SuperSchool Crowd-Sourced Resources

Looking back over my "SuperSchool" posts, I see that I left out a lot; the most important is probably that the kind of redesign I have in mind would produce a shared (online) resource for other schools and indeed for home-schoolers and unschoolers.
  Hmm.... what have I claimed? I've claimed that we can support autonomous project choice, so that any students can find and edit their own path to their own version of college-and-career-readiness, with parental and school sign-off. The path is a sequence of projects (including problem-sets). "Lectures" will almost always be on-demand explanations, answers to actual questions, usually online but always with mastery quizzes. Students switch back and forth between activities on their own schedules (supported, e.g., by Google Calendars shared with teacher and parents but not normally touched by them); they respond to failures by editing the path (routing around failure, if needed.)

So what software resources are needed to support that kind of student plan? Not much, but I believe it has to be crowd-sourced in the sense that we will never have an end to new project designs, new components of skill and knowledge, coming in from the students themselves.

It's an extension of the Khan Academy resource, and not mainly in the obvious we-need-more-lessons-with-mastery-quizzes direction although of course I described a lot of that going on. Mainly, we need to extend their badge system: every time you demonstrate mastery, you get a badge with a label indicating what you mastered, right? And your collection of badges is your current profile, and your goal profile of college-and-career-readiness is a collection of badges which you and your school and your parents agree does represent college-and-career-readiness. So... a badge is a label, with a description of the knowledge (what) or skill (how to) that has been mastered. For each badge there are the badges that it links to as being usefully-learned-before; there are the mastery quizzes which award that badge; there are the lessons (each with triggering questions to which that lesson might be a full or partial answer) which relate to those quizzes; and there are projects and subprojects for which that badge would be helpful, or which would provide experience helpful for achieving that badge.

  This implies a knowledge-and-skills-and-projects map which can't be static because it wouldn't be finite, and because future projects will involve concepts not yet invented. We can't even expect to have a definitive fixed vocabulary for knowledge or for skills. I would propose the use of hashtags until something better came along. A badge is labeled with one or more compound hashtags which look like (and correspond to) nested folders of information, like #math.arithmetic.decimal.multiplication.multidigit; when a badge is proposed, which can be by anybody, it gets a no-more-than-a-paragraph description, and the links required above; and so on. Such a badge can be awarded and checked for with no centralized process at all.... of course, teachers probably won't sign off on plans which depend crucially on badges that haven't gotten on to trusted lists of certified badges. Algorithms for finding suggested plans may depend on other kinds of data, too -- but if things like "personal interests" and "aptitudes" can be subsumed into the badge system, all the better. Some difficulties are obvious, but I'll leave it at that for now....it is the main thing I was visualizing and left out.

"SuperSchool" Sample Students

  In my last post I sketched the kind of school I'd like to propose HCS becoming. In this post I'll add a few details but mainly, as I promised there, I'll look at it from the points of view of a few fictional students some years hence. Jack is a rather geeky freshman, who loves the technical side of everything; Jill is his athletic/artistic elder sister who tolerates tech as a necessary evil; Joe is their eldest brother, an athlete now in college, who was a freshman in the transition. Let's start with Joe.
  Joe: All through 8th grade, Joe was very much aware of a muted uproar in the high school -- it's really just one big building for K-12, and he was encouraged to come to meetings. There was a lot of photography going on, supporting drastic extensions to our previous efforts to put helpful explanations of course material into YouTube playlists. Everything possible was going up, with TED-Ed lessons built around those videos and a separate software platform being designed, adapted from the KhanAcademy concepts. Many 9-12 students were studying and earning part-time money by reviewing their classes in front of cameras; a large crew of outsiders were hired to help. Every course in 9-12, with grade 9 to be semi-complete by the next fall, was being recast as a series of "student-run projects" and "student-group problem sets" supported by rotation with on-demand lecture material having mastery quizzes, fact-sets, and lists of standardized labels for the skills and knowledge each project used and developed. All through the summer, while all the incoming 9th graders read HPMOR as preparation for several projects, the process continued. Nobody expected this to be easy, and it wasn't; Joe's 9th and even 10th grade teachers often had to fill in material that should have been online, and the cameras were there to make it work better next time -- Joe himself, like all the other students, contributed possible mastery-quiz questions. "Planning Fallacy!" became a running joke throughout the school, until the official adoption of "Good Try, What's Plan B?" as school motto posted over the main door. Still, by 10th grade the courses had started to fade into one another because virtually every project includes critical reading, conceptual modeling whether mathematical or not, writing, and art/drama in the presentation -- teachers were busy supporting that. By 11th grade, the notion of "grade" was losing focus; some of Joe's classmates would be graduating after three years, some might take five, it really didn't mean a lot. Joe could have passed the Regents at the end of 11th grade, but he thought learning some more (and getting better scores) was a better bet. As an athlete, he'd chosen some self-measurement experimentation projects in 9th and became one of the founding members of the Quantified Self Club. He learned HPMOR's rationality techniques, especially the multi-megayear ethical thinking, but what he really got from HPMOR was a belief that opposition to Death is a realistic long-term goal, even for Muggles. He decided to become a computational neurogerontologist, developing and testing models of aging brains -- and if there wasn't any such thing he was going to invent it. He's in college for now, but he doesn't feel that he needs college; he has learned to learn from books and MOOCs and from mentors he found in the biohacking community, and the kind of startup he expects to join won't care about credentials. Meanwhile, he drives for both Uber and Lyft and partially supports his apartment with AirBnB.

Jill: Jill entered high school (which no longer has a "9th grade") as Joe was finishing, and he was a student mentor for one of her projects, a year-long LARP set in an alternate-history WWI, based on All Quiet on the Western Front with material brought in from a German translation of The Butter Battle Book, and with computational modeling of the iterated prisoner's dilemma in the context of the Christmas Truce. The LARP included intensive German as well as history, engineering, the physiology of PTSD.... Joe was also backstage helping with a Greek chorus of "robots" for a grotesquely comical musical adaptation of Macbeth where JIll performed, so they used and were credited with quite different skills and knowledge. Each has chaired meetings including the other, under the simplified Robert's Rules of Order. She is now in her third and last year, using a Coursera MOOC and a Colgate hybrid class as she gets ready for Regents but with a focus on art, dance, music, and soccer -- and she simply doesn't like tech that much. She prefers physical books. With video, she transcribes in Tee-line journalistic shorthand and then redoes her notes in Cornell Notes notebooks, and puts her fact-sets for study onto physical index cards, creating mnemonics and silly stories. A Daily pack-in-a-rubber-band exchanges cards with the Weekly box every night; the Weekly box exchanges cards with the Monthly box every Sunday; the Monthly box exchanges cards with the Yearly box once a month. It works for her, and her parents and the school have signed off on it. She has been working with and in local businesses and expects to be a yoga instructor, dance teacher, massage therapist, maybe physical therapist ... but she hopes these are steps along the way to working in dance therapy. Meanwhile, she'll start a biology major with pre-med orientation, which will teach her things she wants to know.

Jack: Jack reread HPMOR last summer after 8th grade and picked an initial project-sequence through to graduation, but he has already changed most of it because he recently decided that the IoT, the Internet of Things, is going to achieve consciousness and we are all doomed unless we work out how to make sure it's a friendly sort of AI. (He started thinking about friendly AI from reading about HPMOR's author, who is prominent in that area.) So he has signed up for as many IoT projects as he can, most of which at HCS are sensor projects within agriculture, athletics, or dance projects -- he is working and then socializing with farm kids, jocks, and arts kids, who might never have talked to him at all in a larger school with conventional structure. (They'd have interacted to some extent in HCS anyway, because it's small -- that makes this whole thing easier, with less resistance to be overcome.)

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So, what difference did our project make for these three? Mainly just that they were in control of their lives, much more than they would have been at a traditional school; secondarily that their schoolwork centered on complex projects with subprojects. They were making choices that they then had to live with, recovering from project and subproject failures with adult help rather than learning fact-sets and tasks, one after another. In Alison King's now-famous phrasing, the teacher shifted from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side". Some of their choices were individual choices, some were voted-on group choices, and they've learned a variety of styles of running groups with subgroups, as adult advisors look on nervously. They are independent learners, independent planners, independent thinkers; intellectually and emotionally ready for the instabilities and opportunities of the century to come.
  As I suggested in the last post, the key factors are the internal motivation factors. For individual accomplishments we think about AMP: autonomy (e.g. of plan choice, and choosing the on-demand mini-lectures to make the plan work); mastery of the chosen subject matter (not just trying to pass a test on material dumped out in class); purpose of the plan overall and of autonomously-chosen compoents within that plan. For individuals within the groups they sign up for, we have SCARF: the status of their roles in their groups, clarity of the structure of that group and the rules that run it, autonomy of action within their roles, relatedness of each thing-to-be-done with other things that already matter, and fairness of group structure and of evaluation.

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A Sampling of Sources: So, my ideas for what they're worth are in my SuperSchool workplace thoughts, my Flexible-Plan Failure-Based Autonomy School outline, and here.

What I'm proposing can be viewed as a mix of Salman Khan's The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined with Peter Gray's Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, adding ideas from Sir Ken Robinson's Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education and Yong Zhao's World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. (Yong Zhao is talking about China's decreasing test-focus, and about the needs of entrepreneurial "black-collar workers". Robinson describes many things, but I would summarize as "You can't have Aristotle without Aristophanes, you can't have Euclid without Euripides" although he doesn't put it that way. I've come to think it's true even if Aristotle might be outraged.) Central ideas about motivation are from Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and David Rock's Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. The sense of rationality we're trying to develop is mostly described in Yudkowsky's work, not only Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality | Petunia married a professor, and Harry grew up reading science and science fiction but Rationality: From AI to Zombies; also Tetlock's Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction which has been described as "putting some of the rationality/cognitive-science literature into an easily accessible and more authoritative-sounding form." The future for which we're hoping kids will prepare themselves, since nobody can do it for them, is roughly as described in Tyler Cowen's Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation with ideas about future job markets from Garett Jones' Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own. [update: I left out two previously-linked books, Megan McArdle's The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success on the need for our schools to teach resilience instead of preventing it, and Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From on social networks as the source of innovation.]

I'm done.

Or then again, maybe not. :-)

The Flexible-Plan Failure-Based Autonomy School

(This hasn't come together as a post, but I have code to write and I'll just put it up for possible discussion, perhaps even this evening. --tjm)


Hamilton Central School today is a highly-ranked school, but that's among schools which are not yet adapted to the 21st century. It's not all that different from the same school twenty-five years ago when my eldest started high school; we haven't changed all that much since my g-g-grandpa started Latin as a teenager in 1831.  The SuperSchool Project wants to change all that, and I approve, whether or not we get a grant from them. As I said in my last post, it seems today's students are headed for an increasingly insecure environment with increased wealth but reduced security, where failure is even more common than now and where we can't know the specifics in advance. They need to develop greater independence, greater flexibility, more resilience. They need to be ready to think for themselves and help one another, to fail and learn from failure, and to form the social networks that have been our "engines of creation" since the Enlightenment. (Book version here.)
 They need, we all need, to learn to think better, to adjust to the fact that our brains fail in predictable ways: the Planning Fallacy is a major example but there are many.  (The second link is to a novel written to teach these ideas, written as freely available Harry Potter fanfiction: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.") They need to know about positive bias and the fundamental attribution error. Often, they need to ask themselves "The fundamental question of rationality: What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?".  They also need to learn standard ways to trick themselves into getting stuff done, and not messing up relationships. I think of this in terms of

1. the AMP internal motivators -- Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose, with research described in Daniel Pink's  Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which I described here including an RSA animation; and
2. the SCARF social motivators -- Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness, with research described in David Rock's Your Brain at Work.

I'll describe my current proposal --- first as a set of central ideas, then in a later post as a potential experience by a couple of fictional students. I'm not claiming to have any good ideas which nobody ever had before; I am claiming that some good ideas are becoming increasingly practical and increasingly necessary as technology improves, and that a small rural-area college-village upstate NY school might be an excellent place to develop them further.

Central Ideas
    An academic plan is no longer a semester-by-semester schedule of courses; it is a plausibly-realistic detailed online schedule of many projects, each with project  presentations and project reports. The plan gets an individual student from a current profile which outlines their current knowledge and skills, all the way to some agreed-upon version of "college and career readiness". The smallest projects (and some large projects, such as ACT or SAT preparation) are best described as problem-sets, where the only purpose is to achieve and show mastery of some skill, but any project involves knowledge (specifically fact-sets) and skills. The largest projects, such as Model UN, are best described as LARP "games": Live-Action Role-Play, with multiple presentations and reports through the project's lifespan. An acceptable plan will involve at least a few LARP projects. In between we might write a song, write a videogame, produce a play, build a robot, develop and test hypotheses about our own diet and exercise as well as hypotheses about whether studying works better in the morning or in the evening, whether time spent practicing Teeline shorthand pays off in improved note-taking...

   A project's fact-sets, including fact-sets about skills, are introduced in on-demand lessons usually of 2-10 minutes to be watched, heard, or read, always with a mastery quiz leading to a repeat or to further progress.  Khan Academy lessons will suffice for many topics. Any fact that's to be remembered long-term does need to be reinforced, and we suggest spaced repetition along with any applicable memory tricks (mnemonics, silly-story, memory palace, etc) to minimize the effort required. So we do have software that presents content and quizzes, and we do have software for virtual flashcards (e.g. Anki) but it's okay if a student wants lessons from the Schaum Outline Series of books and wants to memorize by reading and re-reading or by making stacks of index cards; lessons are on-demand. That doesn't mean they're called for on the spur of the moment; lessons are included in the plan, and a realistic schedule will have lesson-time (usually individual) rotating with the associated project-time (can be mostly group, or not).

My central claim is that we have reached the point in technology where students (with parental approval and school sign-off) can choose and manage such detailed individual plans, with mostly-online reporting (individual and group) to show school and parents that they are successfully fulfilling those plans. Teachers are resources to help kids along the way, teachers teach and mentor individuals and groups and give advice when asked especially at the innumerable failure-points, but they don't give normally give orders and most of the time most students are not even in the presence of a teacher because teachers are busy being one-on-one or one-on-a-few with students who really need that. The teacher is an ally, helping the student finish the plan...not an opponent. (Grades on presentations are weighted averages of values from everybody present, with weights depending on previous performance so that a student who consistently misgrades, in the teachers' estimation, will slowly find their individual grade-weight diminishing.)

So, we're sort of doing Project-based learning:

The basis of PBL lies in the authenticity or real-life application of the research. Students working as a team are given a "driving question" to respond to or answer, then directed to create an artifact (or artifacts) to present their gained knowledge. Artifacts may include a variety of media such as writings, art, drawings, three-dimensional representations, videos, photography, or technology-based presentations.

(To this we add other kinds of projects, of course.) Support lessons are in the form of mostly-online Mastery Learning as partially supported by Khan Academy. This is Blended Learning (described by Sal Khan or in mini-course form as Khan Academy "partner content".)  More specifically I'm proposing a variation on the Rotation Model,

• Personalized online instruction
• Teacher led small group instruction
• Independent and collaborative practice

Our "rotation stations" will frequently not be on the school grounds, and our small groups will usually be student-led -- after initialization if needed, to introduce a simplified Robert's Rules of Order for each new kind of group. They'll be student-led even when the point of a meeting is to have questions answered by a teacher. (Questions preferably written, with student video of question and answer normally put on YouTube with students editing the automatically generated transcript.) They'll be student-led even when the point of a meeting is to have a project evaluation by an audience (usually including a teacher, often including someone from outside the school.)

(and he wanders off into CodeSpace, muttering inaudibly....)

[update:] A note on transition: No, we don't have to start with the final set of options, in fact there never will be a "final" set of options. We begin by describing each current required course as a series of scheduled projects to be supported by rotations and lessons, and then start adding the options as well as new material. Flexibility and autonomy get mixed in, step by step. There's an up-front cost, but it shouldn't be overwhelming.
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Random references:

'A Bit Of A Montessori 2.0': Khan Academy Opens A Lab School : NPR Ed : NPR

[Interviewer:]The research shows that students learn best when they work through challenges together, stumble around, try to find answers and come up with solutions themselves with help from a good teacher. That's hard on a one-way lecture online.
[Salman Khan:]....students should work on problems. ... So, yes, I agree with that — the best way to do it is look at it from a problem-solving point of view, try to struggle with the problem, and then pull the knowledge as you need it. It could be an on-demand lecture, it could be looking at a reference book, asking your friend, asking a teacher, finding an article on the Internet. Whatever it is, it's going to stick much more than when it's pushed on to you.

 
Students in the 21st Century - XQ01_21st_Century.pdf

 Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; Bayes' theorem; A visual guide to Bayes' Rule and other resources from the Center for Applied Rationality.

MEMORY: How to never forget anything ever again — Life Tips. — Medium

In a paper on gradual-interval recall published by Paul Pimsleur in 1967, he hypothesizes the following intervals: 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, and 2 years. Although the exact intervals varied by subject, Pimsleur’s intervals give you an idea about the exponential nature of memory retention. One of the cool side-effects of this is that you can take a large set of facts (e.g. the 1000 most commonly used words in the French language) and introduce them in batches slowly (e.g. 10 per day). That way you only have to review each word every few months in order to remember them all indefinitely. (The flip-side of this is: it doesn’t matter how awesome your teachers or your school was, if you don’t review each fact you learned at least every few years, you will forget them.)

and as a consequence, Forgetting: The Basic Facts, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

The authors don't connect their findings to pedagogical reform, but I'm happy to pick up the slack. If you really want kids to acquire a cognitive skill, don't just teach it to them and move on. You have to maintain the skill not just with practice, but with distributed practice. The iconoclastic flip side: Cognitive skills that aren't worth endlessly practicing probably aren't worth learning in the first place.

THE SCHOOL AS SOCIALIZING -- NOT JUST KNOWLEDGE: (not entirely true, but important point) Can High Tech Hype Trump School Uniforms? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The fundamental error that high tech advocates have made since Thomas Edison’s venture into fortune telling is that, like near-sighted people, they focus narrowly on only one purpose of pubic schools: transferring knowledge and skills from adults to children. In their myopia, they lose sight of the crucial task of socializing children and youth into the community. In other words, taxpayers, voters, and parents expect far more from their schools than student’s heads bulging with knowledge ready to enter college—even in the current heated rhetoric of testing.

BUT IT'S NOT THE TEACHERS: Group learning makes children better decision-makers, study finds -- ScienceDaily

"Collaborative group work positions students as active decision-makers, whereas direct instruction places them in a passive role, following the reasoning of their teacher," Zhang said. "We further theorize that the essential difference between collaborative group work and direct instruction is that students learn about the 'self as agent and others as (the) audience,'''

EDUCATIONAL GAMES
Educational Live Action Role Playing can change the world

Although most people think of larp as a hobby where you play-pretend medieval warriors with foam swords, it is so much more than that.

• Larp is Model United Nations
• Larp is mock trials
• Larp is the U.S. Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin
• Larp is disaster simulations
• Larp is standardized patients for medical training
• Larp is what President Obama's re-election committee ran to test their computer system in 2012

Larp is a lot. I started a non-profit (501c3) company, Seekers Unlimited, that makes educational larps for classrooms.

Revolutionary New Learning Tool “Edu-LARP” Goes to Kickstarter

The science edu-LARPs to be funded for distribution by Kickstarter include: The Great Phlogiston Debate: Students role-play scientists active at the end of the Age of Enlightenment. Noir: Students role-play detectives, forensic scientists, and suspects in a series of possible crimes. Element Heroes: Students stop villains with super powers based on the elements. Monster Maker: Students learn chemistry in a Dr. Frankenstein scenario. Be Your Own Planet!: Students create their own star systems and protect them from interstellar dangers. Balloon Race: Students learn about forces and gravity through racing balloons.

At This Danish School, LARPing Is the Future of Education | VICE | United States

At Østerskov Efterskole, a boarding school in Hobro, Denmark, immersion in the subject matter is the central educational strategy. Students can be immersed in literature, immersed in history, or even immersed in a mission through outer space as they flee from futuristic American astronauts, according to founder and headmaster Mads Lunau. "Actually, in that setting, [the US] has aligned with the Chinese against the Danish fleet, so they have to align to beat us. But there is one [Danish] ship that survived, and it's traveling through space," Lunau told VICE. Some kind of lame classroom board game? Not so much. According to Lunau, "it's more like LARP," referring to the global phenomenon also known as live action roleplaying,

LEARN BY DOING: April 8, 2014 : The Daily Papert

“Children get the knowledge they need, when they need it, from networks of friends, hot lines and, when they are old enough, magazines and the Internet. A first step toward building a new relationship with kids is to join them in their exploration of new ways to learn. In addition to giving us their trust, children might teach us something about learning. A desire to be first on the block to master the latest game has led many kids to think much harder, and thus know much more, about the process of learning than people of my generation ever did.” Papert, S. (1995). “The Parent Trap.” In Time Magazine on November 13, 1995, p. TD34.

PROJECTS: Seymour Papert: Project-Based Learning | Edutopia

An expert on children and computing, Dr. Seymour Papert is a mathematician and one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence. He is a distinguished professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of major books on children and learning. Here he describes learning environments in which children collaborate around meaningful projects and powerful ideas.

Complete Guide to Project-Based Learning | Student Guide

It is only logical that we should utilize our students’ familiarity with technology from a young age to maximize their engagement and learning by integrating it into our curriculum. Project-Based Learning grabs hold of this idea and fosters deep learning and autonomy by using technology to help students engage in issues and questions relevant to their lives. This resource will direct you to a variety of resources on this approach, the research behind it, and how you can use it in your class to transform your students into engaged and interested independent thinkers.

ARTS: Crtical Evidence: How the Arts Benefit Student Achievement - critical-evidence.pdf

Arts participation and SAT scores co-vary—that is, they tend to increase linearly: the more arts classes, the higher the scores. This relationship is illustrated in the 2005 results shown below. Notably, students who took four years of arts coursework outperformed their peers who had one half-year or less of arts coursework by 58 points on the verbal portion and 38 points on the math portion of the SAT

http://www.aate.com/?page=effects The Effects of Theatre Education - American Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE) Students involved in drama performance scored an average of 65.5 points higher on the verbal component and 35.5 points higher in the math component of the SAT Students who took courses in drama study or appreciation scored, on average, 55 points higher on verbal and 26 points higher on math than their non-arts classmates. In 2005, students involved in drama performance outscored the national average SAT score by 35 points on the verbal portion and 24 points on the math section. Live action role-playing game - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In addition to entertainment and artistic merit, LARP events may be designed for educational or political purposes. For example, the Danish secondary school Østerskov Efterskole uses LARP to teach most of its classes.[38] Language classes can be taught by immersing students in a role-playing scenario in which they are forced to improvise speech or writing in the language they are learning.

RATIONALITY AND BEYOND: For Success at School, Personality May Beat Brains | TIME

Arthur Poropat, a lecturer in psychology at Australia’s Griffith University conducted the largest ever review of personality and academic performance. Porporat found that an individual’s personality traits are better indicators of academic success than a high score on an intelligence test, for students at both high school and college. Specifically, he suggests, students who are conscientious, open and emotionally stable have the best likelihood of succeeding at their studies. “Conscientiousness reflects things like making and carrying out plans, striving to achieve, and self-control, and is linked with a factor of childhood temperament called Effort Regulation,” says Porporat. “But I found that two other personality factors were also important: Openness (also called openness to experience and intellect), encompassing being imaginative, curious, and artistic; and Emotional Stability, covering calmness and emotional adjustment (as opposed to being anxious, fearful or unstable).” Students who had those traits were able to compete more effectively in an academic setting. “A student with the most helpful personality will score a full grade higher than an average student in this regard,”

GOALS: COLLEGE AND CAREER READY: What Bad Students Know that Good Economists Don't, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

The numbers don't lie: College is a great investment for great students, a mediocre investment for mediocre students, and a bad investment for bad students.

note changes: Penguin scraps degree requirement - BBC News

Publisher Penguin Random House says job applicants will no longer be required to have a university degree. The firm wants to have a more varied intake of staff and suggests there is no clear link between holding a degree and performance in a job. This announcement follows a series of financial companies dropping academic requirements for applicants.

Hiring Without Signals, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal is an interesting news story by Rachel Feintzeg titled "Why Bosses Are Turning to 'Blind Hiring'." (WSJ, January 6, 2015, p. B4) Here are the first 5 paragraphs:

Compose Inc. asks a lot of job applicants. Anyone who wants to be hired at the San Mateo, Calif., cloud-storage firm must write a short story about data, spend a day working on a mock project and complete an assignment. There is one thing the company doesn't ask for: a résumé.

Practical Guidance for Prudent Students, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

The world is full of chance, and every individual is unique. Still, using these banal facts to avoid giving definite counsel is a cop-out. Although no strategy is foolproof, and every generalization has exceptions, some educational strategies really are better than others. Here they are. Go to high school unless you're a terrible student. High school is a good deal for students of almost every description. On the first day of high school, Excellent, Good, Fair, and even Poor Students can count on a Degree Return of at least 5%. Since Poor Students by definition fit the profile of the typical dropout, the decision to drop out is typically a mistake. The key insight: Uncredentialed, inexperienced, full-time workers earn low salaries, so teens can afford to bet on their own academic success even if they usually fail. The high school payoff remains healthy even in bleak scenarios. While school is less fruitful for confirmed bachelors, Poor Students, and people who hate sitting in class, a male Poor Student who rules out marriage and hates school has a Degree Return of 4%. Should anyone skip high school in favor of a low-skilled job? Yes. Almost a quarter of us are worse than Poor Students. If you're in the bottom 10-15% of the academic pecking order, your graduation odds are so slim that you should quit school and start work. And whatever you do, don't bother with a GED. It may sound like a good middle way, but in practice, its main function is to tell employers, "I have the brains but not the grit to finish high school." Go to college only if you're a strong student or special case. College is a a good deal for Excellent and Good Students who follow two simple rules. First, pick a "real" major. STEM is obviously "real"; so are economics, business, and even political science. Second, go to a respected public school. It probably won't charge list price, and even if it does, you usually get your money's worth.

Three Graphs About Trying and Failing, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

Notice: Although kids in the bottom quartile became much more likely to try college, they became no more likely to finish. The fruits of effort for the second quartile are also underwhelming. How can this be? Because the probability of finishing college if you try college actually fell for the bottom three-quarters of the distribution! This is the fruit of America's college-for-all mania.

The Most Educated Poor in History, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

Adults these days are as educated as they have ever been, but poverty is no lower than it was in 1991. This is not because the few lingering people with "less than high school" have soaked up all the poverty. Quite the contrary: poverty has simply moved up the educational scale. The poor in 2014 were the most educated poor in history. Diagnosis: First, handing out more high school and college diplomas doesn't magically create more good-paying jobs. When more credentials are chasing the same number of decent jobs, what you get is credential inflation: jobs that used to require a high school degree now require a college degree; jobs that used to require an Associate degree now require a Bachelor's degree; and so on... Second, having more education does not necessarily increase people's productive capacity. Those in the know will identify this as the old "signaling v. human capital" point. The short of it is

50 Jobs over $50,000 – Without a Degree (Part 1)

While our parents always told us that you need a degree to get anywhere in the job market, the reality has been flipped on its head in the last two decades. There are all sorts of people out there quietly making a mint, in occupations that I thought were either nonexistent or low-paying.

MEANS AND END: SELF-TEACHING Schaum's Outlines - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

each chapter of a typical Outline begins with only a terse explanation of relevant topics, followed by many fully worked examples to illustrate common problem-solving techniques, and ends with a set of further exercises where usually only brief answers are given and not full solutions.

Use Google Traslate + Voice with Anki to learn new language - YouTube
 Anki Tutorial 1: How to install Anki and make your first flashcard - YouTube
  Anki Tutorial 2 - Adding your first pictures from a Frequency List - YouTube

RANDOM RESEARCH: A green view through a classroom window can improve students’ performance -- ScienceDaily

High school students perform better on tests if they are in a classroom with a view of a green landscape, rather than a windowless room or a room with a view of built space, according to research from the University of Illinois Department of Landscape Architecture.

Slow down your typing to improve your writing: Study -- ScienceDaily

Researchers from the University of Waterloo asked study participants to type essays using both hands or with only one. Using text-analysis software, the team discovered that some aspects of essay writing, such as sophistication of vocabulary, improved when participants used only one hand to type.

The Numbers Speak: Foreign Language Requirements Are a Waste of Time and Money, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

The marginal product of two years of pain and suffering per high school graduate: less than one student in a hundred acquires fluency. (And that's self-assessed fluency, which people almost surely exaggerate).

TECHNOLOGY: Evolution of Classroom Technology (Jeff Dunn) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Classrooms have come a long way. There’s been an exponential growth in educational technology advancement over the past few years. From overhead projectors to iPads, it’s important to understand not only what’s coming next but also where it all started…. c. 1650 – The Horn-Book

RATIONALITY: Too Good to Be True - Marginal REVOLUTION

In an excellent new paper, Too Good to Be True, Lachlan J. Gunn et al. show that more evidence can reduce confidence. The basic idea is simple. We expect that in most processes there will normally be some noise so absence of noise suggests a kind of systemic failure. The police are familiar with one type of example. When the eyewitnesses to a crime all report exactly the same story that reduces confidence that the story is true. Eyewitness stories that match too closely suggests not truth but a kind a systemic failure, namely the witnesses have collaborated on telling a lie. What Gunn et al. show is that the accumulation of consistent (non-noisy) evidence can reverse one’s confidence surprisingly quickly.

Teachers, Learning Styles, and Using Data to Drive Instruction | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

So what’s going on here? Are teacher beliefs so powerful as to overcome strong findings that challenge those very beliefs? The answer is, unsurprisingly, yes. Not only do teacher beliefs in learning styles trump evidence but similar tensions between beliefs and data-driven decisions occur around direct instruction, multiple intelligences, and holding students back for a semester or year and other practices. But teachers, of course, are not the only professionals to succumb to confirmation bias. Doctors, lawyers, software engineers–name the profession–have similar issues. In short, the practice is pervasive among professionals and average folk. If such cognitive bias is rife among the highly and barely educated, where does that leave data-driven instructional decisions as a “best practice?”

Why CFAR? - Less Wrong

We therefore aim to create a community with three key properties: Competence -- The ability to get things done in the real world. For example, the ability to work hard, follow through on plans, push past your fears, navigate social situations, organize teams of people, start and run successful businesses, etc. Epistemic rationality -- The ability to form relatively accurate beliefs. Especially the ability to form such beliefs in cases where data is limited, motivated cognition is tempting, or the conventional wisdom is incorrect. Do-gooding -- A desire to make the world better for all its people; the tendency to jump in and start/assist projects that might help (whether by labor or by donation); and ambition in keeping an eye out for projects that might help a lot and not just a little.

with Frequently Asked Questions about CFAR - CFAR maybe but probably not: High school students and epistemic rationality | Cognito Mentoring ARTICLE ON A CFAR WORKSHOP: The Happiness Code - The New York Times

I hadn’t planned to practice the techniques myself, but in the weeks after the workshop ended, I found myself using them often. I began to notice when I was avoiding work — ‘‘finishing’’ a section of the newspaper (unit bias!) or doing other unproductive foot-dragging — and then rationalizing the lost time as mental ‘‘preparation.’’ I also found myself experimenting more and noting the results: working in a library rather than a coffee shop (more effective); signing up and paying for spin classes in advance (ditto); going to a museum on the weekend rather than doing something outdoors (so-so). Against all odds, the workshop had cracked open a mental window: Instead of merely muddling through, I began to consider how my habits might be changed. And while it was hard to tell whether this shift was because of the techniques themselves or simply because I had spent four days focusing intensely on those habits, the effect was the same. Instead of feeling stuck in familiar ruts, I felt productive, open and willing to try new things. I even felt a bit happier.