Improving Student Learning A Strategic Plan for Education Research and Its Utilization (1999) / Chapter Skim
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2 Focusing Our Efforts: Four Key Questions
2 Focusing Our Efforts: Four Key Questions
Pages 21-48
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From page 21... ...
· How can student engagement in the learning process and motivation to achieve in school be increased? · How can schools and school districts be transformed into organizations that have the capacity to continuously improve their practices?
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From page 22... ...
To be sure, the research literature covers many additional domains of knowledge; the reform movement embodies other worthy goals for American education, such as civic responsibility and arts experience. The committee chose these topics because they lie at the heart of education: together they hold potential for significantly improving student learning.
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From page 23... ...
This knowledge about the efficacy of metacognitive processes indicates how marked a departure current learning theory has made from the behaviorist models that prevailed for much of the twentieth century. The earlier theories focused on the relationships between observable stimuli and observable responses; little consideration was given to the processes of the learner's mind or the social and cultural context in which learning takes place.
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From page 24... ...
Early experience creates strong convictions about how the world operates; faced with facts or notions that conflict with these convictions, young learners may react with disbelief that they are unwilling to suspend. Children will take impressive imaginative leaps to avoid relinquishing cherished misconceptions (see Vosniadou and Brewer, 1989~.
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From page 25... ...
They need to be prepared to assess children's thinking abilities, to decide when to make connections between existing knowledge and school learning and when to help the child overcome misconceptions or naive understandings. T E A C H ~ N G F O R D E E P U N D E R S T A N D ~ N G Another line of investigation suggested by cognitive and learning research involves the development of pedagogical approaches that integrate the three critical elements of deep understanding: factual grounding, awareness of the structure of knowledge in a discipline, and metacognitive or self-monitor · · · ~ sing achv~hes.
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Educational technologies can help students develop models of what they are learning. They make the learners' reasoning processes public and inspectable (Schauble, 1996; Chapman, 1996~.
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From page 27... ...
The emphasis shifts from the individual learner to the environmental supports for learning, including intellectual tools like language, other minds, and the surrounding culture with all of its symbols and rituals that help to organize events. These things tools, people, culture strongly influence what a person regards as meaningful (Egan, 1997~.
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From page 28... ...
The social perspective has had a significant effect on how classroom learning is studied, and it has produced research on local variations in classroom activities and organization (Heber, 1981; Heath, 1983; Rohlen, 1983; Camden, 1988; Tobin et al., 1989~. The social perspective has also focused scholarly attention on understudied populations of learners and revealed learning differences among children of differing social class and learning variations associated with race and ethnicit~v (Ginsburg, 1997; Brice-Heath, 1981, 1983~.
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From page 29... ...
While some aspects of problem solving take place "in the head," many others take place "in the world." Bits and pieces of the approach are visible in many schools in the use of aides and volunteers in the classroom, team teaching within and between schools, and the inclusion of communit~v members and academic or industrial specialists in school activities. There have been some exciting experiments with programs like cooperative learning, but there is much to be learned about how to translate the insights from the research on distributed learning into programs that improve student learning in the average school.
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From page 30... ...
, Getting By: What American Teenagers Really Think About Their Schools, indicated that two-thirds of teenagers readily admit that they could do much better in school if they tried. Half of the teenagers surveyed by Public Agenda say their schools fad!
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can be particularly oppressive. For example, African American students appear to resist intellectual but not athletic competition; constant messages about the academic inferiority of black students negatively affect black students' perceptions, resulting F O C U S I N G O U R E F F O RT S
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From page 32... ...
If parental beliefs about the nature of intelligence and learning influence children's engagement in learning generally, parent's attitudes can also influence children's school performance in specific subjects or domains. The most studied domain is literacy (DeBaryshe, 1995; Spiegel, 1994~.
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One study (Brophy and Good, 1974) found that about one-i of classroom teachers show patterns of highly differentiated behavior: they call on low achievers less often to answer classroom questions or perform demonstrations, wait less time for them to answer questions, praise them less frequently after successful responses, criticize them more frequently for incorrect responses, and do not stay with them in failure situations (by providing clues or asking foDow-up questions)
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From page 34... ...
Discovery learning, an approach developed by cognitive scientists to encourage students to discover for themselves concepts and connections which underlie a body of knowledge, can be more engaging than a traditional lecture (Simon, 1996~. But not every subject can be made intrinsically interesting to every student.
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Ongoing work in District 2 in New York City, describes the measures designed to provide students with "an identification with the aims of schooling, a sense of belonging within a learning community, and a commitment even a sense of responsibility to participate actively in all learning activities" (Resnick et al., 1996:33~. One design element is for instructional activities to focus on developing competence rather than just displaying current levels of ability.
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In particular, the propensity to dropout has been linked to absenteeism in the primary grades, a history of poor academic performance in the early years, problems with social adjustment, and children's behavioral style, particularly aggressiveness (Ensminger and Slusarcick, 1992; Lloyd, 1978; Kaplan and Luck, 1977~. There are strong ties between retention in grade in primary school and later dropping out, even with measures of academic performance controlled (Stroup and Robins, 1972; Lloyd, 1978; Cairns et al., 1989~.
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From page 37... ...
But discovery learning is not an automatic motivator. Research indicates that in order to be effective, discovery learning experiences must strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity, build on the previous knowledge and experience of the learner, and offer opportunities for discovery at a pace that sustains student interest.
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A strategic program of research in the field of motivation could synthesize the many strands of motivation research, seeding the process of integration and theory building, promoting and linking theory-based intervention programs designed to increase student engagement and motivation, along with Tongitudinal studies of their effectiveness. · ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ · ~ · ~ · ~ · ~ · ~ ~ ~ ~ · ~ · ~ · ~ · ~ · ~ · ~ ~ ~ ~ · ~ · ~ · ~ ~ TRANSFORMING SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL DISTRICTS FOR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT Education as an institution, like other organizations, is subject to enormous inertia, fixed in place by tradition and the political forces of school boards, community expectations, administrative capacity, unions, and finance systems.
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Among the useful ideas to emerge is that an organization predisposed to learn will develop processes for making tacit knowledge explicit so that knowledge observations about manufacturing glitches or service problems, about work habits, about customers and suppliers can be gathered, sifted, and applied. The literature on learning organizations has focused attention on the idea of organizational culture.
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From page 40... ...
An associated theme is the development of a professional community among teachers and administrators, among school districts and schools, characterized by such things as shared values, collaboration, shared decision making, professional development, and taking collective responsibility for students' learning. One study of successful professional communities in five inner-city schools analyzed both the characteristics of their
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From page 41... ...
identified three characteristics of professional communities associated with higher levels of student achievement: clarity of shared purpose; collaboration to implement the shared purpose; and collective responsibility for student learning (see also Ball, 1997; Putnam and Borko, 1997; Resnick et al., 1991~. The sustained collaborative work of teachers, researchers, and administrators at the school and district level in reform experiments is beginning to provide empirical evidence that supports the notion of professional community.
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From page 42... ...
Education research needs to find a new paradigm if it is to produce major advances in our understanding of how schools and school districts function and how they can be made more effective as organizations. This will require the collaboration of researchers in organizational sociology, social psychology, political science, and education.
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From page 43... ...
These findings are troubling, not least because much of the research on cognitive development, motivation, and organizational change argues for instructional practices and systemic reform models that differ dramatically from traditional schooling. But these ideas have reached a very small percentage of the children now enrolled in the nation's 87,000 elementary and secondary schools (Elmore, 1996~.
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. In this pursuit, we believe there are two distinct lines of inquiry and one mode of operation that are strong candidates for a strategic education research and utilization plan; they are outlined in the rest of this section.
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From page 45... ...
The research to date suggests that it is during crises that policy makers look to research for help, when the issues are new and people have not made commitments on way or another, or when issues have been fought to a stalemate. · If researchers knew better how to communicate with policy makers, would they be more receptive to research?
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From page 46... ...
It is this sort of partnership that the SERP plan envisions at the core of a long-term program of research on improving the use of research knowledge in schools and school districts. And it suggests the final group of research questions: · Is research that is the product of the collaborative efforts of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers more salient to the needs of the user communities?
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From page 47... ...
to do the hard work required for high achievement; and where students learn, that is, the characteristics of schools and school districts that facilitate and motivate high performance.
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From page 48... ...
Once a school has more than 40 percent low-income students, there are few programs that have a significant effect on achievement levels. Going to some schools risks failure in something as crucial as learning to read (National Research Council, 1998~.
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