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you guys did it again —The PTSA Forum is tonight, and I've been dreading it, mostly because of my mortifying performance at the last PTSA forum, which was broadcast on local cable unbeknownst to me. sigh So....dread. As of this morning I was clueless as to what I might use my 3-minute slot to say. oops - must pick up Christopher back shortly news flash The PTSA president just emailed Ed and asked him to make a statement tonight. He's written something great. back again Alright, so I was sitting around dreading the Forum, and not getting my act together. The funny thing was, I didn't feel like I ought to be getting my act together. I kind of felt like I was waiting for something. Turns out I was. I was waiting for this. I'm going to build my 3-minute statement around this particular discussion of Teaching to Mastery — on the horrific costs in time and delay that not teaching to mastery impose on our kids: The conventional wisdom...holds that lower performers “have it one day and forget it the next.” And whatever they have, “they completely lose over the summer.” Again, this expectation results largely from the kind of instruction students have received. ....In the first ASAP schools we worked with in Utah, teachers routinely placed continuing students at the beginning of the school year 80 to 100 lessons behind the last lesson they had completed the preceding spring. [ED: That's about half a year of lessons] Teachers had been told the ASAP policy for placing students at the beginning of the school year: Go back no more than five lessons in the program sequence and bring students to a high level of mastery on the material. This firming is to take no more than five school days. After the review, students should be well prepared to pick up in the program where they had finished in the spring. It had never occurred to me that the reason kids forget so much over the summer is that they didn't learn it in the first place. All of the research that's been done on the subject of summer regression has been done on students who were not taught to mastery. what is the time-cost of spiraling instead of teaching to mastery? Engelmann says it's the difference between 80 to 100 lessons, or half a year, and 5 lessons, which I assume is 5 days. Here's Dan: At curriculum night for parents of third graders, the teachers explained that parents could expect their kids' math grades to drop in January. That's when they would begin seeing new material, as opposed to review. That was Saxon. I like Saxon's spiraling that continues to include problems for topics that were recently covered. I don't like the amount of review at the beginning of the year. It's too much.January. The kids would be seeing new material in January. If this is true, and I have no reason to think it's not, our schools are sacrificing half of each school year to review the kids wouldn't need if they'd been taught to mastery in the first place. That's 4 1/2 months out of every 9. Wasted. The research I found, which summarizes a meta-analysis of studies, finds that students lose one month of material, not 4. Still, one month is far too much. If a 3nd grade student in America is 3 weeks behind a 2nd grade student in Singapore, he'll be 6 weeks behind in grade 3, 9 weeks behind in grade 4, 12 weeks behind in grade 5 — which makes sense, since grade 5 is where you first start to notice light between U.S. and foreign students on TIMSS tests. The gap becomes visible then, and just keeps on getting wider as the years go by. Elaine McEwan again One of the most disappointing aspects of the TIMSS report as it described the United States was what a small amount of new learning actually occured during the eighth grade. Since both seventh- and eighth-graders took the same tests, researchers had the unique opportunity of creating a quasi-longitudinal study. Sadly, there was no significant difference between the scores of U.S. students at the end of seventh and eighth grades. Given what Christopher is dealing with in Phase 4 math, this doesn't surprise me one bit. He's going to have to spend every minute of next year &, I'm sure, the year after, re-learning the topics they 'covered' this year. Paul Miller on the Phase 4 course How would a mathematically gifted child handle this course, in 6th grade? Of course, it depends how mathematically gifted the child is, but I think someone who's moderately gifted would probably choke on the pace. For comparison, in my graduate courses this past semester, we covered approximately 6 or 7 chapters worth of material in each course. I'd say there were probably about 5 or 6 broad concepts per chapter or so. Given that, I'd say the pace of a course using this textbook for a 1 year course for 6th graders is approximately the same as a graduate level course. Summer Supplement Time linking decline in high school scores to elementary school research on summer regression the time costs of not teaching to mastery U.S. fourth graders not doing as well as thought Phase 4 topic list, grade 6 class comments thread on pre-algebra as algebra Irvington PTSA Forum PTSA Forum Tonight Ed's statement to the PTSA Forum report: PTSA Forum fact sheet for forum: Singapore Math & teaching to mastery & TIMSS gap <!--
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Revision r1.1 - 11 Jan 2006 - 20:22 - CatherineJohnson Revision r1.2 - 30 Jun 2006 - 11:06 - CatherineJohnson |