Tag: The Reflective Educator (page 27 of 43)

May 22, 2012 / 3 Comments

Research on word processors in student writing

I was looking for research on whether word processors are effective when students are learning to write. So far the research is supportive, but I can’t find any research done recently. I suspect there must be research that is current and supports students using word processors. Please let me know if you have any research more recent than what I have below.

Bangert-Drowns, R., (1993). The Word Processor as an Instructional Tool: A Meta-Analysis of Word Processing in Writing Instruction, Review of Educational Research, p69-93, doi:10.3102/00346543063001069

Abstract: Word processing in writing instruction may provide lasting educational benefits to users because it encourages a fluid conceptualization of text and frees the writer from mechanical concerns. This meta-analysis reviews 32 studies that compared two groups of students receiving identical writing instruction but allowed only one group to use word processing for writing assignments. Word processing groups, especially weaker writers, improved the quality of their writing. Word processing students wrote longer documents but did not have more positive attitudes toward writing. More effective uses of word processing as an instructional tool might include adapting instruction to software strengths and adding metacognitive prompts to the writing program.

Lewis, R., Ashton, T., Haapa, B., Kieley, C., Fielden, C., (1999). Improving the Writing Skills of Students with Learning Disabilities: Are Word Processors with Spelling and Grammar Checkers Useful?, Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary Journal, retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=EJ594984 on May 22nd.

Abstract: A study involving 106 elementary and secondary students with learning disabilities and 97 typical peers found that students who used spelling and grammar checkers were more successful than transition group students in reducing mechanical errors, particularly non-real-word spelling errors, and in making positive changes from first to final drafts.

Owston, R., Murphy, S., Wideman, H., (1992). The Effects of Word Processing on Students’ Writing Quality and Revision Strategies, Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Oct., 1992), pp. 249-276

Abstract: This study examines the influence of word processing on the writing quality and revision strategies of eighth-grade students who were experienced computer users. Students were asked to compose two expository papers on similar topics, one paper using the computer and the other by and, in a counterbalanced repeated measures research design. When students were writing on the computer, "electronic videos” were taken of a subsample of students using an unobtrusive screen-recording software utility that provided running accounts of all actions taken on the com- puter. Papers written on computer were rated significantly higher by trained raters on all four dimensions of a holistic/analytic writing assessment scale. Analysis of the screen recording data revealed that students were more apt to make microstructural rather than macrostructural changes to their work and that they continuously revised at all stages of their writing (although most revision took place at the initial drafting stage). While the reason for the higher ratings of the computer-written papers was not entirely clear, student experience in writing with computers and the facilitative environment provided by the computer graphical interface were considered to be mediating factors.

May 22, 2012 / 1 Comment

Student brings typewriter to class

In this video, shared with me by Philip Moscovitch, a student has brought a type-writer into class. Is this perhaps, as Philip suggested, a protest against the use of an old pedagogy by bringing in an old technology? Does the use of a typewriter to record notes seem a bit ridiculous? Is it even more ridiculous that the student, as he states at the end of the video, can download the notes for the course?

A well motivated, literate student can learn as much or more from a good set of notes (or a decent textbook) for a course. Why come to class at all if all that is going to happen is a repetition of the notes?

May 16, 2012 / 6 Comments

Can you teach thinking?

Derek Muller: "Can you teach a general thinking skill?"

John Sweller: "I don’t believe you can. It can be learned, it is learned, and it is biologically primary…If you are talking about a teachable thinking skill, one you have to specify it, you have to provide evidence that it has been taught and learned and that you get a different response from people who have learnt that skill and been taught that skill and people who haven’t been."

So here’s my challenge. Can anyone find evidence of a "general thinking skill" that has been taught and then learnt by students?

May 16, 2012 / 1 Comment

Scientific method

Science lab
(Image credit: Jack Amick)

When many people think of science, they think of the tools of science, much like the photo of a traditional science lab above shows. They think of beakers, and hypotheses, and labs, and think that this is science. Playing with the tools of scientists does not make one a scientist, or become a scientist. Thinking like a scientist does.

Science is a way of thinking, a way of reasoning about the world. People who reject science, reject reason. Science is not a linear process, it is a dynamic way of thinking and collaborating about the world.

There are flaws with this way of thinking, as there are with all ways of knowing. Science cannot answer ethical questions. Scientific results get fabricated, exaggerated, and misunderstood all the time, since they are produced and understood by human beings. However, the process of reproducing results with additional experiments ensures that, over time, bad ideas get weeded out of what we know to be true about the world. Ideas which are correct get re-inforced by additional experiments.

Teaching science as a series of facts someone else has discovered about the world does not give them the opportunity to learn about the process through which those "facts" were discovered. The process, in this case, is far more important than the result. Our schools need to spend far more time dealing the messiness of the process of science, and less time focusing on the results of the scientific process. Students learn process through practicing it.

We also need to recognize that the standard science lab write-up emphasizes a linear process of science, which does not exist anywhere in the scientific community. Following someone else’s lab to learn how to use the tools of science is fine, but one must actually design experiments for oneself in order to learn the process. We need to de-sitcom science education.

May 15, 2012 / 1 Comment

Toxins in schools

No peanuts allowed
(Image credit: Schockwellenreiter)

It occured to me today that schools spend an enormous amount of effort to ensure that they are free of toxins for students. We ban common allergens from the school that are life-threatening for some students (like peanuts) and we build our schools so they do not contain asbestos insulation or lead pipes. Some schools are very concerned about the effects of wifi on students, and so have banned wifi from their schools. When we have a belief as a community that something is toxic for our students, schools rally to protect students from that toxin.

So why are so many schools toxic places for LGBTQ youth?

Obviously many schools have made an effort to develop cultures which are supportive of all of their students, but there are places where physical toxins are banned, and emotional ones are encouraged and even nurtured.

May 14, 2012 / 2 Comments

Paulo Freire reflects on his life

Interview from 1996 World Conference on Literacy, organized by the International Literacy Institute, Philadelphia, USA.

I watched this interview of Paulo Freire, and I thought what he had to share is so important that I took the time to transcribe the interview, which you can read below.

A conversation with Paulo Freire

"If you ask me Paulo, what is in being in the world, that calls your own attention to you? I would say to you that I am a curious being, I have been a curious being, but in a certain moment of the process of being curious, in order to understand the others, I discover that I have to create in myself a certain virtue, without which it is difficult for me to understand the others; the virtue of tolerence.

It is through the exercise of tolerance that I discover the rich possibility of doing things and learning different things with different people. Being tolerant is not a question of being naive. On the contrary, it is a duty to be tolerant, an ethical duty, an historical duty, a political duty but it does not demand that I lose my personality.

On a critical way of thinking

Even so it is for me, it should be a great honor to be understood as a specialist in literacy. I have to say, no because my main preoccupation since I started working 45 years ago had to do with the critical understanding of education. Of course, thinking of education in general, I also had to think about literacy which is a fundamental chapter of education as a whole.

Nevertheless, I also had strong experiences in this chapter of adult literacy, for example, in Brasil and outside of Brasil. The more I think about what I did and what I proposed the more I understand myself as a thinker and a kind of epistimologist proposing a critical way of thinking and a critical way of knowing to the teachers in order for them to work differently with the students.

On language and power

Who says that this accent or this way of thinking is the cultivated one? If there is one which is cultivated is because there is another which is not. Do you see, it’s impossible to think of language without thinking of ideology and power? I defended the duty of the teachers to teach the cultivated pattern and I defended the rights of the kids or of the adults to learn the dominant pattern. But, it is necessary in being a democratic and tolerant teacher, it is necessary to explain, to make clear to the kids or the adults that their way of speaking is as beautiful as our way of speaking. Second, that they have the right to speak like this. Third, nevertheless, they need to learn the so-called dominant syntax for different reasons. That is, the more the oppressed, the poor people, grasp the dominant syntax, the more they can articulate their voices and their speech in the struggle against injustice.

In the last moments of my life

I am now almost 75 years old, sometimes when I am speaking like right now, I am listening to Paulo Freire 40 years ago. Maybe you could ask me, but Paulo, look then you think you did not change? No, I change a lot, I change everyday but in changing, I did not change, nevertheless some of the central nucleus of my thought. The understanding of my own presence in the reality. How for example, could I change the knowledge or the experience which makes me know that I am curious? No, I was a curious boy, and I am a curious old man. That is, my curiousity never stops. Maybe in the last moments of my life, I will be curious to know what it means to die.

My philosophical conviction is that we did not come to keep the world as it is. We came into the world in order to remake the world. We have to change it." Paulo Freire (1921 – 1997)

Of course, Paulo’s arguments on language and power can be adapted to not just apply to the indigenous people to whom he was referring, but to any group without power. Teach your students that words have power, and that you respect their words, whatever their source, but to learn the "dominant" culture’s words is to empower yourself, and to give yourself a voice.

May 13, 2012 / 5 Comments

Teaching probability

My colleague found an activity to do with his 5th grade class, similar to this one. Basically, he gave the students 10 coins each, and asked them to put the 10 coins on a number line (with numbers from 1 to 12) with a partner. Each round they roll 2 six-sided dice, find the total, and remove a coin from their number line if it matches the roll. They keep going until one of the two students has no coins on the number line.

At first, most student’s starting positions looked like this:

Student 1 - flat distribution

or this:

Student 2 - another flat distribution

At the end of the lesson, we played a 5 coin version of the game, and one student’s paper (after 1 round) looked like this:

Student 3 - All 4 coins on number 7

Unfortunately, although most of the students did notice that some numbers came up more frequently than others, as evident by their distributions looking a bit less flat, and bit more centred on 7 on the number line, many of the students still had obvious misconceptions of probabilty. Students made comments like:

"If I spin around twice before rolling, I get a more lucky roll."

"I got a few 11s last game, so I’m going to put a few more coins on 11."

"8 is my lucky number! I’m going to put 3 coins on 8."

"I need to spread out my numbers so I have more chance of getting a coin taken on each roll."

Our plan for next class is to have students switch up groups, discuss insights they’ve had on the game, play a couple of rounds, switch them up again, while we walk around and see what strategies they use. Hopefully we’ll see less students spinning around in order to improve their dice luck…

I also asked for resources on Twitter for using a probability game as part of a lesson on probability, and had the following 5 games recommended (all of these look good because they are relatively easily produced and used in an elementary school classroom).

Pig via @delta_dc
Can’t stop via @Fad23
Decimal race via @mathhombre
Farkle via @bennettscience and @mathhombre
Press your luck via @mathhombre

Update:

I wrote a simulation to test to see what distribution of coins is the best. I am somewhat surprised by the results. Check it out here.

Why am I surprised by the results? My intuition about how this game works failed me. I thought that the likelihood of each number coming up was the most important factor in deciding a good strategy for the game. It turns out that one has to balance out the knowledge of the likelihood of each number being rolled with having a selection of numbers available. It may be that the probability of a 7 being rolled is 6/36 but the probability of a 6 or a 7 being rolled is 11/36.

In fact, it turns out that having a selection of different rolls available is fairly important. I updated the simulation so I could choose the number of coins to place, and with 3 coins placed, choosing 4, 5, 6 is better than having all three coins on the number 7. With 2 coins, it is better to choose 6 and 8 than to put both of the coins on 7 (although 6, 7 is better than 6, 8 – but only slightly).

There are three messages I get from running this simulation.

One should, in general, not make too many intuitive assumptions about how probability works, particularly with somewhat complicated examples.
One should be careful how one uses even simple games to teach probability. All of the students saw that 7 was the most common number, but their intuition of "choosing a wide spread" is a valuable one for this game, but it doesn’t help us get at the idea of some numbers being more likely than others. I think we’d need a different game for that.
It is probably a good idea to build the simulation before you play the game with students, if at all possible.

May 13, 2012 / 0 Comments

PISA results from 2000 to 2009 for Canada

I noticed through this blog, that the CBC had published the PISA results for Manitoba (released as charts) for 2000, 2003, 2006, and 2009. I wanted to verify the results they had posted, especially the mathematics data, so I went and looked up the data for myself on the Stats Canada website (which you can access yourself here, here, here, and here). Using this data, I created th graph below, which shows the scores in math for Canada and for each province (get the raw data here).

I’m not sure what this data shows, although I can see some trends. Of course, if I change the scale, the overall trend seems more clear.

It looks to me like overall the results have been somewhat stable, at least at this scale. While the trend in Manitoba definitely looks like a downward turn for the last few years, and this trend is probably statistically significant, overall for Canada, it looks like the results have moved somewhat randomly, as one would expect from year to year.

May 12, 2012 / 0 Comments

Culture and counting

Not convinced that there are cultural nuances in how we understand and define math? Watch the following short video (see http://www.culturecognition.com/ for the source) in which a child explains the number system his culture uses to another child.

There are other areas in which we understand mathematical concepts differently depending on our culture. For example, this recent study suggests that something like ‘numbers come in a certain order’ may be a cultural representation, and not one of which most of us are aware.

One wonders, if we can see such dramatic differences between different cultures in terms of understanding something fundamental like number, how likely is it that there are other differences within our own culture?

My wife, for example, tends to rely on landmarks for navigation, but I tend to rely on an internal map based on the names and numbers of the roads. She and I therefore have a different understanding of how one should navigate. I can remember meeting people who could not read a map (but who were otherwise able to navigate with ease) suggesting that our representations of geographical information may differ greatly between different people.

How does this influence how we should teach?

May 9, 2012 / 3 Comments

We didn’t do any math yesterday

Practice makes perfect comic

Yesterday, I was covering a colleague’s math class at the last minute, and he had made photocopies of a chapter 1 to 7 review. I looked at the review sheets, and the grade 10 students in front of me, and decided that it was unlikely that the review sheets were going to be useful. I handed them out, and then started putting puzzles up on the board.

Seven Bridges problem

The first puzzle I put up was the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem. Within a couple of minutes, every student was trying to figure out the path across the 7 bridges that doesn’t cross any of the bridges more than once. Before the students got completely frustrated with this problem (since it is deceptively simple to state, but "difficult" to solve), I put up a couple more problems, including a gem from Dr. Gordon Hamilton. I added the frog hopping problem to the board, and taught two students the game of Nim.

Each problem had some students who were working on it intensely. Every student found some problem which was interesting to them, and almost all students were working in small groups on the problems and puzzles. Eventually, a small group of students gave up on all of the puzzles and worked on the review sheets while the rest of the students continued to work on the puzzles until the end of class.

Some students asked for a hint on the bridge problem, and I led them (through questioning) to Euler’s formulation of graph theory. From this, we discussed that there could be at most one starting spot, and one ending spot, and that only a starting and ending spot could have an odd number of paths leading in and out of it. I then put up the 5 rooms puzzle, which one of the girls said within seconds was unsolveable by applying Euler’s analysis to the graph.

A group of boys worked on the frog problem, and went from struggling to even find a single solution to the 3 frog problem to being able to generalize a solution for n-frogs on either side (and a formula for determining the number of moves for each frog puzzle).

The next day, I spoke to my colleague, and asked him if he was okay that I had not done the worksheet with the students. As expected, he was fine with it. I asked him what the students said. He said that students said that they enjoyed the day before, but one student had said, "We didn’t even do any math yesterday."

I’m not sure I agree with that student, and I’m slightly distressed that he didn’t see the problem solving activities we did as being part of math. What do you think? Are problems like these important in mathematics? If so, why aren’t more of them in our curriculum?