How common is perfect pitch?

Perfect pitch, the ability to recognize (and usually name) a musical note heard without reference to any other note, is considered rare and special in the western world.  A common estimate is that perfect pitch in found in only one person in ten thousand in the US and Europe.

Perfect or absolute pitch is more common than that among singers and musicians, including Julie Andrews, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, Bing Crosby, Yo-yo Ma, and many more. (See one list here.) Perhaps half the musicians in a symphony orchestra can identify a note by name when it is played alone.  Is perfect pitch a marker of musical talent?

Chopin at the piano

Probably not.  True, musicians with absolute pitch can tell whether a tune is played in the key of A flat or B flat.  Their ability to distinguish notes by name probably leads a different esperience of music, allowing them, for example, to unconsciously associate colors with particular pitches.  In practice, however, playing music is more about patterns and relationships among notes than it is about the names of the notes.  Skilled musicians can easily transpose from one key to another. 

It turns out that relative pitch - the ability to tell how far one note is from another - shows up later on the evolutionary tree than absolute pitch. Birds and many mammals recognize particular notes.  Songbirds, for example, can recognize a series of notes, but if the researcher transposes the notes up or down by a couple of steps, the birds are completely flummoxed.

Recent research has built on this bird research to demonstrate that many more people have absolute pitch than previously thought.  In the past, researchers asked subjects to name notes they heard.  People untrained in music can't do that - they don't know how to label the notes they hear.  But if a researcher asks people untrained in music to sing a well-known folk song, many will sing it in the correct key.  That is, they retrieve and produce the "right" starting note, even if they can't name that note.

So it's hard to test for absolute pitch among non-musicians, because they can't "name that note." Researchers at the University of Rochester have found a way around this problem.  Elizabeth Marvin and Elissa Newport taught non-musicians a short string of notes and then asked them to identify this sequence when it was embedded in a longer melody. Musicians with absolute pitch and many non-musicians tended to identify the sequence of notes when it was played in the right key but "miss" it when it was transposed into another key.  That is, those with absolute pitch were relying (like birds) on identifying the exact pitches they had learned rather than the pattern of notes.  

Perhaps, then, the fact that absolute pitch is more common identified among musicians than among non-musicans simply means musicians know the names of the notes they hear.  But again, it's not that simple. Researchers in the US and China have studied absolute pitch among music students in the US and China.  Their findings are clear: absolute pitch is more common among students who began their musical studies earlier.  Starting at age four makes absolute pitch much more likely than starting at, say, age eight or nine.  But an even more striking finding was that Chinese students who started learning music at any age were many times more likely than American students to have absolute pitch.

The researchers hypothesize that tonal languages such as Chinese, which require young children to hear and reproduce different pitches for different meanings, help children develop a stronger sense of pitch.  Growing up with a tonal language is like starting musical training at birth.

Perfect pitch and the question of musical nature vs. nurture play important roles in the society of the Land of Winter described in my novel THE ICE CASTLE.  Only students with perfect pitch can graduate from school and enter the highest ranks of society.  Children of the rich and privileged are raised with music all around them. The poor, on the other hand are discouraged from making any kind of music, and musical instruments are banned.  The society strongly believes that musical ability is an inborn marker of virtue and nobility, and the rich and powerful create a self-fulfilling prophecy where the children of the poor are very unlikely to show evidence of such ability.  Kids deprived of music are less likely to develop absolute pitch, and even those with this ability will be unable to demonstrate it without musical training.

Is there any analogy between the way the citizens of the Land of Winter approach the question of musical talent and the way we in our society approach other aspects of intelligence?  Musing on that question is left to the reader.  Meanwhile, to test your own relative pitch, check here, and to learn if tone deafness is real, visit here.

Self-discipline or IQ: which matters more in school?

Being smart helps kids do well in school, but working smart matters more.  Self-discipline is the key.

The psychologist who has shown how much self-discipline matters – and by self-discipline she means delayed gratification, self-control, and study habits– is named Angela Lee Duckworth.  Last week I attended a celebration where she was honored for starting a volunteer summer school program called Breakthrough Cambridge twenty years ago.  Over that time period, over 1700 Cambridge middle students have worked hard and had fun all summer, tutored and mentored by dedicated and loving high school and college students. The older students’ devotion has helped to build the younger students’ self-discipline.  Practically all these inner-city kids go on to college, and 96% of them complete.

 

Duckworth’s self-discipline work focused on looking at predictors of success in school among eighth-graders.  She measured self-discipline through teacher, student, and parent questionnaires and by asking students whether they’d prefer to receive a certain amount of money now or a larger amount later. These different ways of measuring self-discipline aligned pretty well.

What Duckworth found was that her composite measure of self-discipline predicted final grades better than IQ did.  Kids in the lowest quintile, or fifth, of self-discipline ended up with worse grades than those in the lowest fifth of the IQ distribution. Kids who were the most self-disciplined ended up doing better than the one-fifth of kids with the highest IQ.

On one level, these results aren’t surprising, and Asian cultures behave as if they know this. Kids are clearly told by teachers and parents that achievement comes with effort.  American kids, on the other hand, are more likely to believe that success comes from some innate ability that isn’t affected much by how hard you try.  Of course, it’s not just trying hard but specific disciplined habits – homework before TV, studying a bit every day instead of just the night before the test, not skipping the hard parts in your problem set – that lead to better learning.

At Tumblehome Learning, we try to foster kids’ interest and success in science, and the importance of effort is one of our underlying themes.  The kid characters in Tumblehome Learning’s Galactic Academy of Science books – Mae, Clinton, Benson, and Anita – experience the rewards of effort in science.  But first they have to believe they can succeed, They have to imagine themselves as scientists.  Kid characters in our books gain that belief by traveling back in time and encountering scientists who offer them gems of advice and encouragement. 

We can’t take the kids who read our books on literal field trips to the past.  Still, we hope the books themselves serve the same purpose.  As readers identify with the kid protagonists, we hope they experience a sense of possibility, adventure, and encouragement. We believe stories can inspire kids to dream big and work hard.

New Frontiers in Formative Assessment

Formative assessment is an ongoing process of checking students' understanding and then adjusting instruction to best respond to student needs. This process of checking and meeting students where they are takes more teacher skill and flexibility than just marching through a pre-set curriculum, but it should lead to greater learning.

Today is the official release date for New Frontiers in Formative Assessment from Harvard Education Press. Almost two years ago the Noyce Foundation asked me to help share some of the best assessment work of our staff and grantees. I thought a book bringing together interesting work in the field might do the trick, so I put together a proposal, convinced the Harvard folks, and found a co-editor, Dan Hickey, who is an expert on assessment.

Together we solicited authors for twelve chapters on assessment projects and practices. Half the chapters describe the use of technology to aid assessment, often building it right into a learning program. Six more use simple paper and pencil tools to get at students' thinking.

The chapters are evenly divided among math, literacy, and science. It's our contention that different subjects require different approaches to assessment, and we provide plenty of real examples from the projects our authors have run. One chapter discusses techniques for teaching science vocabulary to young English language learners. Another examines how students can label and share graphs among networked computers in a classroom, and another describes a process for preparing teachers to look collaboratively and with diagnostic acumen at students' work in mathematics.

Lorrie Shepard of the University of Colorado at Boulder wrote an insightful foreword, discussing how testing can harm learning and how the chapters of the book provide an alternative. And Dylan Wiliam, assessment maven, gave us this blurb:

This is an extraordinary book. The chapters cover practical applications of formative assessment in mathematics, science, and language arts, including the roles of technology and teachers professional learning. I found my own thinking about formative assessment constantly being stretched and challenged. Anyone who is involved in education will find something of value in this book

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Working with the authors of these chapters was a privilege, and I'm proud of the book that resulted. I hope that teachers, curriculum developers, and other educators will find it useful. In coming posts I'll give short summaries of selected chapters.

Raising daVincis with STEAM

We should be integrating the arts more into STEM education--that's the argument explored in an intriguing new article from EdWeek. STEM should become STEAM, because engineering design and invention require some of the same creativity and ability to think outside the box as does artistic exploration.

The article offers some fascinating tidbits and models. For example, there's the tantalizing fact that Nobel scientists are 22 times more likely than other scientists to be involved in the performing arts. There's a description of the biodegradable water bottle that one this year's ArtScience prize. Here's a video from the Wolf Trap Foundation showing how the performing arts can help young children "feel" mathematics in their bodies.

Of course, as Noyce Foundation trustee Alan Friedman points out in the article, there are big differences between art and science as ways of knowing. Think, for example, of how a piece of work in evaluated. In both art and science, boldness of vision and originality may be important. But in the end, a piece of scientific work is evaluated by whether it can be reproduced, whether it proves to be true. Though Keats says, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," the two are different.

I tend not to think of myself as artistic, but people remind me writing is an art form. In college I read poetry in the cell biology lab and then went off to my creative writing class to write stories about the adventure of scientific discovery. And to my surprise, Lost in Lexicon's playful approach to mathled to my selection as a featured author at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in April. During my talk I plan to play a Lexicon song titled "Girls Can't Do Math," which comes from the village of Tessellate--more arts integration.

Teachers of Lost in Lexicon have integrated the arts with the book as well. One teacher asked kids to paint scenes from the book as they read. Dotty Corbiere challenges kids and adults to represent mathematical ideas from the book in Lego sculptures. And I'll take the integration of science and art further in the second Lexicon book, The Ice Castle, an Adventure in Music.

Bringing art into STEM will motivate more kids to give STEM a try. It will help kids think about science and mathematics in new ways. Even if they don't all grow up to be Leonardo da Vinci or even Steve Jobs, that's a good thing.

Online learning that works for science teachers

The online SciPacks tool of the National Science Teachers Association helps teachers and their students learn more science. That's the conclusion of a just-released independent evaluation by Edvantia, Inc, and it's good news. For several years, ever since writing an Ed Week article on how difficult it is to find evidence that professional development "works," I've been on the lookout for studies like this one.

Sure, there are plenty of evaluations that show that teachers liked their professional development, found it useful, and report they learned from it or even changed their practices as a result. There are relatively few studies that actually pre- and post-test teachers to measure their learning gains. Even more rare are studies showing that professional development for teachers led to greater learning among those teachers' students. But isn't that what we really care about? We work with teachers so students will learn more.

This was a good study. New Houston middle school science teachers or fifth grade teachers with at least a year of teaching experience were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Each group was then given access to one of the two SciPacks (online ten-hour mini-courses) under study, and the two groups served as controls for each other. One group studied the Earth's Changing Surface while the other studied Force and Motion. During the learning window, teachers logged into each of the two units an average of 15 times. Teachers filled out surveys about their science teaching practices and took tests of their content knowledge before and after using the SciPacks.

Following use of the SciPacks, teachers showed a gain of half a standard deviation in their confidence in teaching the topic covered. "Treated" teachers also showed a gain in content knowledge for the topic studied of about 17 percentile points, as compared to gains of 5 to 12 percentile points for the control teachers. Even more interesting were the student results. Fifth graders who had teachers in the treatment group gained 17 percentile points from pre- to post-test on earth science concepts, and 6th and 8th graders gained 10 percentile points on force and motion concepts, compared to 12 and 3 point gains for students who studied the same material but whose teachers had not had the professional development.

That's a very respectable linkage. Teachers who underwent online, self-paced and self-monitored professional development gained knowledge and confidence, and their students learned more than the students of teachers who did not have the same experience. NSTA deserves praise for its careful work in creating and testing these modules. So far there are 22 SciPacks available, covering topics in all major areas of science, some geared to elementary school teachers and some to middle or high school teachers. And these are only one piece of the many tools available in the NSTA Learning Center. Let's hope they see wide use.

Korea shortens its school week, and what about us?

The South Korean government is recommending that all primary and secondary schools cut the length of the school week to just five days. That will mean eliminating the Saturday classes that currently occur twice a month. The school year will fall from 205 days to 190 days, compared to the 180 to 185 that are common in the U.S.

An interesting piece of the story is that this decrease in school hours is meant to accompany a decrease in the Korean work week to forty hours. (Not many of the American adults who would like to see kids work longer hours in school are also asking to work more than forty hours themselves.) The widest concern expressed by the Korean public is that a shorter school week means that students who are poor or behind will have less chance to catch up. Although the express purpose of the change is "to foster a healthy leisure culture in which parents and children enjoy (time) together," one common assumption is that well-off families will send their kids to tutoring at private academies in the extra time, while poor families will not have that opportunity.

On order to accommodate the arts and sports that used to happen on those extra Saturdays, Korea has revamped its curriculum to allow space for such "enrichment" during the regular school week. Meanwhile, we in the US are moving from the other direction. Since passage of the No Child Left Behind bill, advocates of the arts have complained that they have been squeezed out of the curriculum, especially in high-poverty or low-performing school districts. Poor children, argue these advocates, are being shortchanged of the very experiences that will keep them emotionally connected to school and will offer them a doorway to culture and self-expression.

Mass 2020, which advocates for expanded learning time in Massachusetts and nationwide, starts with the premise that children of poverty deserve the same learning experiences that their middle class peers get outside of school. Founder Chris Gabrieli argues that despite what they say, middle class parents believe in extended learning time and provide it for their children in the form of tennis lessons, music lessons, Cub Scouts, gymnastics, and science clubs, not to mention visits to libraries, bookstores, and museums. Children from poor neighborhoods are only going to get these experiences in school, and schools will only be able to fit in such a well-rounded program by expanding students' time in school.

Mass 2020 pressed for legislation in Massachusetts allowing schools to apply for extra funding to become expanded time schools. They had to submit a plan for extending school time by at least 300 hours a year, and for restructuring the school day to build a seamless program incorporating whatever enrichment or extension the school deems most important. Often the expansion includes the arts, homework help, more concentrated time on core academics, more hands-on science, and more electives. Currently, 19 expanded learning time schools serve 10,000 Massachusetts students, and schools with strong planning and several years of implementation have been able to show impressive gains in student learning.

My one disappointment in looking at the expanded learning time initiative is that none of the schools have opted to expand time into the summer. It's in summer that we see significant learning loss that often amounts to more than two months' backsliding in both math (for all schoolkids) and reading (only for poor schoolkids). I'd love to see a few schools try, say, four weeks of inspiring summer programming in science and art with great books to read and some daily use of mathematics. Maybe with such a midsummer boost, kids would start the new school year tuned up and ready to go, bypassing the need for teachers to spend the first couple of months reviewing last year's work and trying to figure out what the kids remember.

Why Boston schools are improving, part 2

In my last post I wrote that stable leadership, outside pressure, and a relentless focus on instruction have all contributed to the Boston Public Schools' steady improvement over the past ten to fifteen years. Today I offer reasons four through six for that improvement.

4. Competition. Since 1994, when Massachusetts law first allowed for charter schools in the Commonwealth, independent groups have been eager to establish schools in Boston. Today there are fourteen Boston charters, among them some of the highest performing public schools in the city or even the state. Controversy continues about whether charter schools, which admit students through a lottery system, serve their fair share of English language learners and students with special needs. Still, one thing seems certain: the looming threat of the charter school movement motivated the Boston Teachers Union to embrace an innovation of their own, pilot schools.

Pilot schools represent a collaboration between the district and the union, where certain work rules and district mandates are suspended. Pilot schools, which are designed to be laboratories of innovation, have autonomy over budget, staffing, schedule, curriculum, and calendar. Twenty-three pilot schools now serve 9000 Boston students, with pilot schools for the arts, for science, for leadership, and for students who are over age. Like charters, pilot schools attract teachers and students who share a particular vision, and they often serve those students particularly well.

Thus Boston is no longer a monolithic system. Instead it offers a menu of schools that challenge one another toward constant improvement.

5. Careful attention to managing innovation. The pilot school program demonstrates that the leadership and often the teachers of Boston are willing to take risks and innovate to give kids a better chance at an education. Of course, eagerness to innovate can bring problems of its own. Like many cities surrounded by universities and philanthropic organizations, Boston sometimes fields more offers for partnership than it can handle. It's easy for a school system that's hungry for funding to fragment its attention among hundreds of small projects, each backed by enthusiastic advocates, each good in itself, but each a distraction from the district's core strategy. Boston, instead, has sought to convince its partners to throw their joint efforts behind the superintendent's priorities.

Moreover, the district has taken a measured approach to innovation. Usually it has allowed a new program, such as coaching for school change or a workshop model for building reading comprehension, to take root first in a few schools. Often these efforts have been piloted by the Boston Plan for Excellence using philanthropic money, only to be brought in house under the core school budget once the kinks have been ironed out. This careful, systematic approach has sometimes frustrated those who want to see change come faster, but it has guarded the district against the whipsaw effect of constantly embracing new enthusiasms.

6. Attention to data. Both the school district and the Boston Plan for Excellence have embraced the notion of delving into student data to drive reform. School teams examine student work for evidence of the quality of assignments. BPE developed a tool called FAST-R to diagnose students' successes and errors in reading comprehension. The team developed an early warning system for identifying potential future dropouts so prevention efforts can be spent where they're needed. The district signed up to be part of NAEP's Trial Urban District Assessment program. This willingness to gather and examine data with all its potential for embarrassing findings has been key to driving an honest, hard-headed approach to reform.

So there you have it - my list for the factors I think have been most important in helping a mid-sized urban district elicit steadily rising performance from its students. Steady leadership, outside pressure, and competition have helped to drive the process. A clear focus on instruction and a devotion to data have helped to characterize it. And a careful, managed approach to innovation has kept the course steady. Now it's the job of everyone involved to continue the course and work for even more substantial change.

Improving education in Boston Public Schools

Films like Waiting for Superman feed into the common belief that urban education in America is dismal and getting worse. Yet in yesterday's post I wrote about the strong work of Ellen Guiney and the Boston Plan for Excellence, and I promised to share some data today about how education in Boston is steadily improving for its 56,000 public school students.

Improving a whole school system is a lot harder than improving a school. An inspirational school leader, a surge of parent involvement, and a cohort of skilled and dedicated teachers can convert one school into a high-flying outlier. But to see steady improvement in the performance of students across a whole district requires a different level of persistence, good curriculum, good professional development, good use of data, and good policy. How does Boston look?

Twelve years ago, 58% of Boston tenth graders failed the English Language Arts section of the respected Massachusetts state test, MCAS, the first time they took it. Only 18% scored Advanced or Proficient.

In 2010, after steady improvement, only 8% of first time test takers failed the tenth grade English test, while a full 60% scored Advanced or Proficient. That's a huge difference.

Math results tell a similar story. In 1998, 75% of Boston tenth graders failed the math MCAS, and 13% scored Advanced or Proficient. By 2010, only 14% of first time test takers failed, and 60% scored Advanced or Proficient. What a huge difference in preparation for these kids who have been through a school system in a period of reform.

You might think these results come from teaching to the test or from the state test getting easier over time. After all, there's a pattern of state test scores rising while national test scores stagnate. But that's not the story here. Yes, schools and districts who embrace standards see their greatest score improvements on tests also aligned to those standards. But if the increases reflect real improvements in learning, we should see an echo of the improvements in other test results.

Since 2003, Boston has participated in the Urban District NAEP trial. Our urban districts have a concentration of kids who are poor, who don't speak English as a first language, or who come from ethnic groups that have traditionally not performed well in school. Their data can get lost in the overall mix of state performance data, and the point of the Urban Trial was to uncover the differences that exist. At grades 4 and 8, the "Nation's Report Card," NAEP, pulls out the scores of particular participating urban school districts, so they can directly compare their performance with one another, with states, and with the nation as a whole.

In 2003, Boston 4th graders scored 11 points behind the nation in reading and 15 points behind in math. By 2009, the last year I have found, those gaps had decreased to 6 points in reading and 4 points in math. Over six years, the reading gap fell by almost half and the math gap by almost three fourths.

Over the same time period, the gap in 8th grade reading performance between Boston and the nation fell from 11 points to 7, and the gap in 8th grade math performance fell from 16 points to 4. In the case of both reading in math, national scores increased, but Boston scores increased faster.

These changes are huge. The improvement in the scores of Boston children suggest that in reading, by 2009, Boston's 4th and 8th graders were performing almost one instructional year higher than they had six years earlier. In math, student performance improved by more than one year's worth. Standards and performance are rising.

This is a story that is not being told about urban education. Tomorrow I'll write about what I think are the most important factors behind these improvements.

Ellen Guiney, tenacious education reformer

Ellen Guiney is retiring from her post leading the Boston Plan for Excellence, the local education fund and spur to reform which she has led for the past sixteen years. Yesterday I attended her goodbye reception at the top of the Bank of America building in downtown Boston, overlooking the glittering harbor. Bank presidents, superintendents, and the Massachusetts Secretary of Education all went over their allotted time to regale us with tales of how Ellen has inspired them, argued with them, prodded them, and never let them waver from their duty to the schoolchildren of Boston.

Founded in 1984 by First National Bank of Boston, the Boston Plan for Excellence or BPE began as a family of charitable funds donated by financial, legal, and insurance firms and devoted to special projects that carried the donor's name. When Ellen came in, she convinced the donors to pool their funds and focus on whole school change with a sharp focus on the quality of instruction in the schools. In partnership with superintendent Tom Payzant, she helped raise $100 million over ten years from foundations such as Annenberg, Carnegie, and Gates. The Plan and the district devoted the funds to setting up coaching models, professional learning communities, data systems, teams to look at how policies should change, and efforts to restructure high schools.

Ellen pulled together a fantastic team. She read and digested research, examined and displayed data, asked questions, doubted, and re-designed. She sat on the couch in her office surrounded by piles of paper and sparked ideas for her devoted staff to spin off. She incubated the Boston Teacher Residency Program, which has supplied 300 promising new teachers, many of them teachers of color, to the Boston Public Schools. According to yesterday's testimonials, she cornered people in the grocery store to talk to them about reform ideas. Sometimes she even laughed at herself.

BPE served as a laboratory for the Boston Public Schools and even the state. The district picked up BPE's successful coaching and data programs and implemented them district wide. When BPE developed an early warning system to identify middle school students at risk of dropping out or failure, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education decided to spread its use to all 351 school districts.

There's so much more I could say. Ellen built dialogue among charter, parochial, Jewish Day, secular private, and public schools in Boston. She sought doggedly and not always successfully to maintain positive relations with the Boston Teachers Union. According to her staff, she lugs giant trash bags stuffed with recycling from the BPE office down to her truck to take home so they can be properly recycled, and does so with no smidgen of concern that she might be mistaken for a bag lady.

And all of this has paid off for the children of Boston. Tomorrow I'll share some data that demonstrates how, with steady, persistent, thoughtful attempts at improvement, urban school systems can come to serve all their students much better.

Ellen is small, slight, and easily embarrassed. She blushes easily, and she would rather stand at the back of the crowd. Yesterday her colleagues hauled her up front and made her listen. Once again, the real beneficiaries were all the rest of us. I walked away inspired by what one smart, dedicated, patriotic woman can do to change the lives around her.

What works in UK schools?

The UK's Guardian newspaper just published an article reporting on the most cost-effective ways for schools to spend extra money. It turns out that effective feedback to students, peer tutoring, and parental involvement are more effective as well as more cost-effective than school uniforms, reducing class size, or performance pay. The article draws on a research report from the Sutton Trust.

The report itself is definitely worth a look, because it defines what it means by practices such as effective feedback, reducing class size, teaching assistants, summer school, homework, peer tutoring, ability grouping, and parental involvement. A chart shows the relative cost of the different interventions along with the expected student gain in months of increased learning per year of intervention. Then a separate sheet on each intervention discusses the nature and strength of the evidence. It looks a bit less rigorous but more general and perhaps more useful to help allocate resources than the new practice guides in our own What Works Clearinghouse.

How the Arts Enrich Education

The arts help kids succeed in reading in math and inspire them to stay in school: that's the claim of a new report, "Reinvesting in Arts Education," appearing this month from the President's Commission on the Arts and the Humanities. In support of this argument, which is not new, the report collects a broader than usual range of evidence from a diverse collection of studies.

Most of the studies are correlational: that is, they show that students who are involved in the arts do better in a multitude of outcomes than students who are not involved. Correlation, of course, is not causation. Students may become involved in the arts because they already feel connected to school, or because they live in wealthier neighborhoods or have parents at home that can drive them to lessons, etc. Still, most of the reports try to correct for these confounding factors. For example, an anthropological study in a low income neighborhood found that students who spent 9 hours or more per week on the arts were four times as likely to have high achievement and three times as likely to have high attendance as their peers with less arts exposure.

Another study approach is longitudinal. Catterall et. al. found using national longitudinal data that by their twenties, students heavily involved in the arts in high school were more likely to have finished college, to have good jobs, to volunteer in the community, and to vote.

Then there are the case studies. The CAGE school in Chicago and the A + schools in North Carolina have seen significant gains in student achievement since introducing integrated arts education. A study of three arts integration schools and three control schools in Maryland showed that arts integration was associated with a substantial decrease in the achievement gap between poor minority students and other students in the schools.

So it goes - study after study suggests that arts education increases self-esteem, math scores, attendance, reading scores, and persistence, while decreasing drug use, delinquency, boredom, and discouragement. Is it plausible that arts education could have all these benefits? Neurological studies suggest that early study of music can increase phonological awareness, which is key to early reading. Similarly, working to develop skill in a particular area of the arts helps devotees develop focus and attention. Study of music increases students' ability to manipulate working and long term memory. All of these are foundational skills that study of the arts can strengthen.

Moreover, when the arts are integrated into schoolwork, students are likely to repeat and re-emphasize a concept through different modalities, helping them remember it. They are also likely to exercise choice and work to perfect their own individual approaches. Choice and mastery enhance motivation. Moreover, thinking about (for example) how music, drawing, or words can represent the same ideas is a cognitively complex and challenging task. Students involved in such tasks report that they don't get either bored or discouraged.

My seventh-grade son just finished a final project on Macbeth. His teacher asked the students to do two arts-related tasks of their own choosing and to write a paper explaining their choices. Damian chose to illustrate five of Macbeth's scenes in Act V with one photograph and one related drawing each. He also made a two-minute film of the "Out, out, brief candle" speech, with background piano music he composed, played, and computer-distorted to make it more haunting. His paper discussed how even as Macbeth declines into darkness and despair, his last battle with Macduff reclaims some honor and offers hope to Scotland. Damian explained how the symbolism of swords, ghosts, shadows, candles, light and darkness in his film and drawings reflect this theme. Damian pursued this pretty sophisticated project completely independently, and he loved doing it. I'm sure he'll remember the project and feel connected to Shakespeare for a long time.

There's still a lot to learn about the effects of arts education. The President's Commission report is a good place to start. We should also ponder why the arts seem to be so motivating, and how we can weave motivating factors like choice, individual expression, personal goals, and mastery into more of what we ask our children to learn.

Formative assessment book turned in

I did promise that I'd be back to blogging once I turned in the formative assessment book to Harvard Education Press. It's done--done for now, at least. There are twelve chapters by 24 authors, and then the introductory and concluding chapters written by me and my co-editor, Dan Hickey of Indiana. David Ellis, former president of Boston's Museum of Science sent me the comment that trying to get a bunch of academic authors all to turn in their chapters on time and in the right format is like pushing a wheelbarrow full of toads uphill. I have to say that although they are kindly and attractive toads, they do tend to hop out of the wheelbarrow!

The book will be called New Frontiers in Formative Assessment, and if all goes well it will come out next fall. We hope the audience will include teachers, professional developers, a professor or two, curriculum developers, and assistant superintendents for curriculum and instruction.

First, though, there will be a lot of back and forth with the press and the authors, refining the chapters, copy-editing, and most of all, making the charts and figures consistent, attractive, and informative. When it's done, I think it will be something to be proud of, with chapters on formative assessment in math, literacy, and science, and with and without substantial use of digital technology. We mean the book to paint a hopeful but realistic picture of how to use assessment in the classroom to improve the quality of teaching and the depth of student understanding.

Formative Assessment

It's been ten days since my last post. The reason is that it's coming down to crunch time for a book manuscript I've promised to deliver to the Harvard Education Press. No, it's not my own book, not really. This one will be called New Frontiers in Formative Assessment, and it contains twelve chapters by different authors working in education. I'm just the person who recruited them to the task, keeps hounding them, reviews and sends back their chapters, tries to decide how to cut the 28 figures per chapter they want to the 3 or 4 figures per chapter Harvard wants...and oh, yes, I need to write the introduction and conclusion.

I do have a co-editor, Daniel T. Hickey from Indiana University, who is actually an expert on formative assessment, while I'm an expert on... um... well, I'm trying to help make the writing of teachers and academics interesting and accessible to a general education audience. Dan's writing a chapter of his own, and he'll help with the first and last chapters as well.

Formative assessment, or assessment for learning, is the practice of constantly probing and monitoring what students understand in order to make adjustments to one's teaching. Ideally, it's what goes on in the classroom every day, as the teacher asks questions, walks around listening to student conversations, designs a mini-pop quiz to see if she got a point across, and then makes plans for the next day based on what she's learned. In reality, formative assessment is hard to do, and the twelve projects described in our book have all labored to come up with ways of supporting this teacher work. The examples come from math, science, and literature classrooms, and about half of them rely on the clever, integrated use of technology tools. In fact, all the classroom examples present tools, from computer programs that gather student responses in real time to simple templates for choosing what math problems to use next or how to plan a lesson.

Maybe this sounds a bit dry to those of you who aren't immersed in education and data as I am, but think of it this way. A classroom with good formative assessment is one where you don't have one set of students incredibly bored because they already know all this and another set completely lost because they're missing some basic understanding. How much more efficient schooling would be if teachers could spend most of their time working right at the edge of their students' knowledge!

For me, an ideal image of formative assessment is a parent sitting with a child who is learning to read. Together the parent and child have chosen an attractive, interesting book, one the child wants to master. Maybe the parent has read it aloud once or twice already, modeling the task for the child. As the child starts sounding his way out through the sentences, the parent helps by pointing to words, by giving hints and encouragement, or by asking the child to repeat a given line. If the child tires, the parent may step in to read every other page. When the book is done, the parent celebrates the child's achievement and is in a great position to choose the next book they will read together.

So back to work. I'll talk to you again when I emerge.

Middle Schoolers Saving Electricity

They call it "the Prius Effect." Prius owners can push a button and monitor their gas mileage from moment to moment. That simple feedback loop causes them to subtly change their driving habits. They ride the accelerator less heavily and press the brakes more gently. On average, their gas mileage increases by ten percent over time.

Now the Gulf of Maine Research Institute PowerHouse program plans to apply the same principle to electricity usage by harnessing the power of middle school students. In Maine, every 7th and 8th grader has a laptop computer issued through school. Moreover, by next year, 95% of Maine homes will have their own "smart" electricity meter. GMRI's plan is to teach middle schoolers about energy by allowing them to track and analyze energy use within their own homes while comparing it to regional and statewide averages. Over time, the theory is, the kids will become picky energy consumers. They'll start turning off lights and appliances and suggest energy-saving interventions to their parents.

It's another test of the power of a feedback loop to inform citizens and lead to change. But of course, it's also a tool for bringing STEM skills to kids, teaching them about electricity, graphing, analysis, and their own power as informed citizens, while involving them in real research about an environmental question that matters to them.

Fifty books a year?

Distressed by results of international reading tests, Michael Gove, British Education Secretary, would like students to read fifty books a year, starting at age eleven. He complains that expectations are too low, so that in preparation for school-leaving exams or GCSE's, many secondary students will be assigned only two books over the course of a school year. Gove wants to see kids reading a book a week.

The inspiration for this idea came from the Infinity School, a KIPP charter school in Harlem with a mainly Hispanic and African-American student population, of whom 80% are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

How much of a change would it be for 11-year-olds to read 50 books a year in the US? Let's say the average book length was 40,000 words. That would be 2 million words of book reading a year, enough to put students close to the top of the distribution of current readers. (As I've discussed in an earlier post, Fourth grade readers at the 90th percentile currently read about 2.4 million words a year, while middle children at the 50th percentile currently read only about 600,000 words a year outside of school.)

A book a week might require 40 to 50 minutes a day of valuable time taken away from video games, television, or doing the dishes, but it would almost certainly result in gains in vocabulary, comprehension, and background knowledge. To me, fifty books a year sounds like a goal worth embracing.

Lexicon in Brookline

On a sleety Thursday night at the Driscoll School in Brookline, Massachusetts, over a hundred parents and students turned out for an evening in Lexicon. Maybe it was the offer of pizza that brought them, but the pizza ran out early, and they were cheerful anyway. We let the still-hungry hordes in to the ten stations staffed by parent and teacher volunteers, some of them in costume and in character. Miss Needle was wrapped in ribbons marked with numbers at irregular intervals, Lily of Flora was wreathed in flowers, and Zeta of Irrationality was dramatic, beautiful, and a little scary in her dress and long dark hair.

The kids, from grades 4 to 6, picked up their Lexicon Travel Guides and crowded around the tables. They fed synonyms to Emily and found metaphors for the Mistress of Metaphor. They measured with erasers and paperclips instead of rulers, and they relied on measurement to calculate the approximate value of pi. (They worried when their calculations didn't come out close "enough.") They coaxed the feuding parts of speech of Flora together by arranging colored petals marked with words into full, multicolored sentences. Tangram puzzles and the mirror maze were favorites, as usual. Kids and parents used word roots to make up words of their own, and they rescued and decorated words from the trashcans of Brevity.

What was so impressive was not just the turnout but the way parent involvement translated into kid enthusiasm and persistence. The kids wanted to complete each task and do it well. Parents came up to me to thank me for coming; all I wanted to do was tell them what great parents they are. I signed books so fast my signature got messier and messier.

To give some kids a break from the noise and activity, we reconvened in the computer room, where I talked to them about writing a book and where ideas come from. Then it was time to clear up and head back out into the sleet. But all of us involved with Lexicon came away elated at how a school community of dedicated staff and attentive parents can make learning such a celebration. Here's to the people of the Driscoll School, to Ellen Davidson and her math group, and especially to Izzy, the fourth grader who first invited me.

More on Raising Teacher Status

Last week I wrote about how we can raise the prestige of the teaching profession. This week, the New York Times, having examined still another PISA report, has published a debate among nine educators about how to raise teacher status without spending more.

Here are some of the suggestions and viewpoints expressed:

1. Reform teacher compensation. Raise starting salaries; eliminate lock step raises based only on seniority and accumulation of post-graduate credits; reward effective teachers with rapid raises. Two areas that are likely to be contentious are to pay for these changes by increasing class size (for an argument in favor of this move, look here), and to measure teacher effectiveness "objectively," which means based on student test scores.

2. Improve teacher training. I have mixed feelings about this one. Kati Haycock of the Education Trust points out that bright students find education programs stultifying and that graduates from teacher training programs do not garner better results in the classroom than bright college graduates with only a few weeks of summer training. Her suggestion is to make teacher training programs better (and raise admissions requirements).

My concern with this approach is that working to improve traditional teacher ed programs may imply fiddling around the edges of an essentially misguided approach. Increasing the number of units, credits, classes, hours, and hoops an aspiring teacher has to go through may drive away strongly motivated, self starting teacher candidates. Some years ago, the state of Massachusetts created a $10,000 signing bonus program to attract people into a fast track toward math and science teaching. In subsequent surveys, these teachers identified the quick start in the classroom as more important than the money in convincing them to sign on.

That's why I'm in favor of programs like the Boston Teacher Residency, which screens for well-educated, smart, dedicated teacher candidates and puts them in the classroom fast--but with strong support systems. Attract the best, don't waste their time, and help them learn and reflect on the job.

3. Get out of our way. Two of the commenters basically said, "Stop messing with teachers. Give us autonomy in our classrooms." And it's true that teachers in high-performing countries tend to have more classroom autonomy. Fifteen or twenty years ago, our teachers had more autonomy, too... and student performance was lower and even less equitable than it is now. Uneven opportunity and expectations were prime motivators for our search for common standards and accountability. Andreas Schleicher of OECD notes that neither autonomy alone nor accountability alone leads to the best results. The best performing systems seem to require school autonomy coupled with strong accountability.

Still, teachers are right to decry a closely scripted curriculum that allows no adjustment for particular student needs. The best teachers are constantly monitoring student learning and adjusting their lesson plans in response. To do so, teachers need to be quick thinkers and very knowledgeable about their subject; they also need the support, feedback, and teamwork of their peers.

4. It's all about culture. One commenter pointed out that although the US ranks 17th among 65 PISA countries in reading, our Asian students rank 2nd and our Caucasian students 6th. Those Asian students have a great work ethic! Families in Asian countries respect teachers!

This analysis gets an enthusiastic response from readers, some of whom have taught Asian students in America or Korea. Teacher status is not about teaching quality, they say: it's about parents who make the kids buckle down and work.

To me, this argument implies that we have to change our whole culture or import a new population of parents before we can make teaching a more attractive profession. That strikes me as either an excuse or an invitation to hopelessness.

5. Other responders made arguments about parental choice and reforming teacher tenure. To me, the most balanced approach came from Cynthia Brown of the Center for American Progress. Take a look and decide for yourself.

Noyce Scholars in South Carolina

The Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, funded by the National Science Foundation, provides grants to universities to help them prepare promising math, science, and engineering graduates as teachers for high-need school districts. Noyce Scholars receive financial support and stipends as they earn their master's degree and become math or science teachers.

I'm just home from a visit to the Southeast Regional Noyce Scholars conference held in Greenville, South Carolina, hosted by Clemson University and Newberry College. In attendance were about 150 Noyce Scholars and faculty from 20 colleges and universities in eight states. I enjoyed three days of South Carolina warmth--people and weather-- rubbing shoulders with enthusiastic, dedicated students. Where else can you find people like my new friend Cindy, who makes "yam" into a two-syllable word? I accompanied a brilliant young student teacher named Katie to Beck Academy, where she's preparing as a middle school teacher of both math and English.

I've learned from visiting a couple of Noyce Scholarship programs that many people involved in the program, especially early on when they're first applying, have no idea who Robert Noyce was. Many of them scratch their head trying to decipher NOYCE as an acronoym. National Organization of Young Company Entrepreneurs? New Opportunities for Youth Contemplating Education? Once they do figure it out, many wrongly assume that the Noyce Scholarship Program is funded by the Noyce Foundation. All over the country people come up to me and thank me for the program. I reply graciously but tell them it was conceived by a congressman and has been funded annually since 2002 by a Congress rightly concerned about preparing math and science teachers to inspire tomorrow's innovators.

I gave three talks at the conference. The first was a breakout session on integrating math and literature at the middle school, using Lost in Lexicon as a case study. Since the conference organizers had bought copies of the book for the first 120 attendees, people were intrigued and we had a lively interchange. The second was a talk I've given once before, called "Lighting the Fire in the Next Generation: Grand Challenges in Math and Science." Once again, the audience came up with good ideas. The third, and the most fun for me, was a dinner address called "Go Out and Do Something Wonderful," in which I draw lessons from anecdotes about my father's life and offer eight bits of advice he might have given to new and aspiring teachers.

At the end of my dinner talk (I later learned two Scholars tweeted the eight pieces of advice out to their colleagues), Lienne Medford asked all the Scholars in the room to stand. They rose, a cohort of at least a hundred, ready to march into a life of service. "There, Penny" said Lienne. "Along with everything else he gave the world, there is your father's legacy." I couldn't stop smiling.

The class size tradeoff

Lowering class size is an education intervention popular among both parents and teachers. When given the chance, voters have eagerly endorsed low class sizes in states from Florida to California.

Still, like other interventions, lowering class sizes carries a cost. Resources allocated to readying more classrooms or hiring more teachers cannot simultaneously be spent on new technology, professional development, or raising teacher salaries. What do we know about the tradeoffs?

Research done by Andreas Schleicher of OECD using PISA scores is suggestive. Schleicher looks at K-12 school spending in OECD countries in terms of salary cost per student. For primary school students, the US spends several hundred dollars more per student than our international peers. For "lower secondary" students--approximately middle school--we spend essentially the average amount; and for high school students we actually spend less than average. (We do spend more on non-salary costs such as capital expenditures.)

But what's interesting is what contributes to that salary cost. Relative to GDP and to other college graduates, US teachers' earnings are only about average. We spend relatively less than other nations on professional development and time for teachers to collaborate. We save money by asking teachers to spend much more of their school day teaching than in other, higher-performing countries.

So if our higher per-pupil costs aren't going to high salaries, great professional development, or allowing teachers non-instructional time to work together perfecting their lessons, where do they go? To lower class sizes.

High-performing countries like Korea and Japan tend to tilt their spending toward teacher salaries that are high relative to other professions requiring similar education; toward supporting teachers with time and coaching; and toward lengthening the school year. They "pay" for these luxuries with large class sizes. We have chosen the opposite tack, squeezing everywhere else in service of keeping class sizes small. Schleicher's research suggests that for us, the tradeoff has not paid off in terms of student performance.

How have we become so convinced that lower class size means quality? Everybody "knows" it; average class size even figures into college rankings. The most convincing evidence came from the STAR study in Tennessee, which showed that in the earliest grades, particularly among poor students, lowering class sizes below 17 in a class led to lasting benefits in student learning.

The results did not extend to later grades, class sizes in the twenties, or middle class students. Moreover, California's huge experiment in lowering class size in the early grades could not be shown to provide any benefit, perhaps because meeting it required hiring just about anybody with a pulse to teach in hastily constructed portable classrooms.

Perhaps, then, quality of teaching, supported by competitive salaries, high quality ongoing training, and time for teachers to work together as a team is more important for most students' progress than class size. As we try to do better with less in K-12 education, will teachers, administrators, and parents be willing to consider letting class sizes rise closer to the international average? Or will we stick with our gut feeling that smaller is better without regard to the opportunity costs involved?

Raising the prestige of the teaching profession: can we do it?

At the end of last week I had the privilege of attending (as an observer) an international summit on the teaching profession in New York City. The summit, hosted by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, invited delegations of 15 countries that are either high performers or fast improvers on the international PISA exam. PISA tests 15-year-olds on broad measures of literacy in reading, science, and mathematics. US performance on PISA, as on other international exams, is mediocre.

The purpose of the summit was to discuss strategies for building a high quality teaching force. All the countries agreed that the quality of teachers has the biggest in-school impact on student learning. Virtually all of them agreed that one important way to build quality in the teaching force is to build the prestige of the teaching profession.

Building the esteem in which teachers are held creates a virtuous circle. Top-performing countries such as Finland and Singapore draw their teaching candidates from the top third of their high school classes. In Finland, there are ten applicants for every available space in national teaching colleges. Both countries work to make sure that teaching salaries are competitive with salaries of other college graduates. In Singapore, teachers are paid a competitive stipend while in training, along with regular bonuses and performance bonuses while they teach. In both countries, teachers are given a lot of autonomy. They mentor and evaluate one another to maintain high quality within their schools.

So the cycle becomes: stipends while in school and competitive salaries afterward ---> highly selective entry criteria ---> highly qualified, ambitious teachers ---> training and opportunities for advancement ---> teaching becomes a sought-after and respected profession, leading to stipends, high salaries, good working conditions, rigorous peer standards, and top applicants.

Singapore and Finland are small countries with centralized decision making and only one (Singapore) or eight (Finland) teacher training institutions, so common decisions about standards and compensation are possible. In the US we have hundreds of teacher training institutions along with alternate pathways; teacher training is often regarded as a low-cost "profit center" for universities, which motivates them to keep entrance requirements low and enrollments high. We train more elementary teachers and gym teachers than we need while we have systemic shortages of qualified math, science, and foreign language teachers.

The public knows that many US teachers come from the lower half of the class. Because the public lacks faith in these teachers' knowledge and professional skills, we often ask them to adhere to a lock-step curriculum. We spend lots of time trying to figure out how to weed out bad teachers, we imagine that they don't work hard, and we resent their benefits. Who would want to become a teacher?

How can we change this picture, especially in a time of constrained funding? One thing I think experience shows is that raising the bar to entry makes a course of action more attractive to high performers. Being chosen for Teach for America, which accepts only about ten percent of applicants, has become a mark of prestige for high-achieving college graduates. The same applies to the rigorous Boston Teacher Residency, a year-long, stipend-paying master's degree program in teaching that accepts only 13% of applicants.

After the conference, my family took the subway to Brooklyn to see a play. We got talking with a young African-American woman who sat near us. It turned out she was a math major who worked in industry doing statistical analysis for a couple of years before deciding to go into teaching. She was recruited by Math for America, a non-profit that is working to build a corps of excellent math teachers in cities around the country. This young woman is receiving a full scholarship along with a stipend during her training year. Then she'll receive mentoring, professional development, and a supplemental stipend during her first four years of teaching in New York City.

This young woman, who is going to be a middle school math teacher, was bright, bubbly, and enthusiastic. She bonded quickly with my seventh grade son. He would love to have her as a teacher. Coming out of Math for America she should have no trouble being hired, and she has a good chance of becoming a leader in her profession. I already hold her in esteem.

I used to think programs like Math for America were an expensive, piecemeal approach to improving teaching and learning in the US. Now I'm beginning to think that these programs may be the pilot lights showing what we can accomplish if we focus on recruiting, supporting, and rewarding teachers of the highest quality.

[For more on this topic, check here.]