What makes a great teacher?

Great article in the Atlantic on how Teach for America has spent the last many years figuring out what makes some teachers able to move their kids ahead while others stagnate and fail. "Those who initially scored high for 'grit'—defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-choice test—were 31 percent more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students." Having a master's degree is not a determiner of classroom effectiveness they found. The article is linked here.
Ripley, A. (2010). "What makes a great teacher?" The Atlantic , Jan/Feb. Accessed 2/9/2010 at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

Gaps for high achievers persist

A new report from the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy finds that, "Achievement gaps between students of different genders and racial, economic, and linguistic groups are large and persistent for the nation’s top-performing students, even as they seem to be narrowing for K-12 students as a whole" (Education Week, Feb 5, 2010).
The study's authors conclude with this thought, "We encourage educators, parents, and policymakers to focus more attention on the excellence gap. This attention need not come at the cost of addressing minimum competency gaps – the shrinking of which remains a necessary and noble goal. Yet continuing to pretend that a nearly complete disregard of high achievement is permissible, especially among underperforming subgroups, is a formula for a mediocre K-12 education system and long-term economic decline."
The full text of the report and state profiles are linked here: "Mind the (Other) Gap: The Growing Excellence Gap in K-12 Education"

The effects of distraction on learning

Interesting article in The Chronicle ("Divided Attention" by David Glenn) today summarized a number of studies on multi-tasking, attention, and learning. One piece of research by Karin Foerde et al. particularly caught my attention, because of the implications for classroom learning.

As CHE describes it...

"Foerde and her colleagues argue that when the subjects were distracted, they learned the [task] through a half-conscious system of 'habit memory,' and that when they were undistracted, they encoded the [task] rules through what is known as the declarative-memory system. (Indeed, brain imaging suggested that different areas of the subjects' brains were activated during the two conditions.)

That distinction is an important one for educators, Foerde says, because information that is encoded in declarative memory is more flexible—that is, people are more likely to be able to draw analogies and extrapolate from it.

'If you just look at performance on the main task, you might not see these differences,' Foerde says. 'But when you're teaching, you would like to see more than simple retention of the information that you're providing people. You'd like to see some evidence that they can use their information in new ways.'"

Computerized math instruction beats out traditional classroom

A new study reported by the What Works Clearinghouse found that, "at the end of the school year students in classrooms using 'I Can Learn' scored higher onthe assessment of pre-algebra and algebra skills than students in traditional math classrooms. The growth was equivalent to moving a student from the 50th to the 57th percentile."
The study met WWC evidence standards and the full report is linked here.