compromise on Texas English/reading curriculum

March 30, 2008 – 12:22 pm

Update Sept. 1, 2008. Since people are still finding their way to this post, I need to add that the compromise noted here has been swept away by subsequent developments. In chronological order, see

===============

The original post here:

A tentative compromise resolution of the controversy over the English / Language Arts curriculum has been reached.

The controversy centered on whether the State Board of Education should mandate a list of specific works of literature for students to read, and if so, how should the list be composed.

According to Alana Morris of Houston, as reported in the Houston Chronicle, president of the Coalition of Reading and English Supervisors of Texas, Texas educators have not been heard in the nearly three-year process of developing a new English language arts curriculum, and teachers now hope that the compromise proposal will result in improvements.

By Tony Whitson | Posted in English / Language Arts, Politics of Education, blog | Tags: | Comments (0)

“Ben Stein is the Rosa Parks of Darwin Skeptics”

March 30, 2008 – 9:21 am

Proponents of “Intelligent Design” continue trying to portray their efforts as a struggle for civil rights, as in this amusing post touting Ben Stein as “the Rosa Parks of Darwin Skeptics.”

Read More »

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Ben Stein, Evolution, Expelled, Intellectual and Academic Freedom, blog, media | Tags: | Comments (1)

responsive, differentiated instruction

March 8, 2008 – 8:02 pm

Something from Mara Sapon-Shevin that I think is worth sharing (posted here with her permission):

Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008
From: Mara Sapon-Shevin
To: Tony Whitson

Hi Tony, Yes, I know this story and tell it as about responsive, differentiated instruction, although “tactful teaching” is a nice reframing! I talk about the swim instructor knowing (and all that implies) his/her students well enough to be able to make the “Jump into my arms” instruction be just at the right level of risk/challenge for each kid. One child barely grazes the water and is scooped up, another gets a little wet, another is allowed to go under and sputter a bit before being reclaimed. And that this differentiation happens seamlessly and without the instructor saying, “OK, Jason, I know you’re terrified of the water, so I’ll catch you before you even get wet” or “Maria, I know you’re brave and really able to deal with this, so I’ll let you go under before I grab you.” It’s not that it’s bad for there to BE diversity, or to respond to it, but important that it be naturalized and normalized. ***

Best, Mara Mara Sapon-Shevin Professor of Inclusive Education Syracuse University Syracuse, New York * * *

© 2008 Mara Sapon-Shevin. Permission to use this material is granted subject to the condition that the source is cited, including the information in the following citations (1 for APA style [5th]; 2 for Chicago style A [15th]):

  1. Sapon-Shevin, M. (2008). Responsive, differentiated instruction. Retrieved Month date, 20xx from http://curricublog.org/2008/03/08/mara-sapon-shevin/.
  2. Sapon-Shevin, Mara. “Responsive, Differentiated Instruction.” (2008), http://curricublog.org/2008/03/08/mara-sapon-shevin/ (accessed Month date, 20xx).

some rights

This work is also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

By Tony Whitson | Posted in blog, differentiated instruction, teaching | Comments (0)

“Testing boosts memory, study doesn’t”

March 8, 2008 – 5:06 pm

A study reported last month in Science is being discussed around the blogosphere under titles like “Testing boosts memory, study doesn’t,” and “Testing, not studying, makes for strong long-term memories.”

I think the 2½-page published report of the study itself makes for an excellent item to “test” students’ (I’m thinking now of grad students in education) ability to recognize the implications of the difference between cognitivist vs. social-ontological approaches to learning.

Here’s the free public authors’ abstract of the article at Sciencemag.org:

Science 15 February 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5865, pp. 966 - 968
DOI: 10.1126/science.1152408		  

Reports

The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning

Jeffrey D. Karpicke1* and Henry L. Roediger, III2 Learning is often considered complete when a student can produce the correct answer to a question. In our research, students in one condition learned foreign language vocabulary words in the standard paradigm of repeated study-test trials. In three other conditions, once a student had correctly produced the vocabulary item, it was repeatedly studied but dropped from further testing, repeatedly tested but dropped from further study, or dropped from both study and test. Repeated studying after learning had no effect on delayed recall, but repeated testing produced a large positive effect. In addition, students’ predictions of their performance were uncorrelated with actual performance. The results demonstrate the critical role of retrieval practice in consolidating learning and show that even university students seem unaware of this fact.

1 Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.
2 Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: karpicke@purdue.edu

Read the Full Text

.

By Tony Whitson | Posted in blog, educational psychology, educational testing, jaw, learning theory, testing | Comments (0)

Science education wins in TX primaries

March 7, 2008 – 2:37 pm

In the March 4 Texas primary contest, where Huckabee’s campaign might have benefited anti-evolution challengers for the state board of education, those challengers were defeated by the (pro-science) incumbents:  Read More »

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Evolution, Science, blog | Tags: | Comments (0)

Time Mag: Huckabee, Texas, Evolution

March 1, 2008 – 6:15 pm

The potential Huckabee effect on teaching evolution is now getting the attention I was calling for in an earlier post here. As reported now by Time Magazine,  Read More »

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Evolution, blog | Comments (1)

Fred Hess & AEI: What Students Don’t Know

February 26, 2008 – 7:24 pm

Another one of those reports. You know the drill. Half of students surveyed did not answer the correct half-century for the Civil War. Etc. See

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.27576,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

By Tony Whitson | Posted in blog, curriculum | Comments (0)

evolution in Corpus Christi seat on TX state Bd of Ed

February 26, 2008 – 5:29 pm

The Corpus Christie area Caller-Times reports on how the teaching of evolution may be affected by the GOP primaries next week.When asked “How do you think the Texas school system will be influenced by the debate between creationism and evolution?“  Read More »

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Evolution, Politics of Education, Religion, Science, blog | Tags: | Comments (0)

Schönborn & Ratzinger on Evolution, Creation, and “Intelligent Design”

February 25, 2008 – 1:04 am

This program will be re-run this weekend:

Upcoming Schedule

Sunday, April 13, at 9:30 AM EDT
Sunday, April 13, at 2:00 PM EDT

=======================

This weekend I heard the talk by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California, given February 15, 2008, and aired this weekend on CSpan2/BookTV (where it might be re-aired in future weeks). [Click here for info on the event, links for online viewing, or to order the DVD.]

Cardinal Schönborn spoke on the subject of his book Chance or purpose?: creation, evolution and a rational faith, which has been available in English since October 2007. The Cardinal also mentioned that the proceedings from the conference on Creation and Evolution hosted by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 is also now available in English.

As I see it, the key statement by the Pope himself, as it appears in the German text, is: Read More »

By Tony Whitson | Posted in BookTV, Evolution, Religion, Science, blog | Comments (1)

Discourses, genres, and other “form fields”

February 24, 2008 – 8:31 pm

magnet fieldFrom physics, we know about magnetic fields, gravitational fields, electrical fields, and other fields of physical force.

If curriculum is the semiosic activity or course of experience in which human being comes to form, then curriculum theory and curriculum studies must be concerned with the fields of semiosic forms guiding the formation of human persons, cultures, social institutions, practices, etc.

By analogy with “force fields” in the physical world, we can think of “form fields” in the world of curricular formation. What Jim Gee describes as “Discourses,” what Joseph Schwab described as “disciplines” and Kuhn described as “disciplinary matrices” (after first describing them as disciplinary “paradigms”), and what Clay Spinuzzi describes as “genres” and “genre ecologies,” might all be regarded as “form fields” for curriculum. As we think of gravitational force as shaping physical space, so we can think of semiosic fields shaping the curricular space of genres, discourses, and disciplines (etc.).

[Note: This reflects a talk given by Jim Gee on Feb. 28, 1992 at Louisiana State University, in which he used gravity’s curving of physical space-time as an analogy for the effects of disciplines on Discourses. The emphasis on formation, as in disciplinary formations, Discourse formations, and form-fields, reflects my own grounding in curriculum studies, as the study of the course of experience in which human being takes form.]

=more later=

© 2008 James Anthony Whitson. Permission to use this material is granted subject to the condition that the source is cited, including the information in either of the following citation forms (1 for Chicago style A [15th]; or 2 for APA style [5th]):

  1. Whitson, James Anthony. “Discourses, Genres, and Other “Form Fields”.” (2008), http://curricublog.org/2008/02/24/form-fields/ (accessed Month date, 20xx). [or]
  2. Whitson, J. A. (2008). Discourses, genres, and other “form fields”. Retrieved Month date, 20xx from http://curricublog.org/2008/02/24/form-fields/.
By Tony Whitson | Posted in Curriculum Theory, Disciplines, James Anthony Whitson, blog, formation, info, lexicon | Comments (1)

Wired: Evolution Wins as Creationists (Accidentally) Switch Sides in Florida

February 20, 2008 – 4:38 pm

On the Wired blog, Brandon Keim reports:

The Florida Board of Education officially upheld evolution yesterday.

The board didn’t quite mean to do that, of course. In a 4-3 vote, the Board accepted a proposed curriculum that replaced all references to evolution with the phrase “the scientific theory of evolution.” In so doing, the board inadvertently made evolution central to public school science education, and also, almost incidentally, mandated education on just what constitutes a “scientific theory.”

Read the full report at http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/evolution-wins.html

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Evolution, Science, blog | Tags: | Comments (0)

Negative Implications Of No Child Left Behind: As Graduation Rates Go Down, School Ratings Go Up

February 18, 2008 – 8:10 pm

ScienceDaily (2008-02-16) — Texas’ public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act, directly contributes to lower graduation rates, according to new research. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation — a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, Latino and English-as-a-second-language students.

The study has been published in the peer-reviewed policy journal “Educational Policy Analysis Archives” and is the first research to track the impact of high-stakes accountability on students, employing individual student-level data over a multi-year period. The study can be viewed at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v16n3/.

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Education, Education Law & Policy, NCLB, Standards & Testing, blog | Comments (1)

intelligent exaptation

February 18, 2008 – 6:51 pm

At The Hive of Lost Memories, a post on “the evolution of grocery bags” provides a superb example of exaptation, from outside the realm of biological evolution:

Plastic or paper? I first heard of the question after a couple of days of my arrival to the United States when I was out with my brother for Thanksgiving grocery shopping. I was confused and did not know what to say to the bagger. We did not have such luxurious option in Vietnam. We brought our own grocery bag to the market. And while I was thinking which one would do a better job, my brother yelled out from behind “plastic”. I turned to my brother with a weird puzzled look on my face and without even asking, my brother whispered making sure no one could hear him “they can be used as trash bags later”. After all it is not about which bag is a stronger bag but more about what else we can use them for after all that groceries are unloaded. …

In their argument for “Intelligent Design” [ID] IDoloters claim that some things (most notoriously, the bacterial flagellum) are so complex that they could only have occurred through conscious, purposeful design: They argue that there could be no adaptive advantage to evolutionary stages leading up to the complete mechanism, since it would not function until it’s all there in its complete form, so it must have been brought into existence, complete, in that final form.

This ignores the principle of exaptation, which recognizes that elements that later become parts of a complex feature or mechanism have adaptive advantage performing other, perhaps unrelated functions, in their earlier stages.

Ironically, this post itself is an example, insofar as the memes embedded in the post on grocery bags originally had no function in the discourse over evolutionary biology; but if people read this post, those memes will come to be disseminated performing functions unrelated to their earlier adoption in the post on grocery bags.

The intelligent blogger who wrote the grocery bags post did not have in mind the function of illustrating exaptation for the ID debate. The fact of that post being written by an intelligent blogger, and maybe this post too, is irrelevant to the basic principles of variation, distribution, adaptation, and exaptation that are seen to operate, as well, without conscious foreknowledge and purpose.

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Evolution, James Anthony Whitson, Science, blog | Comments (0)

eclipsed evolution vote in Texas

February 18, 2008 – 4:42 pm

update: Feb. 23 / APRIL CASTRO / Associated Press  Read More »

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Education, Evolution, Politics of Education, Science, blog | Tags: | Comments (2)

more on Expelled

February 9, 2008 – 9:41 pm

An earlier post here featured Ben Stein and his role in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Three recent items on the film have been posted by the Southern Baptist TEXAN:

  1. Baptist professors featured in new film,
  2. Q&A: ‘Expelled’s’ Robert Marks, and
  3. Q&A: ‘Expelled’ producer Logan Craft.

On the Panda’s Thumb, PvM rebuts Dembski’s argument quoted in the “Baptist professors” article. The rebuttal is up to PvM’s reliably high standards, except for one slight problem: PvM quotes comments that St. Augustine made in a chapter titled

On interpreting the mind of the sacred writer. Christians should not talk nonsense to unbelievers.

PvM uses the long quotation properly; but it ends with “[1 Timothy 1.7],” which could give readers the idea that this is the citation to Augustine’s text, or that PvM might think so. For anybody interested in the source, it is Book One, chapter 19 in Augustine’s work The literal meaning of Genesis (where Augustine explains that Genesis does not literally mean what “literal” Creationsists claim that it means). For a good succinct discussion of this by Davis A. Young, see http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Bible-Science/PSCF3-88Young.html.

Read More »

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Ben Stein, Evolution, Expelled, Intellectual and Academic Freedom, Religion, Science, blog, jaw | Tags: | Comments (2)

more info on TX, FL evolution & science standards

January 19, 2008 – 6:30 pm

An article on ars technica (”New Florida state standards spark nonscientific backlash“) includes several links to helpful sources for keeping up on developments in Florida.

An overview on the Texas standards developments can be found in two articles at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Evolution’s status may be debated by state board, and Proponents want `intelligent design’ included in curricula.

Although the “Evolution’s status” article provides some useful background both on Texas and the history of this controversy in the U.S., it contains a factual error about the legal history, and it has been skewered on more general grounds by The Texas Observer. As for the erroneous legal history, they write:

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, creation science and intelligent design introduce religion into the classroom, violating the Constitution.

In fact, although this is accurate with respect to “creation science,” the Supreme Court has never had occasion to rule on “intelligent design”; and there is reason to question how it would rule in a case on that today. Read More »

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Evolution, Science, blog | Comments (1)

Ben Stein — EXPELLED

January 18, 2008 – 8:11 pm

Expelled bannerPromotion is ramping up for Ben Stein’s slick propaganda piece, EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, which supposedly was supposed to be in theaters beginning February 2008. (It was finally released in April, I think.)

download EXPELLED Press Kit | Type: DOC |
Learn more about the issues and controversy surrounding EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed.

A remarkable interview with Stein appeared yesterday on the Cybercast News Service’s CNS.COM. (I learned about the interview through this post on The Bad Idea Blog, which comments on a number of points in the interview.)

The movie’s official website is amazing, and well worth exploring. I especially recommend the links in the News Archive. One of the more fun bits is at the end of one of the trailers, where Stein reprises his “Anyone? … Anyone? … Anyone? …” from this memorable monologue/lecture in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Read More »

By Tony Whitson | Posted in Ben Stein, Evolution, Expelled, Intellectual and Academic Freedom, Religion, Science, blog, jaw, media | Tags: | Comments (5)