This blog focuses on my scholarship in my five research projects: learning assistance and equity programs, student peer study group programs, learning technologies, Universal Design for Learning, and history simulations. And occasional observations about life.

David Arendale 10/7/13 David Arendale 10/7/13

ECAR 2013 National Study of Student Technology Use

From the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jason Jones

The Educause Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) has released the latest version of its annual report, ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2013. First, students have lots of devices, but relatively little incentive or freedom to use them in class:

Students did seem to indicate an interest in having their phones and/or tablets be more directly incorporated into academics.

Second, two-thirds of students report that their faculty “use technology effectively”:

It’s a little unclear what the students’ judgment is based on here: stuff not crashing? Faculty finding their comfort zone and sticking with it? Regardless, it is useful to know that students respect the faculty’s technology use.

Third, the report asserts that “60% of students prefer to keep their academic and social lives separate,” although there wasn’t a lot of followup about student interest in social networking and academic work in general. (For example, since a lot of Twitter clients support multiple accounts, it’s not terribly difficult to keep one’s academic and social life separate.)

And finally, the report also says that students prefer that faculty themselves provide instruction in how to use technology, rather than rely on the help desk or online-only documentation, which suggests that for the foreseeable future, faculty who incorporate technology in interesting or significant ways will need to continue to budget class time to cover how to use the tech.

There are also interesting results about how students want to use LMSes, and more. As always, Educause interprets the data in light of its understanding of of the institional/corporate world of information technology, rather than a faculty-centered one. (As I’ve already joked on Twitter, no one but Educause would characterize the fact that “Students expressed only moderate interest in learner analytics” as a “surprising” finding, unless what was surprising was that their interest was as high as “moderate.”) Nevertheless, it is certainly helpful to understand how students talk about their use of information technology, especially as one considers incorporating social media, or thinking about an electronic device policy.

At the ECAR site, you can download the full report, an infographic drawn from it, and the survey instrument.

David Arendale 10/6/13 David Arendale 10/6/13

New Research Confirms Some TRiO Best Education Practices

Dr. Shawn Harper previews research findings he'll be releasing formally today about the black and Latino male students who succeed in New York City high schools (and he said there was no reason to believe similar qualities don't help similar students in other urban high schools). The study wasn't of elite charter schools or wealthier parts of the city, but of students who had achieved academic success in regular high schools. Harper found not only that such students exist (no surprise to him, but perhaps to those who lament the dearth of such students) but that many of them have no idea that they would be attractive candidates for admission to some of the most elite colleges in the United States.

Harper -- director of the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania -- attracted considerable attention last year for a study in which he identified successful black male college students and examined the factors that led to their success. This new study is in a way the flip side of that research -- as his focus was on students in New York City high schools who could succeed in college (although he also included a group of New York City high school graduates who were in college for comparison purposes).

But what were the common characteristics that seemed to propel these students to succeed?

Parental value of education. Many spoke of parents who related their own lack of education to their lack of money, and told their children they wanted better options for them.
High expectations. The report says that "almost all" of the students in the study "remember being thought of as smart and capable when they were young boys."
Learning to avoid neighborhood danger. Those who lived in unsafe neighborhoods reported parents who kept them inside whenever possible. Likewise, many of the students reported spending after-school hours in school buildings, in settings where they could study and also socialize in safer environments than were available to them near their homes.
Avoiding gang recruitment. Many said that by becoming known as smart, and by having parents who didn't let them spend time outdoors, they weren't recruited into gangs.
Teachers who cared and inspired. Harper asked the students to name and describe favorite high school teachers, and he noted that none of them had difficulty doing so, describing challenging teachers who knew and cared about them. He said that the teachers of these students are working in ways counter to the image of out-of-control urban schools.
Reinforcement of college-going culture. One student noted that, at his high school, every day that a student was accepted at a college, the entire school was told about this over the public address system. While college-going might not be the norm for his socioeconomic group, he came to think of college-going as the norm from hearing these messages over and over again.

David Arendale 10/3/13 David Arendale 10/3/13

Academic Support Programs at Elite Colleges Since the Beginning

One of my aggravations is the way the popular press and too often research publications claim that academic assistance programs, learning assistance, and developmental education were recently created. The story goes they were created to serve the "new students" attending college. That phrase is code language for first-generation, poor, and students of color. The actual history of U.S. higher education actually records that academic support programs have always been with us. Following is an excerpt from my book, Access at the Crossroads. Enjoy.

Precollegiate academic assistance for most students at Harvard and Yale consisted of private tutors who prepared them for college entrance examinations in Greek and Latin and provided evidence of good moral character that was also required for admission. In the mid-1700s, Yale required proficiency in arithmetic in addition to the already stringent requirements. Other postsecondary institutions soon followed. Students who did not attend Latin grammar schools had few options for entering college. One option for gaining admittance to Yale was for a minister to place students in his home for private tutoring until they were ready for the college entrance exam (Cowie, 1936). This option was similar to the dame schools in England.

Once admitted to Harvard, most students continued to receive tutoring, as assigned readings and textbooks were written in Latin. Many college professors delivered lectures in the same language. Even in the most privileged families, verbal and written competency in Latin was unusual. Therefore, Harvard was the ﬁrst postsecondary institution in the United States to require remedial studies for most of its ﬁrst-year class of students (Boylan and White, 1987). After admission to prestigious colleges such as Harvard and Yale, students entered a cohort. Each week they met with the same tutor for group sessions. The tutors’ primary role was reading aloud the lesson material and then conducting a recitation session to detect whether students had correctly memorized the text. This practice failed to meet the needs for the most gifted and the struggling students, as it focused on the average student’s mastery level of the academic content material. The literature contains no evidence of the efficacy of this crude form of academic assistance.

Economics intervened in academic admission policies during the late 1700s. Because of the social norm of considering only white male students from highly prestigious families, most postsecondary institutions found it in their ﬁnancial interest to admit students less prepared academically but possessing resources to pay college tuition and thus generate more revenue. By the time of the American Revolution, institutions began to differentiate themselves from one another by academic preparation levels of incoming college students and their official mission statements. Amherst and Williams admitted students unable to attend Harvard and Yale as a result of lower academic preparation or inadequate ﬁnances (Casazza and Silverman, 1996). Students experienced unofficial segregation policies and procedures. Stereotypes of perceived academic inabilities and discrimination against females and students of color fueled this discrimination. Nathaniel Hawthorne described the students at Williams as “a rough, brown featured, schoolmaster-looking, half-bumpkin, half-scholar, in black, ill-cut broadcloth” (Rudolph, 1956, p. 47). These assumptions, based on ethnic and class prejudices, reﬂected social norms and prejudices shared by many in society, including key college policymakers. Admission criteria and procedures influenced by these stereotypes contributed to differentiation and stratiﬁcation among postsecondary institutions.

David Arendale 9/30/13 David Arendale 9/30/13

MAEOPP Best Education Practices Center Posts Promising Practices

As I have shared previously through this blog, I lead a team of volunteers working to identify best education practices for TRiO and GEAR UP federal grant programs. These programs focus on assisting first-generation college, poor, and historically-underrepresented students complete high school and college. It is called the MAEOPP Best Education Practices Center. It is cosponsored by the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota and the Mid-American Association of Education Opportunity Program Personnel. To help highlight the MAEOPP Center through this web page I have added a new tab to the top menu bar, "Best Practices." The web page displays my thoughts about best education practices and then provides web links to the MAEOPP Center web site.

We are beginning to post best education practices to the MAEOPP Center web site that have been approved through an external expert panel. The practices range in age from middle school through college. As new ones are approved, they will be posted to the web site. Each submission will be complete enough to provide basic information about it and how to implement. Contact information is provided so you can follow up with the developers to talk more.

David Arendale 9/30/13 David Arendale 9/30/13

New Research Confirms Old Findings for Improving Academic Success of Students of Color

From Inside HigherEd. Click on this link for the entire article. His research identifies practices that many TRiO programs use to support academic success of the students they serve.

Dr. Shawn previews research findings he'll be releasing formally today about the black and Latino male students who succeed in New York City high schools (and he said there was no reason to believe similar qualities don't help similar students in other urban high schools). The study wasn't of elite charter schools or wealthier parts of the city, but of students who had achieved academic success in regular high schools. Harper found not only that such students exist (no surprise to him, but perhaps to those who lament the dearth of such students) but that many of them have no idea that they would be attractive candidates for admission to some of the most elite colleges in the United States.

But what were the common characteristics that seemed to propel these students to succeed?

Parental value of education. Many spoke of parents who related their own lack of education to their lack of money, and told their children they wanted better options for them.
High expectations. The report says that "almost all" of the students in the study "remember being thought of as smart and capable when they were young boys."
Learning to avoid neighborhood danger. Those who lived in unsafe neighborhoods reported parents who kept them inside whenever possible. Likewise, many of the students reported spending after-school hours in school buildings, in settings where they could study and also socialize in safer environments than were available to them near their homes.
Avoiding gang recruitment. Many said that by becoming known as smart, and by having parents who didn't let them spend time outdoors, they weren't recruited into gangs.
Teachers who cared and inspired. Harper asked the students to name and describe favorite high school teachers, and he noted that none of them had difficulty doing so, describing challenging teachers who knew and cared about them. He said that the teachers of these students are working in ways counter to the image of out-of-control urban schools.
Reinforcement of college-going culture. One student noted that, at his high school, every day that a student was accepted at a college, the entire school was told about this over the public address system. While college-going might not be the norm for his socioeconomic group, he came to think of college-going as the norm from hearing these messages over and over again.

David Arendale 9/30/13 David Arendale 9/30/13

Dr. Mitchem and the Fight for the Forgotten

There is an excellent story of Dr. Arnold Mitchem who just stepped down as head of the Council on Opportunity in Education in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is quite a story of overcoming adversity and dedicating his life to helping the "forgotten" students, those who are first-generation and poor, with their educational success and future contributions to society. The article concludes with an excellent timeline of both the history of TRiO and also the fight for equality in education.

David Arendale 9/27/13 David Arendale 9/27/13

Federal "Doing What Works" Website for Dissemination of Best Education Practices Suspended Abruptly Without Explanation

From: “U.S. Department of Education”
Subject: Update on the Doing What Works Website
Date: September 20, 2013 8:29:36 PM EDT
Dear subscriber:
The U.S. Department of Education has suspended operation of the Doing What Works website. We sincerely regret this unfortunate event. You can still acquire many DWW media and materials through other channels. Please email dww@wested.org for specific instructions on how you can gain access to DWW media and materials.
Sincerely, The DWW Team

An important website for helping disseminate best education practices identified by the federal What Whats Clearinghouse has abrubtly suspended without explanation. The "Doing What Works" website was a companion to the Institute for Educational Sciences' "What Works Clearinghouse" that evaluate educational practices regarding a stringent evaluation model. While the WWC is very good at evaluating practices (some would argue the point their standards miss many worthy practices), they were not as user-friendly to understand "how" to implement the practices that they deemed worthy. Doing What Works was a website sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and developed by the Innovation Studies Program at WestEd in partnership with American Institutes for Research and RMC Research Corporation.

The Department of Education sent the following email to those on the mailing list for the Doing What Works website:

From: “U.S. Department of Education”
Subject: Update on the Doing What Works Website
Date: September 20, 2013 8:29:36 PM EDT
Dear subscriber: The U.S. Department of Education has suspended operation of the Doing What Works website. We sincerely regret this unfortunate event. You can still acquire many DWW media and materials through other channels. Please email dww@wested.org for specific instructions on how you can gain access to DWW media and materials. Sincerely, The DWW Team

Key web links for this news:

Report of the website closing by the Washington Post Online From the author: "I won’t mention the irony in the fact that department spends millions on school reform that has no proven record of success but ran out of cash for its Doing What Works website."
Link to an archieved copy of the Doing What Works website. The website has now been erased without even a single web page directing people to other sources. This "Wayback Machine" archive records every web page ever posted. They archived so far 240 billion web pages.
Link to official Facebook page for Doing What Works.
Link to official Facebook page for Doing What Works.
Cosponsor WestED's announcement about suspending Doing What Works.

Why is it important to note the demise of the DWW website?

The federal government spends hundreds of millions each year on funding grant programs in the Department of Education and other agencies. The Government is very effective in spending enormous amounts of money, but lacks a coherent, sophisticated system to disseminate the lessons learned from the money spent. The What Works Clearinghouse is effective at evaluating educational practices in K-12 education, but ignores postsecondary education. However, WWC is not focused on providing easily understood and user friendly reports, videos, sample curriculum, and the like to implement the education practices that meet their standards. Just sending us to "Google" is not an answer for understanding how to implement best education practices. Last time I used the search words "best", "education", and "practices" Google identified 274 million web pages.

A simple solution

When the government awards grants to education institutions, they allow them to charge "indirect costs" to the government for the costs to spend the grant money. The argument is that the institution has to pay for the basic services (utilitis, bookkeeping, laboratories for experiments, etc) to host the project. The government limits these indirect costs to perhaps eight percent for a grant from the Dept of Education and as high as 40 percent from the scientific agencies. The government agrees it is part of the cost of doing business and permits the charges.

Why doesn't the government add their own "indirect cost" to grants that go to education institutions? Hold back one or two percent of the annual appropriation for a grant program and use that to fund a sophisticated best education practices center that provides a user-friendly means to help people implement best education practices. Why not spends a penny or two on the dollar to help people implement what already has been learned?

An example of this approach is a small pilot project I am involved with. I lead a team of volunteers who have created a pilot best education practice center focused on college readiness and college success approaches. It is cosponsored by the University of Minnesota and the Mid-America Association of Educational Program Personnel (MAEOPP), a regional association representing professionals involved with TRiO and GEAR UP programs. Click on this link for the MAEOPP Cener for Best Education Practices. If a group of volunteers can create something like this with next to no budget, what could be created if something more sophisticated was funded with that one or two percent hold back of grant funds from the govenment?