whyeducate

Using zombies to teach kids geography

Technology is changing and education needs to prepare students for the future. Communication, collaboration and problem-solving are vital skills in the 21st century workforce, and yet we’re not teaching them to our children in schools

—Professor Patrick Griffin, director of The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project.

Looking at the long history of the University, you can see a tension that attends its place in society. A tension between what society expects and wants of the University, and what the University believes its contribution to society should be.

—Michael Wesley’s, Executive Director of the Lowy Institute, full speech at the Australian Higher Education Conference 2012

How can you maximise the use of literacy for development if you don’t actually understand how it is used by people together?

—Alex Grey, ‘Literacy in Development: the flaws with using literacy rates to inform development policy (part 3)‘ whydev.org

“We also find that unanticipated school grants lead to significant improvements in student test scores but anticipated grants have no impact on test scores”. Or in the words of Lee Crawfurd, the authors “find that an unexpected injection of spending at schools in Zambia and India does increase test scores that year. But the following year parents anticipate the additional spending by the school, and decide to reduce their own education spending so that they have more money for other things. And test scores go right back to where they were before”. However, whether or not test scores validate and reflect learning, and learning outcomes, is another matter.

• On average across TALIS 2008 countries, 73% of new teachers’ classroom time was spent on actual teaching and learning compared to 79% of more experienced teachers’ classes
• On average, 18% of new teachers’ class time was spent trying to keep order in classrooms compared to 13% for more experienced teachers
• On average, one-quarter of new teachers spent one quarter of class time keeping order amongst their students
• For some countries, that there is no relationship between mentoring and induction programmes and the amount of appraisal and feedback received by new teachers, is of concern
• On average, 30% of new teachers report that more than 10% of students in their classroom have a different first language that the language of instruction

we obtain an estimated impact of 2.85 additional years of schooling per sponsored child”.

—This is a snippet from the second ever impact evaluations of Child Sponsorship, available as a PDF. H/T Waylaid Dialectic

“Through the lens of standardized tests, higher order skills, meta-skills, and dispositions are literally invisible. Yet, these tests are the gold standard of educational efficacy for judging schools, educational innovations, and now even teachers themselves”.

Instead of mastering one skill at a time and learning in blocks, Robert Bjork of UCLA recommends interleaving. “The strategy suggest that instead of spending an hour working on your tennis serve, you mix in a range of skills like backhands, volleys, overhead smashes, and footwork”.

‘Indeed, Mr. Dehgan sees universities as “development laboratories,” creating new technologies and encouraging students and faculty members to work on such developing-world issues. The $100-million in grants, he says, could lay the groundwork for a Silicon Valley-like environment, where instead of technology start-ups, students are encouraged to create new companies and charities to help people in places like Nigeria or Bolivia’.