Increased Reporting DOES NOT Increase Achievement

So here I am, in the land of tiger moms, where supposedly parents are highly involved in their child's education, even riding that pendulum to the other extreme. I don't see it. What I see is a lot of complaining, but little to no positive action at home.

In my school, some parents complained that if they do not know about the homework, they cannot insure its completion. So the principal decided to send a picture or description of the homework assignments to the parents' cellphones. It made no difference. Kids who regularly completed homework before the messages continued to do do. Kids who did not do their homework still do not do their homework. In fact, the parents of five of my twenty-one students admitted to doing the homework for their children. People always like to recommend more communication. Sounds good theoretically, but "communication" is not the cure-all everyone supposes. However, as the principal said, one benefit is the parents stopped calling.

Of course, I expected the students to make a note of the assignments everyday. It is not the teacher's job to tell the parents what the homework is. Parents should check their child's assignment book. If their child is not writing down the homework as instructed, parents should deal with the noncompliance at home. Schools need to stop giving already busy teachers more useless duties. Parents need to emphasize that knowing and doing the homework is the student's responsibility.

A trend over the past thirty years has been to hold the children less and less responsible for their schoolwork and put that burden on the teacher. Years ago, as long as the child was behaving not too badly, parents heard virtually nothing from the school except for the four quarterly report cards. Parents of high achieving children were fine. Parents of low achievers began complaining. They said they could do nothing at home to mitigate a failing grade if they do not know before report cards come out that their child is failing, In response to these complaints, schools started issuing mid-quarter “progress report”. It made no difference to final report cards. High achievers continued to achieve highly; low achievers continued to fail. The only discernible outcome was that teachers had double the reporting work.

Eventually, even mid-quarter reports were deemed too few and some schools began mandating weekly progress reports. It still made no difference. Schools began requiring students to purchase expensive “planners” on the dubious assumption that students were not writing down their homework assignments because they had no little notebook to record the assignments. This assumption is beyond silly, and of course, made no difference. Responsible students have always written down their assignments, long before planner became the soup du jour. Then schools began requiring teachers to post the homework online. The only apparent effect is to create more busy work for the teacher, and stop parental complaints.

Some teachers take matters into their own hands and require students to do the homework during lunch. This tactic is at least partially effective because it generally ensures the homework gets done. I do not like using the lunch hour because children need to run around and play before settling down to an afternoon of work. We invite behavior problems when we deny them this energy outlet. Furthermore, research shows that exercise increases thinking ability and concentration. I prefer to keep kids after school. I have found it to be more effective at promoting self-responsibility.

There is one major caveat: the assigned homework needs to be worth doing.

College Return on Investment

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF) recently published their evaluation of the lifetime payoff of a college degree, concluding that college is a great investment.

We show that the value of a college degree remains high, and the average college graduate can recover the costs of attending in less than 20 years. Once the investment is paid for, it continues to pay dividends through the rest of the worker’s life, leaving college graduates with substantially higher lifetime earnings than their peers with a high school degree.

Meanwhile, Barry Ritholz, using similar data, concludes that a college education “shows a fairly poor return on investment. No wonder so many college graduates are unhappy with their student debt.”

What gives?

What is clear is that without a college education, the chance of earning the median wage is extremely low. There is really no choice in the matter. It's college or nothin' for most people. FRBSF recommends “redoubling the efforts to make college more accessible would be time and money well spent.”

We have seen this movie before. Not that long ago, people wondered if high school would payoff handsomely. It did and eventually high school for all became the publicly funded standard of the land. Everyone who graduated high school could count on a good job, decent salary and a secure future, so they said. And it was mostly true---then.

We are presently taking another turn around the same merry-go-round. Given current economic conditions and opportunities, governments might well conclude it is in the public interest to require and fund college for all. Once college for all is implemented, the Lake Wobegon fallacy comes into play. Just as with mandatory high school, reversion to the mean will occur.

Like medicinal tolerance, it takes more and more education to get the same effect. Soon, (and some people believe it is already happening), college will not be enough. It's inevitable. The pervasive assumption that if only everyone graduated from college, they could all land great jobs ignores the reality that there simply are not enough great jobs to go around for the people who think they made the investment in themselves to qualify for those jobs. And so reversion to the mean happens. The nature of average is that new data only establishes a new average for some of us to be above and some of us to be below.

Nevertheless, college for all is probably a necessary eventuality.

Websites for Kids

Parents have been asking me to recommend some websites. Out of the universe of possibilities, I have selected several worthy contenders:

RAZ-Kids: This is a leveled set of readers with quizzes. The child reads a book online and then takes a quiz. The child can go on to the next book after passing the quiz. Some of the books are audio, allowing the child to listen and follow along instead of reading alone. Many schools offer similar programs, but they all suffer from being online. Children need to read on paper, not on screens. Besides being unhealthy, screens fail to train the eyes to move properly across the page. Studies have shown that reading on screen reduces speed and comprehension. I really like the old-fashioned SRA (anybody else remember SRA?)

In fact, all online resources suffer this same shortcoming simply by being online. I strongly believe the current fascination and quick adoption of anything labeled “technology” is misguided. Nevertheless, I have collected some websites to help your child learn various subjects. I recommend limiting the amount of time children spend in front of a computer screen.

California Treasures: A comprehensive literature, grammar, and writing program popular in many schools. The main menu is here. Supporting activities are here and here. Unfortunately, some of the links do not work.

National Geographic for Kids: Lots of interesting articles in easier English.

Practice English Grammar Online:

Practice Math Online: IXL

MathABC

Adapted Mind

Math Playground

More Games

E-Learning For Kids

Some of the lessons offer a “certificate of completion” the child can print out and bring to the teacher for possible extra credit. Please monitor to ensure your child actually earns the certificate.

Science Lessons: 40 animated science lessons. Children younger than nine years old may have difficulty with the animation. Older children find it easier to make the connection between animated events and real-world events without confusion. Students can learn about the human body in the “health” section of this website: http://www.e-learningforkids.org/health/

Math Lessons: 336 Math Lessons. I just discovered these lessons online. From the same publisher as the science lessons, the goal of these lessons appears to be preparing students to maximize scores on tests, rather than maximizing understanding of math concepts. Not only is the English is slow and easy, but students can repeat any page they want as often as they want. I recommend using these lessons AFTER the child has completed the in-class concept-building lessons. In fact, I will soon use some of these lessons in a comprehensive review.

Computer Skills: This section, from the same publisher as the math and science lessons, helps children learn various computer skills on their own, such as creating a Powerpoint presentation.

Kids Health: A comprehensive resource.

The Open Door Website:

The Open Door website can be used as a online science text based on IB (International Baccalaureate) standards. The text requires reading skills. There are no audio files, but there are extensive illustrations and photos. As of 2014, the science information is quite comprehensive, but the math sections are still extremely meager. This page is an index of quizzes on many science topics. Most of the quizzes can be saved as PDF files and printed out.

The Utah Education Network has collected this nice group of interactive science activities for grades 3-6. The reading is minimal, and the instructions are mostly obvious and intuitive.

Crickweb: The nice thing about the Crickweb science pages is the simple design of each activity and the vocabulary building which will help ELLs with their regular reading.

BBC: The BBC has a number of math, English and science activities, but the audio and video require a lot of bandwidth and may require too much time too load or sometimes never finish loading. I like this interactive series about the body from the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/index_interactivebody.shtml).

For students who want to DO science experiments and activities, here is a set of websites with lots to choose from.

Science Experiments:

Science Activities:

Web Ranger

BBC

Weebly

UEN

Infographics: Sometimes Too Good to be True

There are some really intriguing infographics on the visual.ly website. However, teachers need to be careful about considering them as teaching tools. Many purported explanations are actually summaries, incomprehensible unless the students have already learned the information being presented. A great example is this infographic entitled “DNA Explained.” Take a look.

 

Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

 

 

 

 

It truly is a great summary of DNA and would make a wonderful final activity of a DNA unit.

Teachers should not be surprised. How could a video that lasts less than five minutes possibly “teach” a complicated topic like DNA? Believing it could is wishful thinking. Nevertheless, you may be able to find actual teaching tools you can use among the collection.

Flipping Classrooms: Back to the Future

Billed as the latest great thing in education, flipping is supposed to revolutionize classrooms by relegating routine information to video-watching homework, thus freeing up class time for more productive inquiry, discussion or other activities. However, experienced teachers know that flipping is not new, but very, very old. Teachers have always understood the value of their limited class time and have always expected students to prepare outside of class for the coming lesson. Maybe the new fascination with flipping is actually an admission that society, and therefore schools, at some point gave up expecting students to be responsible for their education.

What really happens in a flipped classroom? Again, what has always happened. The teacher moderated a productive class discussion with the five or so kids who actually read their literature passage or history chapter or whatever the night before.

A quarter century ago I ran a flipped classroom for ten years using cassette tapes. Who'd thunk I was on the leading edge of education? The thing is, I designed and implemented the system myself. Naturally, it worked wonderfully well. Nevertheless, we have all seen any number of worthwhile ideas, designed by one educator but poorly implemented by others, end up in a waste heap covered with derision. Whole language springs to mind.

As far as the idea of replacing homemade cassette tapes with homemade videos goes---well, why not? However, it has become too easy to post anything on the internet like this note-taking video. The creator says before she “flipped” her classroom, she spent hours teaching every new crop of students each year to take notes. With her videos, it only takes ten minutes now.

I looked at her note-taking video. I wouldn't recommend using it. Her routine amounts to an outline which is great, except it isn't actually an outline. I would rather simply teach outlining. Her routine is tedious, redundant and lacks logic. No wonder it takes her hours to teach it. Her printing is sloppy, and a poor model for students. And if a teacher is going to take the trouble to make a video (the basic idea of which is splendid), it should be a well-made video, not one with apologies. ("You should actually stay in the margins. Don't write outside the margins like I did.")

Of course, I support efforts to maximize the efficiency of instructional time. But let's not call “flipping” some fabulous new education technique. It is not. Great teachers have always “flipped.”

The Power of Self-Control for Children

Last month I wrote that the most powerful predictor of academic achievement is actually classroom behavior, and that one of the most effective ways parents can support their child's success at school is to train them to behave at home beginning while they are still babies. It is not true that babies are too young to learn how to behave. Parents teach babies all sorts of poor behavior, usually by rewarding bad behavior with food in a misplaced effort to redirect or quiet the baby. Parents also teach young children poor behavior by accepting incomplete obedience.

For example, I was visiting in the home with a 2 ½ year old child. The child picked up a pair of scissors. The father ordered the child to hand him the scissors. Upon the third repetition of the command, the child put the scissors down on the table. The father wisely picked up the scissors, put them back in the child's hand and ordered the child to hand him the scissors. The father did not accept the child's incomplete obedience by rationalizing that at least the child did not have the scissors anymore. No, the father made a reasonable request and accepted nothing less than complete obedience. The child will take the same attitude into school. Children who are allowed incomplete obedience will also take the attitude they have learned into school. It should be easy to see which child is likely to be more successful in school.

I am not advising that parents be tyrants. I am advising that parent say what they mean and mean what they say. Another word for this is consistency. Recently, I discovered that Pulitzer prize author Charles Duhigg says essentially the same thing in his 2012 book,“The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.”

At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit: willpower. Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success. In a 2005 study, for instance, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 164 eighth-grade students, measuring their IQs and other factors, including how much willpower the students demonstrated, as measured by tests of their self-discipline.

An excellent synonym for willpower is self control. Another one is conscientiousness. It should not be necessary to point out that conscientious, self-controlled schoolchildren behave well in school. Nor should we be surprised that classroom behavior robustly predicts present and future success.

Students who exerted high levels of willpower were more likely to earn higher grades in their classes and gain admission into more selective schools. They had fewer absences and spent less time watching television and more hours on homework. “Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable,” the researchers wrote. “Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

Roy Baumeister, author of “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,”has studied self-control extensively and offers some excellent tips for helping your child increase self-control. One of the most intriguing things Dr. Baumeister found was that a dose of glucose instantly improves self-control.

Our work on self-control (or self-regulation) centers on the idea that self-control relies on a limited energy source. A single act of self-control consumes this energy source, and later acts of self-control are impaired as a result. Findings in our lab on sexual restraint, aggression, intellectual reasoning, emotional coping, and thought suppression support this pattern. Moreover, recent work suggests that part of the energy source of self-control is glucose. Attempts at self-control deplete glucose that is needed for later attempts at self-control.

Therefore, as incredible as it may sound, the first thing parents need to do is make sure that kids get a good breakfast before they go to school. Then, find ways to let children practice using a little will power every day. Practicing makes willpower stronger in every area of life. Practice has at least two positive effects. First, practice creates habits. Good habits, by definition, do not require willpower. One way is to help children build habits through daily routines. As just one example among many, do not have a school night bedtime different from a weekend bedtime. Bedtime should be the same every night. Second, habits become a default response requiring less willpower to implement.

The Surprising Secret to Academic Achievement

Over the years parents have often asked me how they can support their child's academic performance at home. Until very recently, I gave all the standard answers. However, after pondering many years of observations, I have concluded that if I could pick ONE THING parents can do to support success, it would be to insist their children behave at home. I see scholastic problems developing at a very young age, even in the high chair. As just one example among innumerable similar examples, I know just such a family with a baby in a high chair. The parents say they want the child to sit down in the high chair while they feed him. The baby wants to stand up in the high chair and turn around. Although the parents tell the baby to sit down, they do not insist on compliance. In fact, they will follow the baby to the back of the chair and give him a spoonful of food. Naturally, the food reward reinforces the very behavior they would like to extinguish. It all starts from lack of consistency. When parents issue a directive, they must accept only complete compliance, not something less. Otherwise children take this same attitude into school where it becomes the number one source of academic difficulties, manifested by attempts to lower the teacher's bar and find shortcuts which substitute for real learning.

The hard truth no one wants to accept is that the most fundamental difference between high achievers and low-achievers (barring physical challenges) is classroom behavior. Every teacher knows the “good” kids tend to do well, and the disruptive kids do not. Our society does not countenance such a bald idea, so teachers couch it in terms like “does his best, “participates well," “cooperates with others,” etc. If researchers were brave enough to ask the right question, behavior would probably surpass every other variable in predicting academic achievement, even to the extent of overcoming the negative impacts of poverty. And do not worry. A loving insistence on compliance with parental directives is not “controlling”or“authoritarian,”nor will it stunt your child's creativity or critical thinking skills.

Nevertheless, beyond saying what you mean and meaning what you say, all the good advice still applies:

Adequate nutrition and sleep.

Provide a special place to do homework.

Set a regular time for homework and remove distractions.

Make sure homework is completed.

Make sure your child has a special place to record homework assignments.

Have plenty of reading material at home and encourage recreational reading.

Show that you value reading.

Turn off the TV.

Limit or eliminate video-game playing and cell phone use.

Help your child learn to use the internet properly.

Involve your child in day-to-day problem solving while shopping or completing household tasks.

Monitor after-school activities such as music lesson or sports teams. If the child is not doing the homework, reduce after-school activities. Perhaps ask the teacher to send a report home evey home every Friday.

Focus on the child's personal progress and improvement, not on test scores. Test scores that are too high are worthless. It means the test was too easy. Teacher, parent and student learn nothing useful from such a score. Better to level up the test than shoot for high scores which can make everyone feel good, but nothing more.

Double check with the teacher before hiring a tutor. Especially in math, tutors typically teach tricks for getting answers on homework, but do very little to help the child learn the concepts or acquire number sense. Teaching the child tricks can undermine the teacher's effort to provide a quality education.

Establish routines

Establish rules. Every home needs reasonable rules that children know and can depend on. Have your child help you to set rules, then make sure that you enforce the rules consistently.

Make it clear to your child that he has to take responsibility for what he does, both at home and at school. For example, don't automatically defend your child if his teacher tells you that he is often late to class or is disruptive when he is in class. Ask for his side of the story. If a charge is true, let him take the consequences.

Work with your child to develop a reasonable, consistent schedule of jobs to do around the house. List them on a calendar. Younger children can help set the table or put away their toys and clothes. Older children can help prepare meals and clean up afterwards.

Show your child how to break a job down into small steps, then to do the job one step at a time. This works for everything—getting dressed, cleaning a room or doing a big homework assignment.

Make your child responsible for getting ready to go to school each morning—getting up on time, making sure that he has everything he needs for the school day and so forth. If necessary, make a checklist to help him remember what he has to do.

Monitor what your child does after school, in the evenings and on weekends. If you can't be there when your child gets home, give her the responsibility of checking in with you by phone to discuss her plans.

PBS has some suggestions for parents.

No matter how hard you try, your child may struggle academically at some point in his school career. Here are some strategies to help you both cope when the going gets tough.

Let your kids get frustrated. When kids are having a hard time with homework or a school-related subject, they often explode with anger. And parents wonder “What did I do wrong?” “You didn’t necessarily do anything,” advises Michael Thompson, Ph.D. “Sometimes when kids feel misunderstood at school or frustrated by a subject, they get angry or provoke the parent — as a way of making you feel as helpless or angry as they feel. It’s almost like your child is saying, ‘would you hold my hopelessness for a while?’ Or ‘I need you to feel what I am going through, so I am going to make you angry.’”

Take a break. If your child says “I can’t do it!” and throws the pencil down, take a little break. Maybe she needs to rant and blow off a little steam. Come back in five minutes and start fresh. (Those five minutes could save you an hour of struggle.) This also gives a child a chance to “save face” and start over, without even discussing the previous difficulty or outburst.

Don’t always try to have a rational conversation. When kids get very upset about school, the upset may get in the way of their being rational. So wait it out instead of arguing or grilling children about the situation. Once they cool down, you might be able to talk it through.

Let your child make his own mistakes. It’s hard not to correct a child’s homework, but most teachers ask you not to take over unless your child asks for your help or the teacher requests it. Teachers generally want to know what the child understands, not what the parent understands about the material.

Put a time limit on the work. Most teachers will not expect younger kids to work longer than a half-hour on homework from any particular subject, but ask your teacher for a time limit. If your child struggles (while actively trying) and exceeds the limit, write the teacher a note explaining that was all that could get done.

Contact the school. If homework or a project is turning into a dreaded battle, talk with the school. Do not wait for your next conference. It is obviously time for some new insights and new strategies.

Help your child learn how to organize himself. This is a life-long skill that can be taught, but it can be challenging to do so. However you can help your child discover the organizational tricks that will work for him by sharing some of your own. “It’s very difficult to teach children to be organized if it is not in their nature (or yours),” says guidance counselor Linda Lendman, M.S.W. “Encourage your child to label everything. Develop strategies, like the ‘must-do list’ before you leave school (put math book in backpack). Schedule a weekly ‘clean out the backpack and clean off your desk’ time so papers don’t build up. Be patient, and try not to place blame.”

Recognize that school work will never be conflict-free. No one ever raised a child without a homework battle. “There is no conflict-free homework strategy for most kids,” says Michael Thompson, Ph.D. “At times, kids will find it fun and fascinating. Other times, it may be something they just have to do, and you have to help them find the structure for getting it done.”