correllation and causation – family income and SAT scores

This could make you mad, cause you to shrug, or perhaps induce some other emotion somewhere in between. You might say, “well, sure, of course it does.” Hopefully it makes you think.

Dan Pink wrote a post yesterday on the correlation of parental income level and child SAT scores. His post triggered a wave of comments on his blog, of course, from many different viewpoints (from parents, educators, philosophers, admissions folks, etc.).

How to predict a student’s SAT score: Look at the parents’ tax return Dan Pink 2/21/12

Pink is not saying that income causes higher SAT scores, by the way. He points this out in his post, below the graph. But it begs the question (from an educational and policy perspective): What should be done about the situation? Why does the graph look the way it does? If it makes you mad, then what can we do for students that come from low income families, to make up for the inequality of resources that leads to the disparity in test scores? What can we do about the test itself? Many factors related to economics and education obviously have an effect on the student that’s walking in to take the SAT, and therefore have an effect on the resulting scores. When you compound the effect that income has on all other aspects of a students life (schools attended, education of the parents, academic support from tutors, etc.), it’s not surprising that the graph looks the way it does.

Pink also points out:

My hypothesis — again, a guess rather than an assertion — is that the households in the top tier often have two parents with graduate degrees. That is, they’re rich and they’re well-educated and that’s a hard combo to beat. If that turns out to be true, it suggests that one most influential, but not much remarked upon, social forces in America is assortative mating by education level.

Our jobs as teachers, in the broadest sense, is to take students from where they are, and to develop their skills, work with them to reach towards their academic and creative potential, to move them towards independence as learners, and in the process teach them some content that will be useful after they leave our classrooms. Does Pink’s post change this? Probably not. Perhaps it gets you to think about the students that you teach, and how you reach them, regardless of background and parental income level.

Links for 2-14-12: Mitosis, Wind Farms, and Bee Behavior

A Mitosis Mystery Solved: How Chromosomes Align Perfectly in a Dividing Cell. via Science Daily.

Should You Drink Bottled Water (and other questions for Charles Fishman), by Dan Pink.

‘Mountain Lion’ Spotted at UConn Health Center More Likely a Bobcat, via New Canaan Patch.

Rising Ocean Acidity Worst for Caribbean and Pacific, via ENN.com.

World’s Biggest Offshore Windfarm Officially Connected to the Grid, via ENN.com.

“We Can See You” Display Deters Bee-botherers, via Nature News Blog.

and

Biology Labs for Valentine’s Day! from Science Stuff blog.

Assorted Links 2-7-12

All interesting for different reasons.

Another article on the teenage brain, “What’s Wrong With the Teenage Mind” by Alison Gopnik, WSJ 1-28-12: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181351486558984.html

NPR’s First Listen of Shearwater’s new album “Animal Joy,” which comes out next week. Thanks, Paul for the link: http://www.npr.org/2012/02/05/146083321/first-listen-shearwater-animal-joy?ft=1&f=1039

Free Stamford course on human behavioral biology by Richard Sapolsky. A fascinating course, dynamic speaker, and free through iTunes or YouTube. Found via @openculture: cultr.me/gg92Hk

Noah Geisel from TeachPaperless on the usefulness of Twitter: http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com/2012/01/twimpact-twitters-impact-on-my-week.html

To be filed under “fascinating reads of all kinds” and “things that make you think,” check out Brain Pickings, which is mostly book-related, always interesting. Also see their companion Tumblr bookshelf for a quick look at all the books they talk about.

 

Web Tools Come In Handy For Your Holiday Party

A friend came to me the other day with a pressing issue: “I need you to teach me how to tie a bowtie.”

I showed him in person, the best I could without a mirror, but then I had to run to class, realizing that I hadn’t quite given the clearest instructions. So I half joking said, “You know, I could probably make a Jing that would walk you through it.” And yes, we all recognize the inherent dorkiness of making a screencast with step-by-step instructions on how to tie a bowtie. I’m okay with that.

Click for Jing tutorial

It turns out that most YouTube videos are not mirror images, which makes them difficult to follow along at home. But since I used the webcam on my laptop instead of a video camera, it’s backwards (and appropriately so; it’s what you want). So if you need to tie a bowtie — and yes, you should learn how to tie one — hopefully this will be helpful.

On Fungi and the Recycling of Human Nutrients

Really interesting and thought provoking TED talk (is that redundant?) by Jae Rhim Lee on a kind of “mushroom death suit,” that will help recycle you. Quirky? Sure. But she raises some really good questions about our current burial practices and suggests a more green alternative.

On Teenage Brains

The human brain. Image from Gray's Anatomy, via Wikipedia Commons

One of the things we think about often as teachers is the development of the teenage brain. Hopefully what we learn about the brain informs our practice in some way, and can help us to reach each learner in class. If you have a teenager at home, you might also think about what’s going on inside his or her brain every so often, for different reasons than learning!

This National Geographic article by David Dobbs, “Teenage Brains,” takes a fascinating look at the development of the adolescent brain. Dobbs addresses natural selection, the tendency towards risk taking in teenagers, the benefits of such behavior, and the need for development of social connections (which are often related to risk taking in some way). It’s a complex field, for sure, but one that is shifting its approach in understanding why the brain works the way that it does. It’s not so much the idea that adolescence is to be survived in spite of the sometimes maddening tendencies of the teenage brain, but rather it works because teenagers are transitioning towards a world separate from their parents, and while their brains are still developing, important things are happening.

From the article, regarding the reasons for why the brain works the way it does:

Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them—angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling—then how did those traits survive selection? They couldn’t—not if they were the period’s most fundamental or consequential features.

The answer is that those troublesome traits don’t really characterize adolescence; they’re just what we notice most because they annoy us or put our children in danger. As B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College who has spent nearly a decade applying brain and genetic studies to our understanding of adolescence, puts it, “We’re so used to seeing adolescence as a problem. But the more we learn about what really makes this period unique, the more adolescence starts to seem like a highly functional, even adaptive period. It’s exactly what you’d need to do the things you have to do then.”

Give it a read.

Teenage Brains by David Dobbs. National Geographic. October 2011

Setting the Stage (revisited 7/29/11)

As part of the wrap-up for this course, we’re looking back at some of the first things we wrote in June (Introduction to WebTools, Setting the Stage, and Guiding Principles for Tech Use in the Classroom).

I don’t know that my thinking/philosophy on using technology has changed dramatically in the past two and a half months. I was on-board with tech use in the classroom with the goal of improved learning and connection, and I was excited to try out some new tools and learn from a new and diverse group of educators. I still am. I do have a clearer picture of some specific tools that I’d like to implement this year in my classes, and I am happy to have made many new connections in my continually-expanding PLN. What has changed for me is a renewed focus on the idea that the best web tools allow us to do something completely new. I find myself coming back to three points from Jeff Utecht’s article “Evaluating Technology Use in the Classroom”:

• Does the technology allow students to learn from people they never would have been able to without it?
• Does the technology allow students to interact with information in a way that is meaningful and could not have happened otherwise?
• Does the technology allow students to create and share their knowledge with an audience they never would have had access to without technology? [my emphasis]

I’ve been focused primarily on the second bullet point (which isn’t horrible). If that’s all we do with new technology, it still represents movement in the right direction. I’ve made some progress on the third point (through student blogging), but I don’t think I’ve tapped into the full potential there. My students were very excited to keep track of their blog’s Page Views counter, and they broadened their readership by putting their new biology blog posts up on Facebook. (Which, come to think of it, is actually a pretty significant step. I wonder if they were sharing any of their history essays, Spanish translations, or math problem sets on FB?) But I want to try to find some ways to have them interact with people outside of our classroom, outside of our state and country, if possible. That’s a new goal of mine for the year.

Lastly, we should recognize that we’re going to ask our students to jump into this whole using tech in the classroom in new ways thing along with us. They’ll get their own crash courses in web tools in the coming year (in many of our classes), and they’ll be fine. They’ll learn the content (most of it, hopefully), and there will be some tools they like better than others (just like us). And all we can hope for at the end of the day is that they’re willing to try new things, that they work hard, and that they’re curious. It is science, right? What’s not to be curious about? In the process, hopefully they’ll understand more about themselves as learners. And as many have said before, the tech is not the point, it’s just a tool, but if it improves learning then we’re moving in the right direction.

Final Project for WebTools

Overview: In the coming year our school is changing the structure of its master schedule; we are moving to a schedule that will include different length periods spread across a seven-day rotation. Every cycle will contain one 65 minute period (20 minutes longer than what we have now). For my final project, I’m planning to rework the way I use my seventh grade class blog and my ninth grade class blog. I have also started a paper.li electronic newspaper called The Landing that I’m going to use to coordinate current event activities in all of my classes.

1. I started my seventh grade class blog last fall with the idea that it could be a place to share information with my students, beyond the daily details of homework and due dates, etc. (that they get regularly through the school website). To say that I used the blog sporadically would be generous (5 posts over the whole year, which sounds a bit pathetic, I know, especially after taking this class!). It would be totally fair to say that I didn’t use it as an interactive blog at all, except for the last post regarding final exam review, which started to approach an actual conversation/discussion. I’m happy about the potential of using it in new ways this year.

2. My goal for blogging with my ninth graders this year is to find more ways to facilitate online discussion/dialogue. My students will create their own blogs in the first few weeks of class, and my plan is for them to experiment with different web tools over the course of the year in order to share information, teach each other, and connect with other biology students (not unlike this class). (As far as tools go, Google Docs, screencasts, Flipbook, VoiceThread, and Slideshare come to mind, but I’m sure there will be others.) I did not require my students to comment on each others’ blogs last year because I was wary of trying to evaluate those comments, but I’m going to jump into that pool this year. Please let me know if you have a biology class that will also be blogging this year, and we’ll find a way to get our students to share.

3. Inspired by several teachers that have started to rework the discussion/coverage of current events in their classes (Marsha Ratzel, Will McDonough, and others), I set out to incorporate a number of Twitter and RSS blog feeds into a classroom daily paper, using paper.li. (See @brunsell’s article on the topic from Edutopia here.) The online newspaper that I’ve created is called The Landing (which refers the common space outside of our science labs, and I think it also suggests a nice place for meeting/sharing ideas). I began by starting a Twitter list so that I can manage the feeds/stories that students will be most interested in and will pertain to what we’re covering throughout the year. It’s a work in progress, as it’s only a few days old. I’ll continue to update this list as I find new sources, which will then get pulled into the daily feed. I have a general idea of how I’d like to use the feed, but since it’s brand new to me, I’m going to see how it goes and I’ll probably blog about it in the fall (which suddenly doesn’t feel so far away). *I should note that I’ve intentionally included sources/topics that apply to biology (9) and environmental science (7) so that I could use the same electronic paper for both of my classes. Some of the biology content won’t be relevent to my seventh graders, and vice-versa, and that’s okay with me.

Overall, I’m looking to provide some continuity throughout each 7 day cycle, tap into students’ creativity, and to take advantage of the extra time that we’ll have periodically (rather than doing the same thing we’ve been doing for an additional 20 minutes — as much as I like to talk, nobody wants to hear me talk for another 20…). By incorporating new web tools; giving students options in how they present material; and having them interact, collaborate, and share information online (using new tech in new ways); I think we will be able to teach more effectively and reach more students. I think what we’re really doing when we teach this way is just diversifying how we communicate with students, and how they communicate back to us (and to their peers). I’m confident that good things will happen.