I can’t believe that the public swallows the educrats’ argument against testing that, teachers will only teach to the test.  This is a bad thing?  Hellooo!  That’s what they’re supposed to be doing, and what would they be doing otherwise?  The tests should reflect the syllabi—that’s another, hellooo.

“The way we typically do things in education seems almost reverse-engineered to produce the least learning.”

Absolutely!
“The Brain that Changes Itself” by Norman Doidge explains very well the physiological base of learning.
Practice, correct practice, physically changes our brain and makes use “smarter”.

It is about time, that some of the research from the LD and ADHD files are being taken, and being applied to the wider population.

“In an effort to gain widespread acceptance of their work, researchers are delving deeper into the “testing effect,” or as some scientists now prefer to call it, the “retrieval effect.”

What is it about retrieving information, whether in a pop quiz, flashcards or even a classroom game of Jeopardy, that is so effective at creating long-term memories? Why is it better than rereading a chapter or reviewing notes?

There are a number of theories. Some involve the chemical or physical changes that occur in the brain when we summon a memory and reprocess it. Dr. Szpunar and his colleague have found evidence the testing helps protect against what scientists call “proactive interference,” something most of us have experienced when we feel overwhelmed by too much information.

It happens when you’ve been studying for an hour and feel that you can no longer take anything else in. The amount of material you absorbed in the first half hour makes it hard to digest what you read in the second half, says Dr. Szpunar. In one experiment, he found that students, asked to learn five lists of words, did significantly better on the fifth list if they were tested after each one. He is doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and is hoping to use brain imaging to learn more.”

Proactive Interference is a problem among the LD children. My child has a major problem with it, but the majority of the population will have a lesser degree of proactive interference , than the LD population. I discovered years ago, the technique of short quizzes after a short period of studying, rather than the one is pushed by the school -  by reading the material as a review, or for studying purposes. By just reading the material, it has never been as effective for my child, and short quizzes triumphs. These days, my child does it on her own, except for the big tests and exams.

“Joan Peskin, an associate professor at OISE, says it would be interesting to know whether extra quizzes are as effective as other methods that encourage active learning, in which children do more than listen to the teacher and take notes. One technique is to divide students into pairs or small groups. One student will summarize a section of the material they’ve just covered. The other will critique the oral summation and make additions. They switch roles for each section.

Quizzing is not in vogue and is almost a pejorative term in the education community, she says, but that does a disservice to students, especially those who struggle in the classroom.

“In the education community, we don’t look enough at the evidence, and the evidence seems to be quite strong,” she says. “It shows students’ learning greatly improves.”

The so-called active learning that is a regular part of the classroom, is not effective for my LD child. In many cases, she needed both to understand the material and permanent automatic retrieval.

I am so glad to see this being discussed in a Canadian newspaper, because it is one of the items that I did at home, that was actively discouraged by the school. And boy, did they come up with the reasons why I should stopped my activities. Made worse, when I tried to explain proactive interference and how it impacts my child and her learning.

“Proactive Interference is the “forgetting [of information] due to interference from the traces of events or learning that occurred prior to the materials to be remembered”.[5]

Proactive and Retroactive Interference Proactive Interference occurs when in any given context, past memories inhibit an individual’s full potential to retain new memories. It has been hypothesized that forgetting from working memory would be non-existent if not for proactive interference.[6] A real life example of Proactive Interference is if a person had the same credit card number for a number of years and memorized that number over time. Then if the credit card was compromised, and a new card dispensed to the client, the person would then have great difficulty memorizing the new credit card number as the old credit card number is so ingrained in their minds. The competition between the new and old credit card numbers causes Proactive Interference.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proactive_interference

Nancy,

“The so-called active learning that is a regular part of the classroom, is not effective for my LD child.”

I agree with you 100%.  I would also emphasize that it is not effective for most students.  I find it interesting that people who advocate such methods are not classroom teachers.  If they were, they would know that there are many drawbacks to these ‘active learning’ activities.

The chief of these is group dynamics.  In school, unlike sports teams (the usual analogy), students actively encourage the others NOT to actively learn the material.  The main reason for this is ‘rational self interest’.  On sports teams children encourage each other to do better because they know that the team will play better and have a better chance of winning.  In school, it is the opposite.  If students do better as a group, then those that are struggling will have to work even harder to try to catch up.  Therefore, it is easier to bring the group down to their level and get nothing done.

Teachers colleges, administrators, researchers and other proponents of these self-discovery techniques will then say that it is up to the teacher to keep the groups under control and focussed on the material at hand.  But here’s the Catch-22 (and this is what most proponents miss):  if the teacher does guide the group - you’ve lost self-discovery.

The second main drawback is that even when the group is focussed on the material, it is often a case of the blind leading the blind.  Group work and pair work exercises are fine in Grade 2 when the students are learning to add two digit numbers (well, there are better ways, but let’s leave that for now ).  However, how many of us learned the Second Law of Thermodynamics in physics class by ‘discovery’?  How about nuclear fission?  The Fall of the Roman Empire? Inverting a Matrix? ...

My child never did like group activities, In fact she detests working within a group, due to all the bad memories of being told by others to be quiet, while the smarter ones did all the work. What really got her goat, when she knew the group was on the wrong track, and than she would try to correct it. By the middle of grade 4, any group work was brought home, and she did it on her own, complaining how the kids were wrong, and she was right. My point is, discovery learning no matter what it is, and what age - a child still needs to be guided. If a child goes off on a wrong track, an adult should be there to correct or to explain why a child is on the wrong track.

For example, my child when she was under 5, spent a lot of time in the backyard, looking at the dew on a single grass blade to looking at bugs to the small details, and would draw conclusions. Sometimes she was right, and sometimes she was wrong. As her parent, I would sit down and tell her why she was right or wrong, and if need be I further explain it by using a book. The next time, she went out in the backyard, she look at that ant hill or the blade of grass differently, using her prior knowledge to arrive at the next level of knowledge.

My beef about discovery learning in school, is that there is no such thing as one correct answer, but a myriad of correct answers, no matter how off-course the children are in their thinking. A lot of children need the prior knowledge before attempting to discover things on their own. 

What is worse, are the discovery methods being used, or what is called active learning, that ignores the cognitive science knowledge. I learned about proactive interference from the first psycho-educational assessment, and I was soon on the Internet exploring it. It certainly pointed me in the right direction, and it was the beginning of a new world called cognitive science. One would think, that teachers would be aware of proactive interference and how it impacts learning. At the very least, the importance of it, when dealing with LD children. One of the top reasons for parents to pushed for accommodations when dealing with exams, is the proactive interference. A quiet room, is much more preferred than the noisy classroom of 25 kids.

Discovery work is just plain stupid.  how are children supposed to explore and learn on their own when they’re poor at reading and/or math?  This bad curricula has to be got rid of.

Group activity continues in post-secondary school. We were quite surprised at how much is was being used to be honest. The difference for our kids was that in post-secondary groups evaluation includes peer reviews.
When each student is paying for their learning you’d be surprised at how much more honest and candid they become about contribution to the group, the project and how the dynamic changes from what they were used to in high school.

We have a real shot at improvement if we can get Tim Hudak in.
With McGuinty,we`re immobolized.
-we`re still whole language.
Discovery learning and all that jazz.

... and speaking of testing, the latest PISA results are in.  Canada has dropped from second to fifth.  Tops on the list are now Korea and Finland, then Singapore and Hong Kong.  The ones we said should be there.

Not at all surprising. I predict it will get worse, based on the summary PISA report. It makes an interesting read, where the English speaking countries are dropping, compared to the non-English speaking countries. Perhaps the powers to be in education in Canada, should give their head a shake, and start to review the practices/methods that creates the inequities in the first place. I noted two things on the report that is of interest. One, where there is ability grouping, there is higher achievement among all, and two, there is a suggestion that higher teacher training is far superior to small class sizes.

I agree Nancy.  As long as by higher teacher training, they don’t just mean ‘more of the same’.

I don’t share your enthusiasm for Hudak and education Joanne. He will not touch it for the short term, and be very cautious not to upset the status-quo moving forward.

Wayne - re: latest PISA results - from 2nd to 5th - I can see Dean/Doug’s spin machine revving up to explain THAT away as we speak.