This week in the science of learning, September 22, 2024
Kids aren't reading whole books, a podcast on teaching, more
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What to read and listen to this week: bite-sized for the weekend
* This story was from a couple of weeks ago, but still worth taking a look: tutoring has gotten the spotlight lately for its potential to help students catch up after the pandemic. But a new study out of right here in Nashville shows little gain for students. The study “tracked almost 7,000 students who were tutored in Nashville, Tennessee, and calculated how much of their academic progress could be attributed to the sessions of tutoring they received at school between 2021 and 2023. Kraft and his research team found that tutoring produced only a small boost to reading test scores, on average, and no improvement in math. Tutoring failed to lift course grades in either subject.”
Since other recent big meta-analyses show tutoring as highly successful for some students, it’s worth understanding what happened in Nashville schools. According to Hechinger senior reporter Jill Barshay, it was a bunch of things. The online tutoring program was a bust, with teachers spending too much time trying to set kids up on computers. Communication between remote tutors and teachers was poor, and they changed math curriculum halfway through the project. When they did switch to in-person tutoring with teachers, there weren’t enough of them to help all the students who needed it. Read more about the study here.
* This week education reporter Sharon Lurye at the Associated Press reported that students are reading fewer full books in class, with many middle and high schools opting for abridged versions of texts or just excerpts. (My own kids read mostly or only excerpts of books in middle school as well, which drove me crazy.) Lurye points out that schools feel pressure to prepare for standardized tests, and schools and teachers feel like many digital-age students have shorter attention spans—but also the biggest organization of English teachers, the National Council of Teachers of English, seems to support the move: in a 2022 statement they said, “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” [italics mine]
One Connecticut teacher interviewed for the story complains the curriculum is too stuffed, which is why she now only has students read one-third of To Kill a Mockingbird instead of the whole thing. ““It’s like spinning plates, you know what I mean? Like it’s a circus,” she said. But since kids are reading so much less outside of school, and watching so many more TikToks and YouTube shorts without any narrative, it seems like English class becomes critical to even teaching kids about what a story is. Much less all the benefits listed in the story about the benefits of deep reading, according to scientists like Maryanne Wolf.
* I had a chance to sit down and talk with instructional coach and author Gene Tavernetti for his podcast Better Teaching: Only Stuff that Works. I shared with him how I approach my reporting on teaching and learning—that I get most of my story ideas from teachers and parents, not press releases, for example—and we also talked about how I got interested in the science of learning as a subject. I told him that after all these years of talking with schools and teachers, I think that many of the main challenges with schools are surprisingly similar, including schools struggling with teaching reading, and teachers who often don’t have great training to help them be effective in classrooms.
Listen to the whole podcast now.
What you might have missed on Friday: an ongoing discussion about math teaching
I’ve spent the last few weeks writing about math instruction—you can read about it here and here—and it got me thinking about something that comes up a lot around math: what are these math skills for? In reading, learning phonics and background knowledge are in service of a clear goal, to be a proficient reader that is able to extract meaning from books and other texts. But what’s the math version of that end goal? I think it’s a question worth asking, as do two math experts in a story in the UK education magazine TES, “How to fix the primary maths curriculum.”
This Friday’s letter takes a look at the tension between the science of learning math and the end goal, which I think needs more attention. Far from hurting the case for evidence-backed practices in math, it will strengthen them to know why they matter so much.
“Unlike reading, where reading a book or other text for meaning is the end goal, or other pursuits we often compare math skills to, like playing the piano or playing basketball, which also have specific performance end-goals that make the practice meaningful, and that you do alongside the skill practice (no one, for example, would suggest students only shoot free throws for a couple of years before trying a basketball game; you play games alongside getting better at individual skills, they are for a purpose)—the goal for math learning can be much fuzzier, more ill-defined,” I wrote Friday.
Read the whole post, “What are math facts for, anyway?” here.
Keep reading:
Two new books on math offer little more than the ‘think system’
Most American teachers have been taught little about working memory, they say
As an English teacher, I've loved your Math writing lately. Good to expand my horizons!
Do you know why more hasn’t been written about the NCTE’s crazy position statements? That organization has become unmoored, and from what I understand, its founder loathed academia and its obtuse ideas and writing, so to see what it has become is truly rich. I’m just surprised more hasn’t been made of its 2022 position statement specifically.