What an excellent conversation. Check out the following:
A Dinosaur of Education ( http://fabiano.magic-city-news.com/ )
A Dinosaur of Education. From James G. Fabiano ... I received a letter from a
student I had many years ago. He was a good student who worked hard and ...
fabiano.magic-city-news.com/
It is also interesting to note that many successful folks are dyslectic.
Sincere Regards,
Deb
>>> Maria Droujkova 3/12/2010 8:47 AM >>>
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 8:30 AM, Caroline Meeks
wrote:
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Maria Droujkova wrote:
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 1:48 AM, wrote:
The strongest argument against is that any easily administered testing is
biased towards lower level skills (as defined in Bloom's taxonomy). That would
be OK, depending on how the data is used. Any attempt to modify teaching in
response, biases the teaching towards the lower level skills.
In the Australian case, schools will be forced to confine their teaching to
lower order skills to maintain their ranking, preserve enrolments and avoid
criticism and funding cuts. In the case of RTI, it risks defining student
progress by a narrow subset of education skills and overly concentrating
teaching on this narrow subset.
Tony
Tony,
This is my perennial response to the existing programs of this sort. When I
plan interventions, I start with meaning and significance of math in the life
of the person, their family and their social networks. Then some major concepts
areas that can support and advance these meanings become apparent. From there,
skills and tasks within concept areas can be mapped and developed.
What is highly problematic is that all the existing mainstream heavy testing
machinery is at the level of skills. And what I am doing on the individual
basis is not currently scalable. I can't even explain many parts of this highly
intuitive, expertise-based process.
To address this problem, I just started to work on a crowdsourced rubric that
will probe personal meaning and significance of math, and later used during
interventions to help people track growth of math's significance in their
lives. I am now polling local parents who work with me, with some very fruitful
initial brainstorming happening among them. I am also meeting with several
people who have large QA sites or projects that can be used to aggregate
"sparse" info for crowdsourced projects. This may not happen fast, because of
my other tasks such as the math game design project, but we will see what
happens. I want this tool to measure the impact of my projects, which we
currently observe in a purely qualitative, case-study manner.
Maria,
I am going to shift the conversation back to reading because there just isn't
enough data on math yet to talk about it. But I'm making the assumption that
the neurology has an analog in math.
Although I of course agree with the need for meaning and significance there is
also a risk in your approach.
As a dyslectic let me tell you how painful this type of approach can be. When
you can't read or spell or remember things the way other people can and you
really are motivated, want to, understand why you should etc. Then people keep
over and over again talking and working with you on motivation, understanding
of meaning and significance etc. let me tell you first hand this is very hard
on the child's self image. You are sending the message that if only you wanted
to you could do this just like everyone else.
The science says that isn't true for all children. The fMRIs show that
dyslectic children are not using their brain in the same way and that these
difference continue into adulthood and continue to have effects even after the
child has learned to read using different pathways.
So one approach has the risk of ignoring higher level thinking and reasoning.
The other approach has the risk of ignoring actual malfunctions in low level
brain based thinking. And if caught at an early age, and the correct
interventions are done, these issues can be mitigated significantly.
To me its clear that we need to stop arguing about which approach is better and
put on our engineer hats and figure out how to efficiently do both.
Caroline,
This is an excellent point and a great personal story to go with it. I am going
to refer to that image when talking about the issues.
Good BALANCE between three directions is crucial. The three directions for math
are meaning and significance; conceptual understanding; and procedural fluency.
I believe similar directions exist for other areas, as well, though they may
have different names.
For math, there are plenty of tools to measure procedural fluency AND effects
of interventions on procedural fluency. There are also some tools for measuring
conceptual understanding, though fewer, most significantly problem solving
tools, project-based rubrics, and essay-type tools ("explain why..."). There
are motivation tools and anxiety to
