test score.
• Performance measured on % of students who are proficient in core subjects.

I think each of these purposes or aims is a good aim.  I think each one has had both positive and negative impacts on education generally.  

In this context and in the context of the current economic malaise, I have some concerns.  These concerns are not faults of the educational system or those that lead it.  Nor do I suggest to understand fully the source or solutions of these concerns.  But here they are: 

• There is a force pushing education to fill the role of providing marketable skills in a different economic climate than has existed historically.  In the past economic decline has led many to retool or transition to additional skill sets.  The assumption is that additional skill acquisition will result in additional opportunities for contribution.  I'm not sure this assumption will continue in the future as it has in the past.  

And one final thought.  

• As I have considered my education and the purpose of my education amid the daily battles of research, study, reading, writing, rewriting, rereading, and rewriting again.  I take motivation from the possibility that what my education can do for me is open doors to contribute to others in ways I do not fully know now.  By turning my education into a way to contribute instead of a way to acquire I am motivated to continue day to day.  

UPDATE:

I just came across Max Van manen's description and would like to include it here.  It well describes from another perspective what I have written above:

What are we to make of the language of teaching that is thus made available to teachers?  Herein lies the irony of a profound contradiction: the language by way of which teachers are encouraged to interpret themselves and reflect on their living with children is thoroughly imbued by hope, and yet it is almost exclusively a language of doing--it lacks being.  We do not know how to talk of our being with children as a being present with hope for these children.  The language of objectives, aims, teacher expectations, intended learning outcomes, goals, or ends in view is a language of hope out of which hope itself has been systematically purged.  The language of aims and objectives, therefore, is a language of hopeless hope. 

The point is not that the curricular language of educational aims, objectives, or instructional intentions is wrong.  Seen in proper perspective this language is an administrative convenience.  Teachers have always planned what should go on in a particular course, class, or lesson.  The problem is that in an age in which the administrative and technological influences have penetrated into the very blood of our life-world, teachers and even parents seems to have forgotten a certain kind of understanding: what it means to bear children, to hope for children entrusted to their care.  Recalling what thus seems to be forgotten is a kind of recollecting of what belongs to the being of parenting and of what belongs to the being of teaching as in in loco parentis.  

The nihilistic forgetfulness of the essence of our being as teachers curiously turns loose a certain self-destructiveness.  This is evident in the problem lately referred to as teacher burn-out. 

Could this also be related to phd-burn-out?  Parent burn-out?  Van Manen (1990) also writes:

 The only way such teacher burn-out can be overcome is by recapturing in ourselves the knowledge that life is bearable--not in the sense that we can bear it, as we bear a burden which weighs us down, but in the sense that we know that life is there to bear us--as in the living with hope.

Word Cloud from Educational Data Mining 2014 Proceedings

I was curious.  I created a #wordcloud from the #EDM2014 proceedings.

Here is what I found:

I couldn't help but notice the emphasis on #students over #data.  Also it is interesting that #educators were in the top 6.  #model is an interesting one that is near the top.

Where is #instruction ?   It did not make the top 150 words.

#interactivity is low  (near the top)

#assessments in lower right. Smaller than I would have hoped.


What are your thoughts?

Word Cloud from literature review (in work)

Here is a 150-word cloud based on the 66 journal articles I've been reading recently as a part of my #literaturereview.  It is heavier in#data than I thought.  I'm glad #learning is the second biggest word.  Another surprise was the relatively small size of the word#assessment (top right).

Thanks  #nvivo10 !

The literature this comes from can be seen here.

Comments on "The Relative Effectiveness of Human Tutoring, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and Other Tutoring Systems."

First of all, this article is exhilarating. It is written clearly and well defended.  Conceptually, it addresses the core assumption in the adaptive learning, personalization, and intelligent tutoring systems research areas, which is that human tutoring is the gold standard of tutoring. This assumption became codified research in the late 70s and early 80s.  Educational research and the majority of educational technology innovation since then has been related to or influenced by this assumption.

Overall, I agree with the observation that the 2 sigma improvement in learning gains from tutoring found in Bloom's 1984 research can not be generalized as much as originally thought.  Vanlehn still classifies the research as exemplary and invites researchers to continue to seek improves to learning, but suggests that Blooms' research was an outlier.  The major limiting factor (in the case of Anania's third experiment) was a 90% minimum achievement level for mastery learning for the tutored-group compared to a 80% minimum achievement level for the not tutored group.

Specifically, I am impressed with the categorizations used to distinguish between substep-based tutoring, step-based tutoring, answer-based tutoring, and no tutoring.  This categorization correctly does not distinguish between different kinds of interaction media (text-based, voice, audio).  The hypothesis being tested was that a finer-grained level of interaction would yield greater learning gains.  Human tutoring being the most fine- grained level (because there are no limits on how detailed a human tutor can give feedback on) and answer tutoring the opposite end of the spectrum. This meta research discovered that the step-based tutoring, the substep-based tutoring and the human tutoring had about the same effect on learners.  And all were better than answer-based tutoring, which in turn was better than no tutoring.  The two nonintuitive results were, then, that substep-based tutoring does not have significantly better performance for learning than step-based tutoring.  The second big observation is that step-based tutoring (& substep-based tutoring) yielded very similar results to human tutoring.  Or in other words that human tutoring has not out performed step-based or substep-based tutoring.

My Take Aways
What are the research steps moving forward?
Could learning gains from substep-based tutoring be explored in "ill-defined tasks (e.g., design tasks where the outcome variable is novelty or creativity)," (Vanlehn 2011)?
What other outcome variables could be used to compare tutoring approaches?

Before I read this article I was going to write about the value of capturing inner loop (or step-based) student data to use to evaluate students' understanding of knowledge components.  More specifically, I have believed that improving diagnosis would improve the intervention.  Let's look more carefully at this notion as described by Vanlehn.  Vanlehn observes how human tutors do not know how to asses student learning, and do not know what to do with assessments of students when it is given to them.  But apparently, tutors infer which problems the student gets right and can use that in their tutoring.  So he has described why human tutors are not as good at diagnosing as we usually think.  But he has not built the case that ITS cannot become better at diagnosing student misconceptions.
 The article introduces a connection between student behavior and tutoring systems architecture that is a better categorization of learning than was understood previously.  This makes intuitive sense.  Learning is not solely dependent on the design of instruction, nor is it solely dependent on the behavior of the learner.  It make sense that both inputs would affect learning outcomes.  So, I've learned that my architectural-based model to improve learning is at most half the battle.  Yet I'm hopeful because I've found recent, valid research that I can extend using Christensen's theory building approach.

What is it about my research data or circumstance that can identify anomalies in Vanlehn's framework (in order to improve it)?


Another interesting question is, why do we continue to evaluate learning on learning gains?  If there is one thing I have learned from education, it is that there is more to education than grades.

Writing Weekly

This past week I read John Mauldin's description of how he approaches his weekly writing.  He writes:

As I sit down to write each week, I generally turn to the events and themes that most impressed me that week. Reading from a wide variety of sources, I sometimes see patterns that I feel are worthy to call to your attention. I’ve come to see my role in your life as a filter, a connoisseur of ideas and information. I don’t sit down to write with the thought that I need to be particularly brilliant or insightful (which is almighty difficult even for brilliant and insightful people) but that I need to find brilliant and insightful, and hopefully useful, ideas among the hundreds of sources that surface each week. And if I can bring to your attention a pattern, an idea, or thought stream that that helps your investment process, then I’ve done my job.

As I reflect on this, two thoughts come to my mind.  First, that I should write a weekly piece describing some of the ideas and concepts I have come across.  A weekly contribution could serve as both a form of instruction to others.  It could serve as a filter or idea broker for others interested in these topics.  It serves as a proxy network for connecting with others with similar interests.  Interestingly, John Mauldin's idea is not to be "brilliant or insightful."  He is not building a network based on his own superior ideas.  Instead he's trying to find brilliant and insightful, and, "hopefully useful, ideas" to share them (for free) to anyone interested.  This is one way idea-brokering creates value--by connecting ideas with people.  In fact, Mauldin is explicit to include different ideas, ideas from perspectives different from his own.  I think this is to add dimension and perspective to his own thoughts and reflections.  For me, John Mauldin's weekly piece helps me stay informed of the financial and economic world better than traditional news media or other outlets.  I enjoy reading them.  I think I enjoy it in part because he writes specifically to the nonconsumer of investment literature--those who don't have access to or can't afford (in time or money) the high cost of professional financial and economic analysis. His writing, is not necessarily interactive--meaning I'm not contributing.  But, for me, it is surely informative and useful.  I am able to form an opinion.

The second thought that comes to mind from reading Mauldin's letter is the idea, or hope, that as I write weekly, I can improve my own thoughts and ideas and the thoughts and ideas of my readers--my connected neighbors.  There are two parts to this thought.  1) Because writing is an activity that has opportunity costs--meaning the time I spend writing is time I don't spend doing something else--I must make decisions, judgments, or evaluations of what to write.  I can't write down everything I read.  Besides what is the value of rewriting everything that has already been written down?  Writing down ideas affords me the opportunity to evaluate what I read.  I hypothesize that as I write week after week I will begin to improve how I choose what to write based in part on what I've written.  2) The second part to improving the thoughts and ideas of connected neighbors and me is to give, receive, and share feedback on what is written.  I don't know what form or frequency the feedback will take.  As my writing is refined or becomes more focused the kind and frequency of feedback may stabilize.  Maybe more significantly, you, my connected neighbor, can improve your own evaluative skill as you see and seek value in your circumstance.  I'm looking forward to it.  Let's go.

Stake Conference Adult Session

Here we are.  Saturday evening at the Stake Center.  This might be the first time in over a decade when Adult session in stake conference fills half of the gym!  I don't know what the head count is (I wonder if anyone counts like is done on Sunday).  But it's impressive.  The topic is hastening the work.  I'm so glad to hear reference to Clayton Christensen's book.  I would love to share my thoughts about Christensen's book.  I think there are some great lessons for us to learn.  When I write us, I'm referring to me, my family, and especially my son.  In fact, one of the things I can do to help my son in his efforts to serve others.

One of the great concepts of Christensen's book is the benefit of associating with an institution that seeks to serve others.  For many individuals, being given an opportunity to serve others is an attractive reason to join an organization. 

I didn't start wearing a bike helmet until I had kids

In fact, it wasn't really until my kids starting riding bikes.

I know, I should have started wearing a helmet years before.  But we don't always do what we know we should do.