As someone who was one of those "kids who need it the least", I feel compelled to call out the demeaning nature of this headline and this article. The tone throughout is saddening to read....
Exemplary
As someone who was one of those "kids who need it the least", I feel compelled to call out the demeaning nature of this headline and this article.
The tone throughout is saddening to read. Students who are motivated to learn seem to be discounted as not needing attention. If a process helps students who are already "high performing" learn more than they would otherwise, the situation is "worse", but any program that would attempt to do so must have done so "unintentionally". The authors give their cursory, dismissive caveat of "learning gains for any group of students are to be welcomed", but the rest of the article calls that into question. Speaking entirely speculatively, they wonder whether those high performing students could have done just as well without the resources. They call for taxpayers to ask "if their dollars are being wasted". It is clear that they have their priorities: students who perform below a standard need attention, and students who perform above that standard don't.
I can understand concerns over trendy learning methods, in part, because I always disliked them, and found them an impediment to my own learning. And I can understand the concern that the evaluation of learning methods, especially when there is significant funding involved, can be skewed by likely intentional cherry-picking of populations to present misleading results: here, by presenting improvements for students who "used the program as recommended" while not placing equal prominence on the finding that almost no students did. That seems to be the real story here. That does not need the hostility toward the needs of higher-performing students who want to learn more.
It is particularly sad to see that these sentiments have changed so little. Growing up going to a variety of schools, apart from a few rare teachers in unusual circumstances, it was often made clear to me, as someone who could satisfy any basic requirements and desperately wanted to learn more, that my needs did not matter, that my presence was a burden on the school, and that the presence of everyone like me was a burden. At times this was simply matter-of-fact and not even hostile, like the young teacher in a Midwestern town who simply admitted she didn't know how to teach me and let me do whatever I wanted in the library instead of going to class. At times it was abusive, like the teachers in what was nominally a major California city's top public program for gifted students that in practice handled us by giving us more menial work than we could practically complete (one memorable assignment was to spend the weekend listing every simile and every metaphor in a several hundred page novel, by hand; this was only one of our assignments for that weekend), without the work actually letting us learn anything beyond what any other class learned. I was fortunate enough to escape this situation, which by the end had become rather abusive and psychologically damaging, and go to university early, but some pain in the memory of that experience necessarily remains.
that was my third-grade teacher's response to my mom asking her to give me accelerated math work. Something like 500 coordinate pairs to graph. I refused to do it and also refused to do any...
by giving us more menial work than we could practically complete
that was my third-grade teacher's response to my mom asking her to give me accelerated math work. Something like 500 coordinate pairs to graph. I refused to do it and also refused to do any further accelerated math work for the next two years (3rd and 4th grade) because I was so demotivated by that.
In second grade, I had been learning basic algebra (solve for X etc) and in 6th grade they had me skip pre-algebra because I passed the final when it was given to us as a screening pre-test. I can only imagine how much more I could have learned if my teacher had been kind instead of hostile.
Now the district I grew up in doesn't permit anyone to take geometry in middle school, let alone algebra 2 (alg2 in 8th grade was the track I ended up in). Gifted education is never even mentioned in any school board candidates' statements. It's devastating to me (a) what I missed out on as a kid and that (b) I was still so much better off than someone like me would be today.
And obviously all of this is available to kids whose parents can afford private tutors. It's so incredibly depressing to me.
I believe San Francisco eliminated 8th grade algebra (1 or 2? I don’t know). But after enough public outcry they brought it back. The city has enough money to support all types of students. Why...
I believe San Francisco eliminated 8th grade algebra (1 or 2? I don’t know). But after enough public outcry they brought it back. The city has enough money to support all types of students. Why would you punish the high performers that we need in our future society?
To provide context, many American school districts let advanced middle school students take high school mathematics (algebra 1) one grade/year earlier. San Francisco eliminated advanced math...
To provide context, many American school districts let advanced middle school students take high school mathematics (algebra 1) one grade/year earlier.
San Francisco eliminated advanced math classes in middle schools for "equity" reasons. Knocking the top performing students down a few notches is certainly one way to reduce performance gaps.
I have a simelar story. When I was in 4th and 5th grade, I was in the GATE program and I loved it because it was a huge increase in the breadth of things I learned about. Then I went to middle...
I have a simelar story. When I was in 4th and 5th grade, I was in the GATE program and I loved it because it was a huge increase in the breadth of things I learned about. Then I went to middle school and their GATE program was a note-taking club that just taught learning strategies and graded you based off of the notes you took in other classes - something that had forever made me hate Cornell notes.
So I gave up on GATE, and when I went to high school I took honors classes instead. But frankly it was often a waste of time. The curricula were often identical to the non-honors classes, just with more work. I almost failed high school because the district required English 1 specifically, and even the honors version of that class was painfully boring to me. English was my strongest subject; I was taking advanced literature classes for fun. But maybe in retrospect I should have done middle school GATE; the vast majority of classes I took in those years were just review of elementary school things where I grew up.
But the thing is that I’m a private teacher now so I understand why this happens. The most students I have had in a class at once is a mind-blowing two students, and yet in most of those classes the kids tend to diverge in skill very quickly. You can’t really speed up on the slow kid because if you do that too much they will never catch up and you will have wasted more time trying to go back and catch them up then if you just slow down then and there. So it’s incredibly tempting to just give the fast kid some busywork to keep them on topic so even if their education isn’t being productive as it could have been, they are at least reinforcing the things they already learned. What I’d rather do is give them something to look into and try to learn on theirselves, but I don’t always have the resources at hand or the flexibility to make up things on my own.
When you are a fast learner in a school setting, everyone else in the class becomes the slow kid. Asking a teacher to accommodate you is more work than is obvious, so it’s understandable that you get some that just give you busywork. For what it’s worth I also had a fair share of teachers in the past who did actually give me things to challenge myself rather than busywork. Most of the math teachers I have dealt with were happy to challenge me because they were passionate about getting kids interested in their subject.
In August 2022, three researchers at Khan Academy, a popular math practice website, published the results of a massive, 99-district study of students. It showed an effect size of 0.26 standard deviations (SD)—equivalent to several months of additional schooling—for students who used the program as recommended.
....
Those gains, and many others like them reported each year, are impressive. Since use of these tools is widespread, one could be forgiven for asking why American students are not making impressive gains in math achievement. John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist, declares himself “impressed how education technology has had no effect on . . . outcomes.” He was talking about reading but could equally have called out mathematics, the other big area in which education technology is widely used but growth in achievement has not followed.
A clue is in those wiggle words “students who used the program as recommended.” Just how many students do use these programs as recommended—at least 30 minutes per week in the case of Khan Academy? The answer is usually buried in a footnote, if it’s reported at all. In the case of the Khan study, it is 4.7 percent of students. The percentage of students using the other products as prescribed is similarly low.
Imagine a doctor prescribing a sophisticated new drug to 100 patients and finding 95 of them didn’t take it as prescribed. That is the situation with many online math interventions in K–12 education today. They are a solution for the 5 percent. The other 95 percent see minimal gains, if any.
...
It’s not at all clear that the program vendors are at fault, any more than you would blame a pharmaceutical company for the failure to see results among patients who didn’t take their drug. Indeed, the vendors point to data that students who use their program more show higher performance. But that is a correlation. As Hilary Yamtich, a fourth grade math teacher at a school in Oakland, California, who conducted a study of her own, points out, “students who are more motivated to learn are more likely to choose to use Khan.”
With the caveat that I am not an educator or in an education-adjacent field, to my observation the above statement is key yet often ignored. This is especially true when it comes to mathematics,...
As Hilary Yamtich, a fourth grade math teacher at a school in Oakland, California, who conducted a study of her own, points out, “students who are more motivated to learn are more likely to choose to use Khan.”
With the caveat that I am not an educator or in an education-adjacent field, to my observation the above statement is key yet often ignored. This is especially true when it comes to mathematics, which is really bad because it’s among the disciplines that requires motivation the most thanks to its abstract nature and general divorcedness from day-to-day life at levels above basic algebra.
To my naive eye, the most straightforward way to improve this is to simply make classes for these subjects much more hands-on. Instead of pushing textbooks, rote memorization, and theory, focus on practical application and show students how and why it’s useful. For many, that alone would be tremendous for boosting motivation. It would’ve been a game changer for me.
Context for my comment: I was a math major in college but I've never really been an educator That feels very wrong to me. Math can be SO fun if you have the right context for it, but that context...
Context for my comment: I was a math major in college but I've never really been an educator
That feels very wrong to me. Math can be SO fun if you have the right context for it, but that context is usually not going to be practical. Instead, math should be viewed as a game and taught in the context of games. What if we had a game with these rules (axioms), and this goal (conjecture) could we win it (proof)? That's a framework a lot of people will understand, and it's much more appropriate to math than trying to shoehorn random real-world examples that won't matter to kids.
Because the thing is, with math, often what you do has no obvious real-world application until much after it's been discovered. Math is about the joy of discovery.
And in contrast, a lot of rote memorization IS required. Basic addition is like phonics, you have to learn to see the characters 5+7 and read it as 12 (or really see 5 7 and see all at once, "consecutive odd numbers", "prime numbers", "57", "12", "35", "2", etc). It's the exact same skill as reading comprehension, except for, you can check your work by counting. Phonics books should also have basic addition and subtraction problems in them, it's the same skill. We don't focus on real-world examples of learning that "Cat" rhymes with "Bat", we just accept it's really important for kids to know that so we try to make learning it be fun. That's what needs to happen for basic arithmetic. Make it about stories and games.
I’m sure that approach would work for a lot of kids, and as such is worth trying, but it’s still leaving out a large number. I don’t believe it would’ve worked for me, because at that age games of...
I’m sure that approach would work for a lot of kids, and as such is worth trying, but it’s still leaving out a large number. I don’t believe it would’ve worked for me, because at that age games of logic would’ve been just as abstract, ungrounded, and unappealing as the bare theory.
I really need to see something in action (optimally, in practical use) to be able to understand it. Less now that I’m an adult who can sit and grind through things, but it still improves uptake speed dramatically.
It’s why basics phonics and multiplication posed no issue. Their usefulness is blindingly apparent to the point that even as a child one gets the sense that they’re missing out for not having acquired those skills, which is potent motivation.
What was your practical application for reading, and how would that be different from the same lesson including seeing 5+7 and having 5 frogs and 7 toads and counting them to make 12 friends on...
What was your practical application for reading, and how would that be different from the same lesson including seeing 5+7 and having 5 frogs and 7 toads and counting them to make 12 friends on one of the pages of the phonics book?
For reading, I remember being frustrated that I couldn’t make sense of all the written language I was surrounded with every day. For multiplication, its usefulness as a shortcut through the tedium...
For reading, I remember being frustrated that I couldn’t make sense of all the written language I was surrounded with every day. For multiplication, its usefulness as a shortcut through the tedium of counting was enough to sell it.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've found that students who faithfully follow instructions and do the practice that they're asked to do generally perform much better than those who don't. The trick is in...
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've found that students who faithfully follow instructions and do the practice that they're asked to do generally perform much better than those who don't. The trick is in getting them to actually do it.
As someone who was one of those "kids who need it the least", I feel compelled to call out the demeaning nature of this headline and this article.
The tone throughout is saddening to read. Students who are motivated to learn seem to be discounted as not needing attention. If a process helps students who are already "high performing" learn more than they would otherwise, the situation is "worse", but any program that would attempt to do so must have done so "unintentionally". The authors give their cursory, dismissive caveat of "learning gains for any group of students are to be welcomed", but the rest of the article calls that into question. Speaking entirely speculatively, they wonder whether those high performing students could have done just as well without the resources. They call for taxpayers to ask "if their dollars are being wasted". It is clear that they have their priorities: students who perform below a standard need attention, and students who perform above that standard don't.
I can understand concerns over trendy learning methods, in part, because I always disliked them, and found them an impediment to my own learning. And I can understand the concern that the evaluation of learning methods, especially when there is significant funding involved, can be skewed by likely intentional cherry-picking of populations to present misleading results: here, by presenting improvements for students who "used the program as recommended" while not placing equal prominence on the finding that almost no students did. That seems to be the real story here. That does not need the hostility toward the needs of higher-performing students who want to learn more.
It is particularly sad to see that these sentiments have changed so little. Growing up going to a variety of schools, apart from a few rare teachers in unusual circumstances, it was often made clear to me, as someone who could satisfy any basic requirements and desperately wanted to learn more, that my needs did not matter, that my presence was a burden on the school, and that the presence of everyone like me was a burden. At times this was simply matter-of-fact and not even hostile, like the young teacher in a Midwestern town who simply admitted she didn't know how to teach me and let me do whatever I wanted in the library instead of going to class. At times it was abusive, like the teachers in what was nominally a major California city's top public program for gifted students that in practice handled us by giving us more menial work than we could practically complete (one memorable assignment was to spend the weekend listing every simile and every metaphor in a several hundred page novel, by hand; this was only one of our assignments for that weekend), without the work actually letting us learn anything beyond what any other class learned. I was fortunate enough to escape this situation, which by the end had become rather abusive and psychologically damaging, and go to university early, but some pain in the memory of that experience necessarily remains.
that was my third-grade teacher's response to my mom asking her to give me accelerated math work. Something like 500 coordinate pairs to graph. I refused to do it and also refused to do any further accelerated math work for the next two years (3rd and 4th grade) because I was so demotivated by that.
In second grade, I had been learning basic algebra (solve for X etc) and in 6th grade they had me skip pre-algebra because I passed the final when it was given to us as a screening pre-test. I can only imagine how much more I could have learned if my teacher had been kind instead of hostile.
Now the district I grew up in doesn't permit anyone to take geometry in middle school, let alone algebra 2 (alg2 in 8th grade was the track I ended up in). Gifted education is never even mentioned in any school board candidates' statements. It's devastating to me (a) what I missed out on as a kid and that (b) I was still so much better off than someone like me would be today.
And obviously all of this is available to kids whose parents can afford private tutors. It's so incredibly depressing to me.
I believe San Francisco eliminated 8th grade algebra (1 or 2? I don’t know). But after enough public outcry they brought it back. The city has enough money to support all types of students. Why would you punish the high performers that we need in our future society?
Searched just now, it was algebra 1.
To provide context, many American school districts let advanced middle school students take high school mathematics (algebra 1) one grade/year earlier.
San Francisco eliminated advanced math classes in middle schools for "equity" reasons. Knocking the top performing students down a few notches is certainly one way to reduce performance gaps.
I have a simelar story. When I was in 4th and 5th grade, I was in the GATE program and I loved it because it was a huge increase in the breadth of things I learned about. Then I went to middle school and their GATE program was a note-taking club that just taught learning strategies and graded you based off of the notes you took in other classes - something that had forever made me hate Cornell notes.
So I gave up on GATE, and when I went to high school I took honors classes instead. But frankly it was often a waste of time. The curricula were often identical to the non-honors classes, just with more work. I almost failed high school because the district required English 1 specifically, and even the honors version of that class was painfully boring to me. English was my strongest subject; I was taking advanced literature classes for fun. But maybe in retrospect I should have done middle school GATE; the vast majority of classes I took in those years were just review of elementary school things where I grew up.
But the thing is that I’m a private teacher now so I understand why this happens. The most students I have had in a class at once is a mind-blowing two students, and yet in most of those classes the kids tend to diverge in skill very quickly. You can’t really speed up on the slow kid because if you do that too much they will never catch up and you will have wasted more time trying to go back and catch them up then if you just slow down then and there. So it’s incredibly tempting to just give the fast kid some busywork to keep them on topic so even if their education isn’t being productive as it could have been, they are at least reinforcing the things they already learned. What I’d rather do is give them something to look into and try to learn on theirselves, but I don’t always have the resources at hand or the flexibility to make up things on my own.
When you are a fast learner in a school setting, everyone else in the class becomes the slow kid. Asking a teacher to accommodate you is more work than is obvious, so it’s understandable that you get some that just give you busywork. For what it’s worth I also had a fair share of teachers in the past who did actually give me things to challenge myself rather than busywork. Most of the math teachers I have dealt with were happy to challenge me because they were passionate about getting kids interested in their subject.
From the article:
....
...
With the caveat that I am not an educator or in an education-adjacent field, to my observation the above statement is key yet often ignored. This is especially true when it comes to mathematics, which is really bad because it’s among the disciplines that requires motivation the most thanks to its abstract nature and general divorcedness from day-to-day life at levels above basic algebra.
To my naive eye, the most straightforward way to improve this is to simply make classes for these subjects much more hands-on. Instead of pushing textbooks, rote memorization, and theory, focus on practical application and show students how and why it’s useful. For many, that alone would be tremendous for boosting motivation. It would’ve been a game changer for me.
Context for my comment: I was a math major in college but I've never really been an educator
That feels very wrong to me. Math can be SO fun if you have the right context for it, but that context is usually not going to be practical. Instead, math should be viewed as a game and taught in the context of games. What if we had a game with these rules (axioms), and this goal (conjecture) could we win it (proof)? That's a framework a lot of people will understand, and it's much more appropriate to math than trying to shoehorn random real-world examples that won't matter to kids.
Because the thing is, with math, often what you do has no obvious real-world application until much after it's been discovered. Math is about the joy of discovery.
And in contrast, a lot of rote memorization IS required. Basic addition is like phonics, you have to learn to see the characters 5+7 and read it as 12 (or really see 5 7 and see all at once, "consecutive odd numbers", "prime numbers", "57", "12", "35", "2", etc). It's the exact same skill as reading comprehension, except for, you can check your work by counting. Phonics books should also have basic addition and subtraction problems in them, it's the same skill. We don't focus on real-world examples of learning that "Cat" rhymes with "Bat", we just accept it's really important for kids to know that so we try to make learning it be fun. That's what needs to happen for basic arithmetic. Make it about stories and games.
I’m sure that approach would work for a lot of kids, and as such is worth trying, but it’s still leaving out a large number. I don’t believe it would’ve worked for me, because at that age games of logic would’ve been just as abstract, ungrounded, and unappealing as the bare theory.
I really need to see something in action (optimally, in practical use) to be able to understand it. Less now that I’m an adult who can sit and grind through things, but it still improves uptake speed dramatically.
It’s why basics phonics and multiplication posed no issue. Their usefulness is blindingly apparent to the point that even as a child one gets the sense that they’re missing out for not having acquired those skills, which is potent motivation.
What was your practical application for reading, and how would that be different from the same lesson including seeing 5+7 and having 5 frogs and 7 toads and counting them to make 12 friends on one of the pages of the phonics book?
For reading, I remember being frustrated that I couldn’t make sense of all the written language I was surrounded with every day. For multiplication, its usefulness as a shortcut through the tedium of counting was enough to sell it.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've found that students who faithfully follow instructions and do the practice that they're asked to do generally perform much better than those who don't. The trick is in getting them to actually do it.
Number Munchers for life.
It's almost as addictive as Pac-man in the right setting. It's at least 25% responsible for my math literacy.