有时间再整理能源篇，也许没必要了。
大家想要此类文章可以从各杂志期刊网站查询。
刚开通的国家科技图书文献中心（www.nstl.gov.cn）也有偿提供此类服务。（以前是由大方数据负责的）
或自己学要有条件的，可以通过学校图书馆查询世界期刊的电子版。
无论考研、6级阅读，选材太广泛，有时从大英百科全书里，有时从杂志期刊里选材，无可能标中。
我整理这些东西主要还是希望对大家的写作有益，不过还是在有耐心看的基础上。
导读：
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
没有教育，没有未来 来源：经济学人杂志(03/27/99)
陈述有关非洲贫穷儿童的教育的信息；无法接受教育的儿童数量；
教育是怎样与贫穷以及其他社会困境相关的；在教育机会上的性
别差异；非洲教育状况；某些国家是怎样削减教育开支以达到其
偿债要求的；联合国儿童基金会与英国牛津饥荒救济委员会的研
究。
怎样不传授价值观念 来源：教育文摘(May97)
集中讨论个性教育；教育界流行的提高学生个性的策略；个性教育的原理；
儿童发展计划（CDP）作为促进儿童社会与道德发展、改变学校风气的最佳典范。
成绩评估体制的作用与局限 来源：Phi Delta Kappan(05/01/99)
讨论教育成绩评估在美国社会中的关联；
什么样的成绩评估适合儿童；
这类评估预料将引起的对社会改变的影响；
现存的用来测试学生的演讲形式；
教育的目的；
成绩评估上的人类发展因素；
才能发展：两个观点 来源：Phi Delta Kappan(06/01/98)
关于教育项目必须在所有教育层面上发展青少年才能的主张；
对一系列才能的认识；
格伦维尤（芝加哥城郊住宅区）和劳伦斯（印第安那州）的一些样例；
所使用过的项目以及模型的详细内容；
父母和社区的作用；
笨孩子？用胡椒粉吧 来源：新政客杂志(06/28/99)
对英美两国学校儿童假日活动的比较；
为何美国的学校儿童不再有暑假；
一些美国人与英国在儿童教育上的看法；
帮助学生取得成功 来源：今日美国杂志（非报纸）(Dec97)
在教授学生独立行动的教育上所取得的成果的报告（1997）；
自律的要求；
父母帮助孩子开发自律能力的途径；
他们的八个成功秘诀 来源：时代杂志(10/19/98)
关于父母是怎样影响儿童成为好学生的调查；
父母怎样通过身体力行来教育孩子解决难题；
如何是学习充满趣味；
给孩子读故事；
关于年级并不是最重要的因素的观点；
让孩子追逐自己的兴趣所在；
插入：父母指南：你能帮着做些什么？
儿童的游戏 来源：国家评论(05/19/97)
集中讨论一分由NICHHD（国家儿童健康与人类发展研究院）所公布的报告，报告陈述了在托儿所的孩子以及单独由母亲照顾的孩子如何学习思考和语言；
学前儿童的教育对认知发展的重要性被看成是神经解剖学的事实。
超越性别的神话 来源：Time(10/19/98)
集中讨论儿童的性别与学习；
在学校里，男女平等的谎言；
Susan Baile的报告“学校如何欺骗女孩”；
带女儿上班日；
在教育上男孩、女孩种族隔离的抬头；
教师的技巧如何影响男孩与女孩的学习；
正文开始
===============================================================
---------------------------------------------------------------
NO SCHOOL, NO FUTURE
--------------------
Better education in poor countries would give everyone a richer life, and not cost much. But in Africa more and more children do not go to school at all
RASAKI HASSAN is a Nigerian taxi-driver who wants to set up his own company. Why? ``So I can make money to send my children to school.'' What for? ``So they can have a better life.''
Mr Rasaki typifies the almost universal belief in education in the poor world, particularly in Africa. For millions like him, it means that their children may escape from the drudgery of labouring or subsistence farming and offers a prospect of wealth, power and a job with a suit and an office. Parents will make huge sacrifices to send a child to school.
That's not just good for the children. ``Educate part of a community and the whole of it benefits,'' argues Amartya Sen, India's Nobel-prize winning economist. Basic learning, he says, drives economic growth: think of Japan after the war. It also lowers fertility rates: see Bangladesh in the past 20 years. It helps women to raise healthy children and farmers to reap bigger crops. If enough people learn to read and write, the economy will improve and everybody can get more out of life.
But, in much of Africa, the state of schooling is dire. All over Africa every day children walk or run for miles to reach decrepit buildings, which often do little more than keep off the sun and rain. There may be no water or electricity and not enough benches or desks. Books and equipment, if any, are shared in classes of up to 100. Sport is kicking a ball of wrapped-up rags around a stony field. In some areas schools have to take one set of pupils in the morning, another set in the afternoon. And many children do not get there at all.
According to the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), around 40m children in sub-Saharan Africa get no basic teaching. And spending on each child is half what it was 20 years ago. Although enrolment in primary schools has increased hugely since colonial times-from 25% of all children in 1960 to about 60% now-the numbers of the uneducated are also growing. At an ``Education for All'' conference in 1990, all but two of the world's governments pledged that universal basic education would exist by 2015. But by then, at current rates, about 75m children, most of them in Africa, will have none. Why?
One answer is lack of resources. The 30 African countries deepest in debt spend as much on interest as on health and education combined. In the past two decades, reforms demanded by aid donors, the IMF and the World Bank have required cuts in government spending. Education for all was no longer an option. In Tanzania, the government devotes three times more to debt-servicing than to education, on which spending has dropped two-thirds in a decade. In Zambia, where debt repayment now costs 10% of GDP, spending on schools has fallen. By 1996, over 550,000 Zambian children aged between six and 11 were out of school. Even so, Zambia still found money for defence: indeed defence spending, as a share of GDP, rose from 1.1% in 1985 to 1.8% in 1996. In Tanzania, it was at 3.3% of GDP in 1996.
Oxfam, a British-based charity, released a report this week which describes the link between poverty and educational success measured by enrolment, the proportion of children completing four years of school, and girls' learning achievements. Richer countries do not automatically have better education. Zimbabweans, Oxfam argues, are taught roughly as well as South Africans, though they have only half the income per person. Botswana's education system is three times better than (four-times-richer) Kuwait's. Kenya, less than half as rich per person as Pakistan, has a schooling system rated three times better.
Lack of money keeps children out of school. Cutting school fees and abolishing school uniform-which often costs more than the fees-increases attendance at once. In 1997, Uganda did both, putting 2m more children in schools today. And only a smallish amount of money is needed to get every child into school: $2 billion more a year would do it for Africa, says Unicef, equal to a rise in government spending on basic education from 2% of GNP to 3%. That much is spent each day on military equipment around the world. Aid, too, could be better directed: only 15% of it is earmarked for education and health, and countries where fewest children go to primary school have had the biggest aid cuts this decade.
But debt, aid and money do not tell the whole story. Forgiving debts could simply allow some governments to spend more on guns. For this reason, Oxfam wants debt relief to be strictly conditional on improved educational standards.
There are other reasons why education is failing in Africa. AIDS is one. Girls may be kept at home to care for a stricken relation, or they may catch it themselves at school. Some become pregnant and have to drop out, even though the boy responsible does not. Girls are at a disadvantage in other ways, too, and have a higher drop-out rate than boys. Some parents do not bother to educate them at all: if they can afford to send only one or two children to school, boys generally take precedence. Poorly paid and unenthusiastic teachers are an even bigger problem. In Nigeria a primary-school teacher is paid only $23 a month; often the salary arrives late, if at all.
Putting into primary education some of the money now spent on servicing debt, on armies and on higher education-combined with changed attitudes to girls' education-could quickly give most African children basic skills in reading and writing. Of course jobs, suits and offices will not follow automatically. But at least there will be many more Africans with the basic training they need to help themselves. Without that, the African future will be bleak indeed.
---------------------------------------------------------------
HOW NOT TO TEACH VALUES
-----------------------
What goes by the name of character education nowaays is, for the most part, a collection of exhortations and extrinsic inducements designed to make children work harder and do what they're told. Even when other values are also promoted--caring or fairness, say-the preferred method of instruction is tantamount to indoctrination. The point is to drill students in specific behaviors rather than to engage them in deep, critical reflection about certain ways of being.
This is the impression one gets from contemporary proponents of character education as well as the curriculum materials sold by leading national programs-an impression only strengthened by visiting schools singled out for commitment to character education.
Some of the most popular school-wide strategies for improving students' character seem dubious on their face. The premises of requiring student uniforms, for example, are that (1) children's character can be improved by forcing them to dress alike, and (2) if adults object to students' clothing, the best solution is not to invite them to reflect together about how this problem might' be solved, but to compel them all to wear the same thing.
A second strategy, which might be called "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Honesty," has one value after another being targeted, with each assigned its own day, week, or month. This is unlikely to result in lasting commitment to any of these values, much less a feeling for how they may be related. Nevertheless, such programs are taken very seriously by some of the same people who are quick to dismiss other educational programs, such as those intended to promote self-esteem, as silly and ineffective.
A third strategy, offering students rewards when they are "caught" being good, is favored by right-wing religious groups, orthodox behaviorists, and leaders of--and curriculum suppliers for--the character education movement. But considerable psychological evidence suggests that the more we reward people for doing something, the more likely they are to lose interest in what they had to do to get the reward. Extrinsic motivation is not only quite different from intrinsic motivation but actually tends to erode it.
This effect has been demonstrated in many circumstances and with respect to many different attitudes and behaviors. Most relevant here are studies showing that individuals rewarded for doing something nice become less likely to think of themselves as caring or helpful people and more likely to attribute their behavior to the reward.
The same applies to a person's sense of responsibility, fairness, perseverance, etc. The lesson a child learns from Skinnerlan tactics is that the point of being good is to get rewards. No wonder researchers have found that children frequently rewarded or praised for caring, sharing, and helping are less likely than other children to keep doing those things.
Even worse than rewards are awards-certificates, plaques, and trophies-whose numbers have been artificially limited so only a few can get them. When some children are singled out as "winners," the central message every child learns is: "Other people are potential obstacles to my success." Thus, the likely result of making students beat out peers to be the most virtuous is not only less intrinsic commitment to virtue but a disruption of relationships and, ironically, of the experience of community so vital to the development of children's character.
Unfortunately, the problems with character education are not restricted to such strategies. More deeply troubling are the fundamental assumptions that inform character education programs.
One such assumption is that children are basically evil, that most behavior problems (in the words of one proponent of character education) are "the result of sheer 'willfulness' on the part of children." Even the common emphasis on self-restraint as a virtue reflects a pessimistic view of human nature, a view that, happily, is not supported by the available evidence.
Conservative Agenda
The values championed by leading character-education theorists often reflect a conservative agenda, even if they present their programs otherwise. Alongside such unobjectionable items as fairness and honesty, they frequently emphasize obedience and loyalty, diligence and the Protestant work ethic.
A focus on respect and responsibility may, in practice, mean little more than getting students to do whatever the adults demand. One writer was led to wonder whether, if Germany had had character education at the time, it would have encouraged children to fight Nazism or support it.
Perhaps the most significant (and least remarked on) feature of character education is the way values are taught and learning is thought to take place. Schools with character education programs I have visited are engaged largely in exhortation and directed recitation. The programs them-selves-and the theorists who promote them-seem to regard teaching as a matter of telling and compelling.
Even when character education proponents tiptoe around the word indoctrination, their model of instruction is clear: Good character and values are instilled in or transmitted to students. The virtues and values in question are fully formed, and, to many proponents, divinely ordained. Children are passive receptacles to be filled. This model of education sees children as objects to be manipulated, not as learners to be engaged.
Wrong Goal
I believe proponents of character education are promoting techniques that seem strikingly ineffective at fostering autonomy or ethical development because, as a rule, they are not trying to foster these things. The goal is not to support or facilitate children's social and moral growth, but simply to demand good behavior, to get compliance, to make children act the way we want them to.
Rewards and preachy stories, exhortations to be good and attempts to instill certain habits may temporarily buy a particular behavior, but they are unlikely to leave children with a commitment to it. You can turn out automatons, but the words and actions are unlikely to continue--much less transfer to new situations--be-cause the child has not been invited to integrate them into his or her value structure.
Traditional moralists are apt to ask: If values and traditions and the stories that embody them already exist, do we have to reinvent the wheel? The answer is no-and yes.
It is not as though everything that now exists must be discarded and entirely new values fashioned from scratch. But the process of learning requires that meaning, ethical or otherwise, be actively invented and reinvented, from the inside out--that children be given the opportunity to make sense of such concepts as fairness or courage, regardless of how long they have been around.
Children must be invited to reflect on complex issues, to recast them in light of their own experiences and questions, to figure out for them-selves-and with one another-what kind of person one ought to be, which traditions are worth keeping, and how to proceed when two basic values seem in conflict. In this sense, reinvention is necessary to help children become moral people, as opposed to people who merely do what they are told--or reflexively rebel against what they are told.
Ironically, many people who accept character education without a second thought already know that academic learning is most effective when children can construct meaning around scientific or literary concepts rather than having facts shoved down their throats. But memorizing right answers doesn't work any better to promote understanding in the social or moral domain than it does in math class.
The standard response to this by traditionalists boils down to a single epithet: relativism If we do anything other than insert moral absolutes in students, if we let them construct their own meanings, then we are saying that anything goes, that morality collapses into personal preferences.
Such either/or thinking, long since discarded by serious moral philosophers, continues to fuel character education and to perpetuate the confusion of education with indoctrination. To say that students must construct meaning around moral concepts is not to deny that adults have a crucial role. The romantic view that children can basically educate themselves if grown-ups don't interfere is not taken seriously by any constructivists I know of.
Educators, parents, and other adults are desperately needed to offer guidance, act as models (we hope), pose challenges that promote moral growth, and help children understand the effects of their actions on others, thereby tapping and nurturing a concern for others that is present in children from a very young age.
Character education rests on three ideological legs: behaviorism, conservatism, and religion. Of these, the third raises the most delicate issues for a critic. So let us be clear: It is of no relevance that almost all leading proponents of character education are devout Catholics. But it is entirely relevant that, in the shadows of their writings, there lurks the assumption that only religion can serve as the foundation for good character. It is appropriate to consider the personal beliefs of these individuals if those beliefs are ensconced in the movement they have defined and directed. What they do on Sundays is their own business, but if they are trying to turn our public schools into Sunday schools, that becomes everybody's business.
Even putting aside the theological underpinnings of the character education movement, we can describe the natural constituency of that movement. Logically, its supporters should be those who firmly believe we should focus on repairing the characters of children rather than on transforming the environments in which they learn, those who assume the worst about human nature, those who are more committed to preserving than to changing our society, those who favor such values as obedience to authority, and those who define learning as the process of swallowing whole a set of preexisting truths. It stands to reason that readers who recognize themselves in this description would enthusiastically endorse character education in its present form.
The rest of us must call attention to the difference between what takes place as "character education" and the enterprise of helping students become ethically sophisticated decision makers and caring human beings. Wanting young people to turn out that way doesn't require us to adopt traditional character education programs any more than wanting them to be physically fit requires us to turn schools into Marine boot camps.
What does the alternative look like? We can sketch the broad contours of a divergent approach, beginning with the elimination of Skinnerian reinforcers and lesson plans that resemble sermons. What to add? We might suggest holding regular class meetings in which students can share, plan, decide, and reflect together. We might provide children explicit opportunities to practice "perspective taking"imagining how the world looks from someone else's point of view. Activities that promote an understanding of how others think and feel, that support the impulse to imaginatively reach beyond the self, can provide the same benefits realized by holding democratic class meetings-namely, helping students become more ethical and compassionate while simultaneously fostering intellectual growth.
An existing practice that might be reconfigured is using literature to teach values. Many programs use simplistic little morality tales in place of rich, complex literature. Naturally, the texts should be developmentally appropriate, but some character educators fail to give children credit for being able to grapple with ambiguity.
Or perhaps the concern is not that students will be unable to make sense of challenging literature, but that they will not derive the "correct" moral. This would explain why, even when character education curricula include impressive pieces of writing, the works tend to be used for drumming in simple lessons.
Rather than employ literature to indoctrinate or induce mere conformity, we can use it to spur reflection. Whether students are age 6 or 16, the discussion of stories should be open-ended rather than relentlessly didactic. Teachers who refrain from tightly controlling such conversations are impressed by the levels of meaning students prove capable of exploring and the moral growth they exhibit in such an environment.
Instead of announcing, "This man is a hero; do what he did," such teachers may involve the students in deciding who (if anyone) is heroic in a given story-or in contemporary culture--and why. They may even invite students to reflect on the larger issue of whether it is desirable to have heroes.
More than specific practices that might be added, subtracted, or changed, a program to help children grow into good people begins with a commitment to change the way classrooms and schools are structured.
Consider the format of classroom discussions. A proponent of character education, invoking such traditional virtues as patience or self-control, might remind students that they must wait to be recognized by the teacher. But what if we invited students to think about the best way to conduct a discussion? Must we raise our hands? Is there another way to avoid having everyone talk at once? How can we be fair to those who aren't as assertive or as fast on their feet? Should the power to decide who can speak always rest with the teacher?
Perhaps the problem is not with students who need to be more self-disciplined, but with the whole instructional design that has students waiting to be recognized to answer someone else's questions. And perhaps the real learning comes only when students have the chance to grapple with such issues.
One more example: A proponent of character education says we must make students understand that it is wrong to lie; we need to teach them about the importance of being honest. But why do people lie? Usually because they don't feel safe enough to tell the truth. The real challenge for us as educators is to examine that precept in terms of what is going on in our classrooms, to ask how we and the students together can make sure that even unpleasant truths can be told and heard.
Does pursuing this line of inquiry mean that it's acceptable to fib? No. It means the problem has to be dissected and solved from the inside out. It means behaviors occur in a context that teachers have helped to establish; therefore, teachers have to examine (and consider modifying) that context even at the risk of some discomfort to themselves.
If we want to help children grow into compassionate and responsible people, then we have to change the way the classroom works and feels, not just the way each separate member of that class acts. Our emphasis should not be on forming individual characters so much as on transforming educational structures.
Happily, programs do exist whose promotion of children's social and moral development is grounded in a commitment to change the culture of schools. The best example of which I am aware is the Child Development Project (CDP), an elementary school program designed, implemented, and researched by the Developmental Studies Center, in Oakland, California.
CDP's premise is that, by meeting children's needs, we increase the likelihood that they will care about others. Meeting their needs entails, among other things, turning schools into caring communities. The CDP offers the additional advantages of a constructivist vision of learning, a positive view of human nature, a balance of cognitive and affective concerns, and a program that is integrated into all aspects of school life (including the curriculum).
In short, there is a compelling need to reevaluate the practices and premises of contemporary character education. To realize a humane and progressive vision for children's development, we may need to look elsewhere.
~~~~~~~~
By Alfie Kohn, From Phi Delta Kappan
Alfie Kohn writes and lectures widely on education and human behavior. His books include Punished by Rewards (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) and his newest, Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1996). Direct inquiries on this article to him at 242 School St., Belmont, MA 02178. Condensed from Phi Delta Kappan, 78 (February 1997), 428-39.
---------------------------------------------------------------
THE USES AND LIMITS OF PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT
---------------------------------------------
In his introduction, Mr. Eisner, who served as guest editor of this special section, puts performance assessment into a broad educational and social context
PERFORMANCE assessment is one of the "hot topics" on the agenda of education reform -- and for good reason. Performance assessment is a closer measure of our children's ability to achieve the aspirations we hold for them than are conventional forms of standardized testing. Indeed, our educational aspirations have been influenced by the fact that our children will inhabit a world requiring far more complex and subtle forms of thinking than children needed three or four decades ago. For example, our children will need to know how to frame problems for themselves, how to formulate plans to address them, how to assess multiple outcomes, how to consider relationships, how to deal with ambiguity, and how to shift purposes in light of new information.
These modes of thought will be critical in a society in which citizens are apt to change vocations several times during the course of a worklife, in which mobility has increased and new forms of adaptability are required, and in which choosing a course of action requires the consideration of diverse and sometimes conflicting information. No longer will most jobs, particularly those that are the most desirable, require the use of routine skills and rote memory. As Edward Haertel informs us in his article in this special section, these changing expectations for the outcomes of education reflect a nonbehaviorist view of human nature. When learning was conceived of as the acquisition and aggregation of reinforced units of information, "practice makes perfect" could serve as a guiding principle for teaching. The kind of thinking that students are now being encouraged to engage in requires much more than what Edward Thorndike, the father of American psychological connectionism, dreamed of. Context matters, judgment counts, and the opportunity to act in order to try out one's speculations is of critical importance.
The demise of behaviorism and the emergence of constructivism in our view of human nature are not the only sources of our changing conception of children and education. We have come to realize that meaning matters and that it is not something that can be imparted from teacher to student. In a sense, all teachers can do is to "make noises in the environment." By this I mean that we have in education no main line into the brains of our students. We are shapers of the environment, stimulators, motivators, guides, consultants, resources. But in the end, what children make of what we provide is a function of what they construe from what we offer. Meanings are not given, they are made. And we are interested in enabling students to make their activities in school meaningful, not merely because of the grades they receive but, more important, because of the satisfactions and insights their efforts make possible.
We have also come to realize that the kinds of meanings that our students can make are related to the forms of representation they can employ themselves or can decode when others have used them. Each of the forms of representation that exist in our culture -- visual forms in art, auditory forms in music, quantitative forms in mathematics, propositional forms in science, choreographic forms in dance, poetic forms in language -- are vehicles through which meaning is conceptualized and expressed. A life driven by the pursuit of meaning is enriched when the meanings sought and secured are multiple.
In addition to these considerations, we have also begun to recognize that the aim of schooling is not merely to enable our children to do well in school. The stakes are considerably higher. What we are after is to enable our children to do well in life outside of school; the scores generated by the kinds of tests we have been using are proxies, but, alas, we have found that as proxies they are most useful for making inferences about the scores students are likely to receive on other tests.
We want more. What we want is an approach to assessment that possesses what psychometricians call concurrent or predictive validity. That is, we want test scores to tell us about how students address tasks beyond the classroom.
These factors -- the virtual demise of behaviorism, the emergence of constructivism, the importance of meaning, the desire for concurrent and predictive validity -- have provided the ground for interest in performance assessment. Despite the lack of a single definition, performance assessment is aimed at moving away from testing practices that require students to select the single correct answer from an array of four or five distractors to a practice that requires students to create evidence through performance that will enable assessors to make valid judgments about "what they know and can do" in situations that matter. Performance assessment is the most important development in evaluation since the invention of the short-answer test and its extensive use during World War I.
The Army Alpha intelligence test was, among other things, a representation of our view of learning, a view promulgated by Thorndike, the father of stimulus-response theory. This form of testing was given a great boost by the creation of optical scoring devices and was regarded as a sound procedure for determining what students had learned. Standardized achievement testing fit comfortably not only within our conception of learning but also within our conception of schooling. Consider the ways in which schools are organized, the tacit assumptions underlying that organization, and how conventional achievement tests fit school organization.
In 1847 the first graded school was invented in America. The assumptions about the course of learning upon which the school was built were straightforward: students would be grouped by age, and each age level would be assigned to a grade. Age grading in our schools became the dominant organizational structure. It was further assumed that, since students were grouped by age, the content and aims for each grade should be the same for all children in that grade. Effective teaching was defined as the ability to enable all children in a grade to achieve the goals for that grade level. Like an army marching in tandem, at the end of an eight- or a 12-year period students would exit the school having mastered the content assigned to each of the previous grade levels.
These assumptions about human learning and these features of school organization are alive and well in American schools today. Indeed, perhaps more than in the past, the specification of grade-level standards is more than a tacit embrace of age grading. If we were to take President Clinton's advice, we would take grade-level standards so seriously that no child would be promoted without having met grade-level expectations, despite research indicating that retention is not generally a good remedy. The roots of the problem are deeper.
We have learned that human development does not proceed in a tidy manner. An 8-year-old is not an 8-year-old is not an 8-year-old. Children differ not only in the rate of their development but also in the particular areas of work they are expected to perform. Some students have high-level aptitudes in the arts; others, in the sciences. Some children are gifted in social skills; others, in the use of language. If by some magic, teaching could be made optimal for every student in a class of 25, the variability of student performance in that class would increase in each subsequent grade. Optimal forms of teaching for those gifted in the arts would enable them to move farther and faster in artistic pursuits than those gifted in other areas; those gifted in mathematics would move farther and faster in quantitative areas than those not so gifted. Under optimal teaching, variability would surely increase. Yet much of what we attempt to do in education is predicated on standardization and uniformity, on homogenization and on a model of learning represented by a tidy procession of students marching in unison through the grade levels toward fixed targets that have been defined well in advance. Standardized testing has always fit such a model very well.
Although, as Linda Mabry points out in her article in this special section, performance assessment practices that employ restrictive rubrics for scoring can be congruent with a standardized, age-graded approach to schooling, performance assessment practices that provide opportunities for open-ended responses and that enable youngsters to play to their strengths fly in the face of assumptions about uniformity. Uniformity can be pursued and assessed if assessment practices significantly constrain the way data are secured and analyzed. But when performance assessment tasks have an open-ended quality and thus make possible the expression of individuality, the assessment of standardized outcomes is considerably more complex. But the problem is even more complicated.
One of the motivations behind the standards movement is the desire to hold schools accountable, and that accountability is facilitated if schools, classrooms, and students can be compared. The ability to compare is compromised if students move through different curricular tracks or if assessment practices provide tasks that are open-ended; classrooms, schools, districts, and states can be more easily compared when assessment practices, goals, and curriculum content are uniform and closed. But when, for example, the amount of time allocated to the study of a subject differs from school to school, when the content of a subject taught differs from one school to another, or when the aims of a field of study differ in different schools, comparisons are more than treacherous. Thus, while assessment practices that are open-ended make possible the assessment of individuals, they may not provide the kind of global comparative "temperature taking" that a public anxious about the educational productivity of its schools seems to want. Is there any prospect of developing an approach to performance assessment that will make the particular achievements of individual students visible and, at the same time, provide information about a class or a school that is useful for comparing it with other classes and other schools?
One option, of course, is to employ two different kinds of assessment. One of these would be the continued use of large-scale, temperature-taking testing intended to provide comparative data on the performance of schools or school districts. Such a practice would not allow for the description of distinctive forms of individual student performance. A second assessment would need to be designed to reveal the distinctive talents of individual students and the effects of school practice on their development. One form of assessment would focus on the general; the other, on the particular.
And yet I cannot help but wonder whether an assessment oriented to the revelation of individual talents could survive in a "race" with an assessment bent on enabling the public to make comparisons between schools and school districts. Indeed, one feature of President Clinton's most recent proposal for school reform is the provision of a "report card" that would rate the performance of schools.
The desire to compare is implicit every time we talk about "world-class schools." The basic assumption is that not only can we compare schools, school districts, and states, but we can also make meaningful comparisons of the educational quality of schools in different nations. If we can't make those comparisons meaningfully and at the same time make the kinds of assessments that would describe individual student performance with respect to a student's distinctive features, is it likely that we will decide to undertake the latter and to forgo the former approach to assessment? Will we give up our inclination to seek comparisons, to form rankings, to establish hierarchies, to position ourselves in relation to others? We are, after all, a meritocracy, and we tend to use test scores in education to identify the meritorious. The use of standardized testing is conducive to such aims.
Under these circumstances, what is required to give pride of place to an assessment system that both facilitates teaching and learning and reveals the distinctive intellectual achievements of individual students? From my perspective, what we need is a change in the public's conception of the mission of the schools. Of course, bringing about such a change is no small task. Yet a shift needs to be made from a conception of schooling as a horse race or a kind of educational Olympics to a conception of schools as places that foster students' distinctive talents. The good school, as I have suggested, does not diminish individual differences; it increases them. It raises the mean and increases the variance.
Bringing about such a change in the conception of schooling cannot be achieved, in my view, without changes in the structure of schooling in America and in the criteria that institutions of higher education employ in making admissions decisions. Universities affect secondary, middle, and even elementary schools in the most conservative of ways. We need to have admissions criteria that are considerably more flexible and open-ended and that do not continue to privilege a narrow range of competencies that are fundamentally reflective of social class advantages. Parents, always concerned about their children's social and educational mobility, will continue to adapt to the existing criteria if they are not changed. Our priorities for schools in America have not grown out of a deep public debate about the mission of education; they have grown out of a desire to improve test scores. Test scores are widely regarded as proxies for the quality of education. But they are utterly inadequate -- as all the authors in this special section testify.
My aim in introducing this special section is to put performance assessment into a broad educational and social context. Performance assessment affords us, in principle, an opportunity to develop ways of revealing the distinctive features of individual students. It affords us an opportunity to secure information about learning that can help improve the quality of both curriculum and teaching. In short, it affords us an opportunity to use evaluation formatively and to treat assessment as an educational medium. But it is unlikely that such opportunities will be realized if the public's attitudes and expectations toward schooling are not changed, and it is unlikely that they will change without revision of the policies that affect the educational and social mobility of students in schools. Our form of school organization gives comfort and support to a comparative, competitive model of education: the bell-shaped curve is an encomium to competition. Our economy is built on a competitive model, and too many education reformers wish to liken schooling to business and to conceive of the factors that they believe should infuse education as similar to those that animate the business world.
My own inclinations are quite the opposite. I believe we need not be motivated through competition in order to provide educational conditions conducive to our children's development. We derive the most satisfaction not from competition, but from the quality of experience afforded by meaningful work. Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that most people believe that scientists inquire in order to know. Quite the contrary, he said. Scientists know in order to inquire. Whitehead's point was that, for scientists -- certainly for the best of them -- the joy is in the journey. That observation is not a bad ideal for education. Whether our meritocratic society will embrace such an ideal and make the changes in schooling and in education policy that are congruent with Whitehead's observation remains to be seen. But we should not kid ourselves about what's at stake. In the end, what's at stake is not only the quality of life our children might enjoy, but also the quality of the culture that they will inhabit.
1. Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, What Work Requires of Schools: A SCANS Report for America 2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 1991).
2. Ibid.
3. From John Dewey to Jean Piaget to Jerome Bruner, major psychologists and philosophers have emphasized the constructive character of cognition. Humans make sense of the events of the world they inhabit. How those events are constructed is influenced by the resources with which people have to work. The transmission model of teaching is built upon a premise that assumes that transmission is possible.
4. For a discussion of the effects of forms of representation on cognition, see Elliot W. Eisner, Cognition and Curriculum Reconsidered, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994).
5. David C. McClelland, "Testing for Competence Rather Than for Intelligence," American Psychologist, January 1973, pp. 1-14.
6. Clarence S. Yoakum and Robert M. Yerkes, eds., Army Mental Tests (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1920).
7. David Tyack, The One Best System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).
8. John I. Goodlad, The Nongraded Elementary School, rev. ed. (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1987).
9. The concept of "temperature taking" is especially applicable to the approach taken by the National Assessment of Educational Progress in its sampling of student learning.
ILLUSTRATION
~~~~~~~~
Elliot W. Eisner
ELLIOT W. EISNER is a professor of education and art and chair of the Department of Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.
---------------------------------------------------------------
TALENT DEVELOPMENT: TWO PERSPECTIVES
------------------------------------
Educators must design educational programs that recognize, develop, and nurture talents in all our youths at all educational levels, the authors point out. They give readers a brief look at how two different school districts are going about that task.
Advocates of gifted education are beginning to be challenged to consider the proposition that recognizing and developing a broad array of talents among many people may, in fact, be the most singularly powerful contribution we can make to education as a whole.
TO MEET the challenges of designing programs for the gifted and talented (GT) that reflect new understandings of talent development, school districts across the nation are reexamining their traditional approaches and exploring ways to identify and develop talents in all students. John Feldhusen's Talent Identification and Development in Education (TIDE) model for gifted programming suggests a more diverse view of human abilities and aptitudes. It recognizes a variety of talent in all youths, including minorities, the economically disadvantaged, and the culturally different. The concept of talent identification and development empowers us to return to the business of educating all students by emphasizing the need to select appropriate instructional responses based on a student's specific talents and educational needs rather than on concern with a label. The following is a brief look at how two different school districts are using the TIDE model as a foundation for their GT programs.
The Glenview School District
Glenview, Illinois, is a "North Shore" suburb of Chicago. The community has a diverse population of approximately 38,500 people, is predominantly affluent, and includes a now-closed military base, middle-and upper-income houses, middle- to lower-middle-income apartments, and two trailer courts.
Glenview's school district, Community Consolidated School District 34, consists of seven schools serving 3,500 students. The three primary (K-3) and three intermediate (4-6) schools are grouped in pairs by neighborhood. There is one middle school for grades 7 and 8 for the entire district. There is no high school in the district (Illinois students often attend high schools that are in different districts from their elementary/middle school districts). The district's racial and ethnic makeup is predominantly Caucasian; Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans make up about 15% of the population.
The TAG Program
The original Glenview Talented and Gifted (TAG) Education Program included consultation and resources for grades K-3 and 7-8, with a formal pull-out program for grades 4-6. In each of the intermediate schools, pull-out classes met once a week for a three-hour session. Criteria for identification included scores of 95% or higher on all subtests of the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS), 130 or higher on the Cognitive Skills Index part of the CTBS, and teacher recommendations.
The TAG curriculum provided cross-grade enrichment experiences for gifted students. The regular curriculum, which was rigorously academic, and the many extracurricular opportunities available at each school (art club, instrumental music, school newspaper, and computer activities) were not considered part of the programming for GT students. The traditional pull-out program provided a place for these students that was socially and emotionally safe, but it was narrowly focused and out of alignment with the district's beliefs and goals. It limited what the district was able to do for GT students and caused more problems than it solved.
A study group consisting of teachers, parents, and administrators worked for four years seeking a better approach to meeting the needs of gifted and talented youth. Feldhusen's TIDE model and Donald Treffinger and Marion Sortore's Programming for Giftedness Series were major influences on the group. In brief, we were able to see gifted education as one component of a "community of learners" model in which student need could drive programming for all learners. The entire school community could then become involved in programming to meet the needs of GT students. TIDE is now thought of as an integrated part of the district's total delivery-of-service model. The district's professional development offerings and strategic plan through the year 2000 provide support and resources to teachers and administrators for the creation of personalized educational environments that afford appropriate learning for all students.
Implementation of TIDE
The district's implementation of the TIDE model began with a change in the role of the gifted education coordinator. Under his direction, professional development sessions were held for teachers who would be implementing TIDE during the following year. The teachers were able to embrace the model conceptually, and their response to it was guardedly favorable. They recognized that the old program was no longer viable and that TIDE was a realistic approach to delivering services. However, they expressed a number of concerns. How would parents receive these changes? Would the necessary support and resources be forthcoming? What additional responsibilities would the change entail?
Teachers of grades 3-6 generated lists of activities already going on in their classrooms for talented students. For example, students who excel in math move ahead at their own pace, do independent study projects at the end of the chapter, demonstrate mastery and buy time for other activities, participate in accelerated math classes, or join a math class at a higher grade level. Students who excel in reading participate in independent reading programs to learn literary skills for pleasure, join the Great Books Program, have individual book conferences with their teachers, participate in book sharing with their classes, and undertake in-depth activities linking reading to other curricular areas.
Students who excel in spelling go through all the suggested lists in the district's spelling books to ensure mastery, choose their own words for spelling lists, link spelling lists to attempted use in writing activities, switch to vocabulary building, and build "key concept" spelling lists in various curricular areas. Students who excel in writing keep personal journals, write for the school or class newspaper, study journalism, publish a class or school literary journal, and link writing to other curricular areas.
Students who excel in science participate in enrichment experiments presented in teacher manuals, create experiments on their own that reflect the current class topic, link science to literature and writing, spend additional time proving or disproving hypotheses, attempt to manipulate other variables in the regular experiments, keep a science journal, help organize and participate in science fairs, and study famous scientists and their findings.
The teachers at Glen Grove, one of the district's intermediate schools, felt that they were ready to immerse themselves in the TIDE concept during the 1996-97 school year. They were able to provide for the needs of GT students with independent study options, journal-keeping assignments, lunchtime discussion meetings, individualized curricular support, a student resource library, acceleration and enrichment in the classroom, ad hoc seminars and workshops, and special individualized experiences in the regular classrooms.
Glen Grove teachers received support and resources to help them meet the needs of GT students in the classroom from the TIDE coordinator, who was also available to consult with students, teachers, and parents. During 1996-97, the TIDE program provided direct support to more than 60 students at Glen Grove, compared to the 24 who had previously been identified and involved in the once-a-week pull-out. TIDE provided indirect support to many more students through the participation of all building teachers, rather than just the eight who had previously identified gifted students in their classrooms. TIDE helped "talented/gifted education" become less visible and more integrated into the day-to-day activities at Glen Grove.
We still have a lot of work to do in implementing TIDE in our schools. This year the entire district has begun the transition from TAG to TIDE. We are working toward recognizing and nurturing talents in specific areas and providing students with opportunities to explore their own emerging strengths. In a flexible and dynamic manner, we are emphasizing appropriate and challenging instruction for all students.
Lawrence Township
The Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township is one of nine school districts that surround the city of Indianapolis. The suburban area is primarily residential, with light industry and some farmland. Socioeconomic levels in the predominantly middle-class community range from the very affluent to the very poor. The district serves a broad, diverse student population that is 23% minority. Over the past 10 years the district has grown at a rate of 500 students a year. The student population is projected to total 15,300 for the 1998-99 school year. There are 10 elementary schools, three middle schools, two high schools, a career center, and a centralized kindergarten. Of the 10 elementary schools, three are magnet schools: a science and technology magnet, an international school, and a talent development academy.
Previous Approach to Gifted Programming
As did most school districts in Indiana in the early 1980s, Lawrence Township began its gifted and talented programming at the elementary level using the pull-out approach. Then in the late 1980s the district began to offer full-time, self-contained classes for GT students in grades 3-5. Program planning also began at the middle school and high school levels. This traditional approach to GT programming was highly successful for the students and the community.
In the early 1990s middle school reform brought major changes. From the administration came the directive to redesign the gifted and talented program to be compatible with middle school philosophy. Teachers, counselors, building principals, and parents were invited to participate in the project, as was John Feldhusen, a Purdue University professor and a specialist in talent development. With Feldhusen's leadership and expertise, our committee and school district embarked on a talent approach to gifted programming. This plan became the cornerstone for the K-12 Talent Recognition and Development (TRAD) Program that is currently in place in our school district.
The TRAD Program has four components that represent talent development at each level of schooling: Emerging Talents (kindergarten), Recognizing and Developing Talents (1-5), Developing and Nurturing Talents (6-8), and Nurturing and Refining Talents (9-12). Guiding our understanding of the concepts of talent and talent development are Feldhusen's TIDE model, Treffinger's model of programming for talent development in education, Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, Joseph Renzulli's model of schools for talent development, and Kathleen Butler's model of learning and teaching style. TRAD focuses on four talent areas: academic, visual/performing arts, leadership, and technical/vocational. A brief description of each level of programming follows.
Kindergarten Level: Emerging Talents
Emphasis at the kindergarten level is placed on providing learning opportunities within the curriculum and instructional strategies in the classroom that challenge young children and nurture their talents. Special attention is paid to language arts and mathematics. The use of interest centers, specialized materials that are developmentally appropriate for the young child, and technology (including a computer lab) help to achieve the curriculum goals. Other talents, such as artistic, musical, problem-solving, and leadership skills, are also broadened by the use of carefully planned activities. Professional development is available to the kindergarten teachers throughout the year.
Elementary Level:Recognizing and Developing Talents
The elementary component has retained the self-contained classes (called STRETCH) that have been a part of the district's gifted and talented program for the past 20 years. These classes serve approximately 5% of the district's students in grades 1 through 5. STRETCH classes are one of three magnet options for parents of elementary-aged children. Curriculum and instructional activities within these classrooms are accelerated at least one year for all students, with research and independent study as the core focus at each grade level. Classroom activities are designed around diverse talents, multiple intelligences, individual learning styles, differentiation of curriculum, integration of technology, and expanded assessment strategies. Students are placed in these academically talented classes through an application and identification process using guidelines set forth by the Indiana Department of Education.
Middle School Level:Developing and Nurturing Talents
Given that all youths have strengths, interests, and talents, the middle school level of talent programming provides the flexibility that is needed for young adolescents. Talent programming at each of the district's three middle schools focuses on four areas: academic talents, leadership talents, visual/performing arts talents, and technical/vocational talents. Each talent area has its own unique identification and placement process. Special classes for the academically talented are available in the four core subject areas of mathematics, language arts, science, and social studies. Classes for the artistically talented -- along with musical competitions, leadership programs, service learning, student council, and service organizations -- are all available for developing and nurturing the talents of our middle school students.
High School Level: Nurturing And Refining the Talent
Many options are offered to our high school students to refine their specific talent areas. Accelerated and advanced courses are available to all students. Partnerships with area universities allow students to take college-level courses throughout their high school years. Distance learning provides another avenue for continued development and refinement of talents in specific areas. Mentorships and internships are offered to help students pursue their special talents in the workplace. Both of the district's high schools have outstanding performing arts centers and have received national recognition for their programs. Leadership programs and service learning continue at this level, with the high school students working with elementary and middle school students in many of the projects. A new career center provides state-of-the-art technology and other career-related learning opportunities for students in the technical and vocational fields.
Parent and Community Involvement
Parents are essential to the success of any talent development program. To help them better understand the special talents and learning needs of their children, Lawrence Township has initiated parent forums, starting at the elementary level, to provide current information about and training in talent development. The district's TRAD Program also reaches beyond the K-12 spectrum. Its Community Education Program provides opportunities for students and adults to continue to pursue their interests and develop new talents throughout their adult years. Currently, five universities offer courses within the district with programs leading to associate's, bachelor's, master's, and M.B.A. degrees.
Professional Development
Talents grow in students if there are good facilitating educational environments. Critical to the success of any talent development program are the teachers in the classroom. Appropriate teacher training is offered on a continuing basis for all professional staff in Lawrence Township. This training includes not only curriculum design and assessment practices but a deeper understanding of talent in all children, especially those who are traditionally underserved in gifted and talented programs.
Conclusion
Talent development programs can grow effectively when districts communicate and exchange ideas with one another. Access to experts in the field is also crucial. The Center for Creative Learning in Sarasota, Florida; the Gifted Education Resource Institute at Purdue University; and the newly formed International Consortium for Talent Development at Sarasota all provide materials, consultants, and training opportunities to support talent programming in schools.
Talent Identification and Development in Education, whether in a large or small school district, changes the way a school community views gifted and talented education. A broader understanding of talent emerges that recognizes that strengths, interests, and talents can be nurtured in every child, not just in those who already demonstrate advanced accomplishments in specific talent areas. There is no single program model that will optimize all children's talent development. Districts need a variety of resources to match students' strengths and to provide the nurturance necessary for continuing growth of talent. The U.S. Department of Education's report on talent development, National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent, challenges us to design educational programs that recognize, develop, and nurture talents in all our youths at all educational levels. We cannot afford to do less.
1. Donald J. Treffinger, "School Improvement, Talent Development, and Creativity," Roeper Review, December 1995, p. 95.
2. John F. Feldhusen, Talent Identification and Development in Education (Sarasota, Fla.: Center for Creative Learning, 1995).
3. Donald J. Treffinger and Marion R. Sortore, Programming for Giftedness Series (Sarasota, Fla.: Center for Creative Learning, 1992).
4. Donald J. Treffinger, Levels of Service (LoS) and Programming for Talent Development in Education (Sarasota, Fla.: Center for Creative Learning, 1997); Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: Theory into Practice (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Joseph S. Renzulli, Schools for Talent Development: A Practical Plan for Total School Improvement (Mansfield Center, Conn.: Creative Learning, 1994); and Kathleen A. Butler, Learning and Teaching Style (Columbia, Conn.: The Learner's Dimension, 1995).
5. National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent (Washington, D.C.: Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, 1993).
ILLUSTRATION
~~~~~~~~
By Jan Fulkerson and Michael Horvich
JAN FULKERSON is director of professional development and talent development programs, Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, Indianapolis, Ind. MICHAEL HORVICH is an independent consultant on talent identification and development in education. For the previous 17 years, he was coordinator of gifted education, Glenview (Ill.) Public Schools.>
---------------------------------------------------------------
AN AWKWARD CHILD? USE PEPPER SPRAY
----------------------------------
In Britain recently I was taken aback by the routine sight of schoolchildren wending their way to and from school: cultural differences between the UK and US always strike when you're least expecting them, I find, and I was surprised to realise that most British kids will continue to go to school for another month or so. School terms already seem a hazy memory here, because school holidays started three or four weeks ago. Which, for the mass of American parents, presents a problem: what do they do with the kids for what is actually a full quarter of the year?
The answer -- for those who can afford it -- is that great American rite of passage: summer camp. It took me years here to understand why American children have such long summer holidays, particularly given the parsimony of most American companies when it comes to holidays for their parents: a long-serving, loyal employee is lucky to have three weeks' annual leave. Then somebody explained the reason: it is all a throwback to agrarian America, when kids were needed as labour in the fields at harvest. So they have short breaks at Christmas and Easter (or winter and spring in PC-speak), then the huge yawning summers immortalised by Allan Sherman in 1962:
Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah Here I am at Camp Grenada Life is very entertaining And they say we'll have some fun if it stops raining
This summer, the American Camping Association says that 8.1 million American kids will attend camps at 8,500 different institutions, 5,500 of them overnight ones. The tradition started, they say, as long ago as 1861 -- presumably the kids involved were privileged ones not needed for the harvest -- when one Frederick Gunn took pupils from the Gunnery School in Connecticut to hike, boat, fish and sail during the long, hot summers. But "camp" has now largely become a euphemism for keeping-the-kids-occupied: many are day camps only and are often held at the kids' usual schools, except that their teachers (or "camp counsellors") tend to be students, with lessons in swimming, games and the like rather than in the three Rs.
In the nineties, though, a more sinister variation has crept into fond notions of timeless summer innocence: "behavioural modification" camps for teenagers whose parents find them difficult. Glossy brochures and glitzy websites offer parents places (at $150 a day) such as "Red Hot Springs" -- "120 acres of secluded land away from the negative influences of peers and others" -- or less-expensive places (at a mere $80 a day) such as "Paradise Cove" in Western Samoa, which supposedly specialises in "intervention and behavioural modification". For inmates of Red Hot Springs, the daily timetable reads: "7.30 Wake-Up, 7.40 Morning Fitness Session, 8.15 Personal Hygiene" and so on.
I say "inmates" advisedly, because these teenagers often have been effectively kidnapped to get them to a camp that can be hundreds or even thousands of miles from home: "escorts", usually moonlighting cops earning up to $2,500 a time, will frequently wake the kids up in the middle of the night and bundle them away in handcuffs before they know what is happening to them.
Last year, 16-year-old David Van Blarigan managed briefly to give his escort the slip at Kingston airport while forcibly en route to a camp known as "Tranquility [sic] Bay" in Jamaica; he sneaked a phone call to a next-door neighbour back home in California, who happened to be a judge. The outraged man took the case through the courts, but the verdict finally came back: because the boy is a minor, his parents have the right to inflict such "behavioural modification" practices on him.
This particular boy was not involved with drugs, alcohol or crime; he was merely enduring a troubled adolescence. But the effect of the judicial ruling was to allow children fewer rights than convicted prisoners: the man who owns and operates this Tranquility Bay camp is a former petrol-station manager, but parents who place their children in his charge are nevertheless willing to sign a contract that authorises those in charge "to use pepper spray (or electrical disabler, Mace, mechanical restraints, handcuffs) as means to or alternative to avoid... having to physically restrain or wrestle with the student".
Generations of British parents have abused their own children by sending them to boarding-schools that may not be so high-tech but use no less brutal methods of repression, and we can see the results throughout the British establishment today. But there is something quintessentially American about this latest trend: throw money at a problem to make it go away, even if that problem is your own kid.
Just to add an odd little twist to this phenomenon, nearly all these "behavioural modification" institutions seem to be traceable back to an address in southern Utah -- the state that is the home of Mormonism. Could they be fronts for enforced conversions to clean-cut Mormonism? Certainly I could spot no black faces in their literature, and Mormons have traditionally looked on black people as inferior beings.
This summer, then, spare a thought for American kids at "camp". Millions will spend their months hitting baseballs and splashing around in traditional carefree fashion. But, for others, the same lazy, hazy days of summer will mean being in straitjackets, handcuffed, CS-gassed or prodded with laser guns. It's what their parents want, after all, and it' s the product of free consumer choice. It's America, 1999.
~~~~~~~~
By Andrew Stephen
---------------------------------------------------------------
HELPING STUDENTS ACHIEVE SUCCESS
--------------------------------
If your offspring brings home a test paper with an "F" on it, don't ask why he or she failed. That "can lead to a response such as 'Because I'm not smart enough,'" says Dale H. Schunk, professor of educational psychology and head of the Department of Educational Studies, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind. He says the issue is not that the youngster needs to be smarter; it's that he or she needs to work smarter.
"In the case of the failed test, ask your child, 'How did you take the test?' You may learn that your child was watching two boys in class pushing each other, and as a result, didn't have time to finish the test." If you know the problem, you can suggest a better strategy or method for dealing with it next time.
"In addition to teaching subjectarea knowledge and skills, the more important goal right now in education is to teach kids to operate independently." Schunk explains that, to learn, students need to regulate themselves to achieve their desired goals.
Self-regulation requires the capability to exercise some degree of control over one's learning. That means regulating as best you can your environment, thoughts, behavior, and emotions so you can be successful. "Rarely can you control everything, but what we need for students to do is to decide what areas they can control and make a difference in. If a teacher assigns a term paper on a certain author and says it has to be 10 pages long, then there's not a lot you can control about that. But you could make a difference by asking if you could write specifically about one of the author's books."
Students who attribute success to factors over which they have little control--such as luck or ease of task--may not be motivated to learn on their own. On the other hand, those who believe that success comes from a combination of factors-such as ability, effort, and the use of strategy--may be more motivated to work on learning. Schunk offers these suggestions for parents to help their offspring become successful, self-regulated learners:
o Monitor where your children study. Help them select an environment conducive to concentration and see that they have the materials needed to do the work.
o Make sure they know the correct methods and procedures for doing the assignment. Go over the steps to ensure that they are aware of how to do the work.
o Build their confidence. Students who feel they can do well will try even when the work is difficult.
o Teach them to control their emotions, not to panic if test questions are hard. Remind them to maintain concentration and focus.
o Emphasize the progress they are making. Point out that they are doing more complicated work now than they were six weeks ago.
