AP or not AP may not be the question

The Brookings Institute published a paper that questions the traditional wisdom that AP courses help prepare students for college.

It cites an overemphasis on measurable statistics that are attempting to quantify the elusive nature of improved educational outcomes. The data are not encouraging:

For instance, in 2009, the U.S. Department of Education's research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, conducted an exhaustive review of research on college preparation and found "low evidence"--the weakest category--that academic preparation for college was effective at improving classroom outcomes. The reviewed studies included a wide variety of methods of college preparation, from increasing the difficulty of academic standards to matching curricular topics to known college courses. 

These methods also notably included increasing the quantity of advanced coursework taken in high school, such as Advanced Placement classes. None of the methods was found to have a strongly predictive positive impact on college readiness.

Indeed, in 2013, Dartmouth stopped accepting Advanced Placement credits after 90 percent of students who scored a perfect "5" on the AP Psychology exam reportedly failed the university's own test.

More evidence from later in the article:

We thus examined whether these patterns held up in a nationally representative database of U.S. students progressing from high school to college in the 1990s. Analyzing thousands of transcripts from the Department of Education's National Educational Longitudinal Study, we found confirmatory evidence that advanced high school courses apparently do little to prepare students for success in college coursework.

Specifically, we showed that students with one more year of high school instruction in physics, psychology, economics, or sociology on average have grades in their first college course in the same subject just 0.003 to 0.2 points higher on a four-point scale. For example, for students of similar race, socioeconomic status, and high school standardized test scores, those who took a year of high school economics earn a final grade in their college economics class 0.03 points higher than students who have never encountered that subject before. What’s more, these trivially small differences hold even for students who took exactly the same college course.

Here is some analysis of the reasons why the authors believe this gap exists:

What can explain why high school course-taking is so weakly related to college grades, both in our study and in previous ones? It is not that high school students are not learning. Rather, it is more likely they often learn the wrong things, do not sufficiently focus on the critical thinking commonly needed in college, or simply forget much of what they learned.

For instance, the ability to analyze evidence and pen a persuasive essay is central to much of college. Most colleges mandate at least a semester course of intensive writing and argument, as it is presumed that even students from top high schools are insufficiently prepared with this essential skill.

Additionally, studies on long-term retention of high school coursework suggest that students forget much or most of what they learn. Students who remember a few basic concepts may hold a head start that quickly diminishes as college classes rush toward advanced material. The little information that is retained from high school may explain the very slight advantage from prior coursework that we observed in our study.

The authors argue for a stronger emphasis on the need for more innovation and experimentation. In other words, the jury is still out.

Here is the link to the full article:  How important are high school courses to college performance?

The real world is not an exam

Original post:  Feb 25, 2014

It's often tempting to think that there are simple solutions to every problem. The reality is that there are going to be times when finding the right answer is downright difficult (if not near impossible).

As my boys begin their educational career, I can only imagine how many tests and exams they will take over the course of their academic lives. If you counted up the number of bubbles on the multiple choice tests that they will see between MCAS and NAEP and SATs, it might reach into the millions! But on many of those standardized test there is only one "correct" (best) answer. You and I both know that there is often no such analog in the real world.

The field of medicine is even more challenging. I've been reading a number of articles that discuss some of the factors that drive additional costs. There are all kinds of additional tests that are ordered by physicians. In many cases, they are attempting to rule out some very unlikely events.

This blog post titled "The Real World Is Not an Exam" offers one such example. A young man had just completed his medical training and was attempting to diagnose a patient:

He went off to evaluate an older patient with neck pain. It hurt when she turned her head. It had been going on for a few days. “Wouldn’t hurt to get a cardiac work-up,” he reported back. “Stress her, get an echo. Neck pain, you know, tipoff for heart disease. Gotta remember: In old women, heart disease will have unusual symptoms.”

True enough, occasionally. But not in this woman, who had a stiff neck and probably needed a new pillow.

He saw a patient whose hips were hurting after a long hike a few days before. “I got an M.R.I., pronto,” he announced. “It could be aseptic necrosis. Bone death. That’s what it usually is with someone taking those drugs.”

No, in fact, even with those drugs, it is usually muscle strain, the kind that hurts a lot and then goes away. Only in the wonderful world of the single best answer should you put your bets on anything more exotic.

The author offers a potential solution later in the piece:

They learn to recognize key phrases (neck pain) and stock situations (older woman), and they live in dread of unlikely worst-case scenarios. (Dies from heart attack while buying new pillow. You are sued.) Sometimes the actual, three-dimensional patient is not real enough to eradicate all her paper iterations.

Fear of uncertainty is expensive, and my young friend seemed poised to become single-handedly responsible for the high cost of health care in his ZIP code.

Like all victims of the single best answer syndrome, he ordered tests in wild profusion because, in his experience, every question had an answer and a test that would get you there. Options never included “You decide to keep an eye on it for a little while,” “You tell the patient to come back if it gets worse” or “You must make peace with the fact that you are never going to figure this one out.”

I wonder where the fine line is between caution and fear. It's probably near the line between knowledge and wisdom!

The Prensky rules

Original post:  May 15, 2013

I just finished an article titled "The Touch-Screen Generation". With the advent of tablet computers, young children are now able to use all kinds of applications. If you have ever seen how intensely some young children engage with iPads, you know precisely how intently they can focus on these little screens. There have been many debates about whether or not this is a positive development.

Many parents feel guilty about allowing their children to play on tablets. One way they attempt to ease their consciences is to insist on educational applications. Marc Prensky, an education and technology writer, takes a very different approach. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Prensky’s 7-year-old son has access to books, TV, Legos, Wii—and Prensky treats them all the same. He does not limit access to any of them. Sometimes his son plays with a new app for hours, but then, Prensky told me, he gets tired of it. He lets his son watch TV even when he personally thinks it’s a “stupid waste.” SpongeBob SquarePants, for example, seems like an annoying, pointless show, but Prensky says he used the relationship between SpongeBob and Patrick, his starfish sidekick, to teach his son a lesson about friendship. “We live in a screen age, and to say to a kid, ‘I’d love for you to look at a book but I hate it when you look at the screen’ is just bizarre. It reflects our own prejudices and comfort zone. It’s nothing but fear of change, of being left out.”

I found this unusual perspective to be very thought-provoking. While I can't say I will personally do the same thing, there is a lesson in his approach. Other parts of the article question why we focus so relentlessly on education at the expense of fun. Fun might actually lead to creativity much more effectively!

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/the-touch-screen-generation/309250/4/