Audio Webcast Program #8
Additional Audio from Audio Webcast Program #8:
Making Mistakes and Moving Beyond Them is in the Scientific Spirit
Additional Audio 1 of 3: Phoebe Cottingham
Title: Using neutrality to get to the truth
Listen Online: (1:55)
Download Audio Webcast MP3 File: cottingham.mp3 ~1.8 MB
Summary: For years, maybe since the beginning of time, education has engendered disagreement. Science will not end this, at least not in our time, but it will help to change the nature of the debates.
Phoebe Cottingham is the commissioner of educational evaluation and regional assistance at the department of education. She is a leader in the effort to establish a solid, empirical starting point for educational disagreements.
Introduction: The ability to step back from one's work and view it from a more neutral point of view is an important skill for scientists to develop. It allows them to examine their efforts and determine their degree of success or failure with a certain emotional detachment. They understand that risk is inherent in any experiment, and they know that failure can be its result. However, they also understand that sometimes a great leap forward can be the result of experimentation. In the 1940s, D-Day was a risk; in the 1950s, Rosa Parks took a risk. Educators are called upon to take risks, smaller ones perhaps, but with the same potential for both failure and success.
Successful educational professionals are willing to take risks in their pursuit of the goal of higher student achievement and accept the possibility of setbacks or even failure along the way. They use those setbacks as an opportunity to step back and analyze their next steps, and that, they know, is the key to making progress. Thus, applying scientific neutrality allows failure to become the first step towards success.
Transcript:
Ed Janus
For years, maybe since the beginning of time, education has engendered
disagreement. Science will not end this, at least not in our time, but
it will help to change the nature of the debates.
Phoebe Cottingham is the commissioner of educational evaluation and regional
assistance at the department of education. She is a leader in the
effort to establish a solid, empirical starting point for educational
disagreements.
Phoebe Cottingham
Well,
I think everyone agrees that probably using rigorous methods was not
necessarily the forte of education research. There were scientific
studies going on but they were mainly descriptive, and the problem was
that they could not really isolate whether there was truly an effect
from different practices and policies that could be attributed to that
practice or policy.
It may be interesting, but it just may not
give us the answers that will tell us whether, if we do X or Y or Z, we
have a chance that we're going to make the kind of difference we hope
to make.
If you are considering trying to change some facet of
your educational system or your, your school, you're confronted with an
onslaught of people who have claims about, "This is better than that,
and you should do what I say and not what so-and-so says."
But if you don't have any, what we call control group or counterfactual
basis for judging this -- in other words you don't really know what would
happen if you weren't doing this -- you're left confused. And to sort out
these kinds of competing claims, you want to have some sort of
agnostic, independent assessment that tells you what we really truly
know.
And I think that's why we've had these so called wars,
because the, that we haven't had very good standards of evidence to, to
test out different ideas about what's the best way to teach math or
reading or to improve overall the performance of low performing schools.
Additional Audio 2 of 3: Lisa Towne
Title: Using a comparison to make better choices
Listen Online: (2:20)
Download Audio Webcast MP3 File: towne.mp3 ~2.1 MB
About this audio clip: Embracing the scientific revolution in education won't make educators' lives easier; it will make them more effective. Transforming education through scientifically-acquired knowledge of what works better, starts with a new way of approaching our work.
Lisa Towne is an expert on using science to improve education at the National Research Council.
Context: Allowing ourselves -- and getting our students -- to learn from mistakes, and to do so systematically, accurately, and continually is the essence of the scientific spirit as applied to education. Using assessments wisely can help both teacher and student perceive failure as a step towards mastery. Getting students involved in their own assessments can move them beyond fear of failure and on to higher levels of achievement. This is the scientific spirit in practice.
Transcript:
Ed Janus
Embracing
the scientific revolution in education won't make educators' lives
easier; it will make them more effective. Transforming education
through scientifically-acquired knowledge of what works better, starts
with a new way of approaching our work.
Lisa Towne is an expert on using science to improve education at the National Research Council.
Lisa Towne
We
can't assume that the capacity to, to know good research when you see
it and to be able to draw out what the inferences are for local
situations from research, that capacity I don't think we can assume is
there.
I think that's the crux of the matter. Because the
history of our country and the history of education in our country
hasn't, hasn't had that kind of knowledge base or culture.
And
I think that change in mindset is more likely to occur if, if we
don't try and shove scientifically based research down their throat, in
a way, you know? As, so long as we, as we try and, and convey to
schools and districts that this is really empowering for them, and that
this really has very strong potential to help their kids, that
will make this kind of a culture change more likely to occur in a
positive way.
States and districts now do have to pay
attention to this. Now of course the way in which they approach doing
that matters a lot. If they go about this, from the perspective of just
doing what's minimally required to comply with the law, then that's not
really going to advance what I think is the, is the spirit of
scientifically based research provisions in the law and the larger
evidence based education movement.
I think part of what's
compelling about that case can be just engaging people in a
conversation about how they think they know what they know. How do you
know that what you're doing in schools is the most effective thing you
can be doing right now to get your kids to proficiency?
I don't think that the point of scientifically based research is to
simplify matters. I think it's, I think the point of scientifically
based research provisions in law is to improve matters. And, and it –
it may require more work along the way to think hard about what the
research says and to get smart about those things.
>And I think
part of the spirit of all of this also is to, even when you do a review
of scientifically based research and you make certain choices about
what kinds of programs you want to deliver to your kids, I think that
isn't the end of the story. I think then you also have to be good about
tracking the impact of what you've implemented.
And so, you
know, the implementation matters, the kinds of situations the kids are
in matter, and so the – it's not a matter of just choosing a program
based on scientifically based research and then saying, "Okay, check,
I've done my scientifically based research homework." It's really a
culture and an ethos of continuing to try and assess, systematically
and rigorously, the extent to which various programs are achieving
goals or raising student achievement or closing the achievement gap.
My
personal belief is that, that schools are, have to, to see scientific
research as their ally in order to make this work. At the end of the
day teachers are still providing instructions to kids. And so if, if
that hasn't really seeped into the people on the front line, I don't
think it's going to be as effective.
In 25 years, if, if we've
succeeded in getting educators at various levels to take both what is
good about standards based reform and accountability, and
scientifically based research, taken both of those things to heart and
connected them so that you've got research as, as part of a system that
is aligned to promote positive outcomes, I think then we could really
get somewhere.
Additional Audio 3 of 3: Phoebe Cottingham
Title: Scientifically based practices are meant to improve matters
Listen Online: (3:58)
Download Audio Webcast: cottingham2.mp3 ~3.7 MB
About this audio clip: I asked Phoebe Cottingham what we might expect from this revolution in ten years? Which of the most important pedagogical "questions" might we have answers for?
Context: N/A
Transcript:
Ed Janus
I asked Phoebe Cottingham what we might expect from this revolution in
ten years? Which of the most important pedagogical "questions" might we
have answers for?
Phoebe Cottingham
Well,
in ten years I, I would hope that we have confirmed and established
that there's a pretty good set of reading interventions that will help
the early readers. And I hope that we do the same thing in math. I hope
we have a better sense of what to do with potential school dropouts and
with those who have dropped out of school.
I hope we have a
better sense also of how much it matters to have different scales in
our school system, different sizes, different arrangements. Those are
things which we ought to try to look more closely at, because they do
matter a great deal and they cost us a lot to make any kind of a
change. We ought to know also about the individual one-on-one services,
about what kind of tutoring or special help programs can, can further
help a child who may be falling behind or seems to be unable to grasp
material.
Should I shift around our curriculum? Should we,
should we look for new ways of, of imbedding the teaching of reading
and writing across the curriculum for example. I think I'd want to
know, well, has anybody tried these things? And, and how have, what
kind of an impact have they had across the board on student learning?
Do, does everybody seem to learn better, or do some? What are the
learning gains? And then I'd want to look at my student body and say,
"Is this a student body that's going to fit appropriately with this?"
If I became convinced that spending money for A rather than B would, would
help us, and I had some studies that would convince me of that, I would
use the studies rather than my own value judgments actually.
I think that if I'm a teacher -- and I've talked to teachers and some of
them say, "I really wish somebody would tell me." And, and I think that
teachers, probably most of all, would like to feel comfortable knowing
that what they're doing is, is in the right line of, of thought, or
that they're doing something that has been found to be not so effective
as, as they might have hoped.
But if you don't have any, what
we call control group or counterfactual basis for judging this -- in other
words you don't really know what would happen if you weren't doing
this -- you're left confused.
|
