Start School Later

I don't seem to have any posts on the Start School Later movement

The Start School Later movement refers to a series of efforts in the U.S.A. by health care professionals, sleep scientists, educators, economists, legislators, parents, students, and other concerned citizens to restore a later start to the school day, based on a growing body of evidence that starting middle and high schools too early in the morning is unhealthy, counterproductive, and incompatible with adolescent sleep needs and patterns.

Yesterday's Science Daily adds the (possibly) latest: Secret to raising well behaved teens? Maximize their zzzzz's

Recently published in the journal of Learning, Media and Technology, this interesting paper exposes the negative consequences of sleep deprivation caused by early school bells, and shows that altering education times not only perks up teens' mood, but also enhances learning and health.
...in puberty, shifts in our body clocks push optimal sleep later into the evening, making it extremely difficult for most teenagers to fall asleep before 11.00pm. This, coupled with early school starts in the morning, results in chronically sleep-deprived and cranky teens as well as plummeting grades and health problems.
There is a body of evidence showing the benefits of synchronizing education times with teens' body clocks; interestingly, while 'studies of later start times have consistently reported benefits to adolescent sleep health and learning, there [is no evidence] showing early starts have a positive impact on such things', add the researchers...

Girls vs. Tests, Boys vs. Classwork

Or perhaps boys vs. work, generally; Why Girls Tend to Get Better Grades Than Boys Do - The Atlantic

girls succeed over boys in school because they tend to be more mastery-oriented in their schoolwork habits. They are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals. They also are more likely than boys to feel intrinsically satisfied with the whole enterprise of organizing their work, and more invested in impressing themselves and their teachers with their efforts.

These days, the whole school experience seems to play right into most girls’ strengths—and most boys’ weaknesses.

On the whole, boys approach schoolwork differently. They are more performance-oriented. Studying for and taking tests taps into their competitive instincts. For many boys, tests are quests that get their hearts pounding. Doing well on them is a public demonstration of excellence and an occasion for a high-five. In contrast, Kenney-Benson and some fellow academics provide evidence that the stress many girls experience in test situations can artificially lower their performance, giving a false reading of their true abilities. These researchers arrive at the following overarching conclusion: “The testing situation may underestimate girls’ abilities, but the classroom may underestimate boys’ abilities.”

Perhaps we need two-dimensional grades.

Good Fat, Bad Fat, Test Scores

An international comparison suggests that diet has a really major impact on test scores: Breast milk reveals a correlation between dietary fats and academic success -- ScienceDaily

"Looking at those 28 countries, the DHA content of breast milk was the single best predictor of math test performance," Gaulin said. The second best indicator was the amount of omega-6, and its effect is opposite. "Considering the benefits of omega-3 and the detriment of omega-6, we can get pretty darn close to explaining half the difference in scores between countries," he added. When DHA and LA are considered together, he added, they are twice as effective at predicting test scores as either is alone...

The authors seem to think they're talking about cause and effect; both fats are part of normal brain development, 'cos the brain is mostly fat. They might be right. Of course, some of us have been trying to use more omega-3 anyway. I wonder how much it would cost to raise the omega-3 (and lower the omega-6) content of school food.

Algorithms learning about human learning

One consequence of the online-5-minute-lecture (e.g., Khan Academy) approach is that with lessons broken into bite-size pieces, each of which has associated exercises, it's easier to test the effectiveness of any given piece. Khan Academy, Video tasks on the learning dashboard

Many of our exercises are tagged with “curated related videos”—videos that are hand-selected as related to the exercise. Using this as a starting point, we looked at all the videos that were already tagged as related to any exercise. For each of these videos, we compared the accuracy on its associated exercise both before watching the video and after watching it. From there, we selected the top fifty most effective videos, each improving the accuracy on its associated exercise by at least twenty percent, and are now highlighting them on the mission dashboard. When the system recommends an exercise with an associated video on the list of our top fifty related videos, it will automatically recommend the related video as well.

Compare with a human teacher who is trying to see which explanations are most helpful, judging class reaction and then perhaps a weekly quiz...the algorithm is of course completely incapable of what the human does, but on the other hand it has immediate access to individual data about what works for whom. In the not-terribly-long run we should be able to have videos tagged as having different styles (highly compressed v. wordy, words v. equations v. pictures, rules v. examples, humor v. straight exposition...) and automatically choose whichever works for given students based on what has improved their scores in the past. I suppose in the very long run we're moving towards a time and motion study program for small units of learning-effort.

Or then again, maybe not.

August 19, 2014 Board Meeting

HCS, under new management, looks (reassuringly?) unchanged at the just-uploaded BOE Meeting 8 19 14 - YouTube; mostly-familiar names being appointed or reappointed at the beginning, a ten-minute presentation on possibly-somewhat-improved standardized test scores 20 minutes in (but it's hard to judge with so many opt-outs; it does seem that we opted-out much more than most schools) and concluding remarks by Ferdinand about the 35-minute mark; it was only a 37-minute meeting. (And then switched to executive session, of course.) Looks good...