How class culture forms how students think about topics critically, engage with material

 There is an old saying that teachers don’t tell students what to think, but what to think about. A new study from the University of Kansas found that even beyond helping students understand how to think through complex topics, a classroom can work with a teacher to develop its own social construction of thinking.

Teaching students how to think in critical, reflective and deliberate ways has long been an important part of public and literacy education. But there is a common assumption that teachers provide the knowledge and students are recipients on how to form these processes of thinking. 

Min-Young Kim, assistant professor of curriculum and teaching at KU, led a study in which she observed how a teacher in an eighth grade English language arts class engaged students in constructing how they thought about literature. Kim found the students and teacher socially constructed how they think about a poem through a process called “languaging.” The teacher held them accountable for how they think, and the process facilitated the students’ engagement and connection with the material.

A growing body of literature has focused on the nature of knowledge in various academic subjects, but there has been little study on how thinking processes are formed in each.

“As a learning community, every classroom is constructing what thinking means, even though they have curriculum, materials and other things they share,” Kim said. “I wanted to understand that better. How do we facilitate thinking as a learning community? Not many studies have examined that.”

To probe the question, Kim observed an eighth grade English language arts class as the teacher and students studied Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Witnesses.” Over several class sessions, the students read the poem, analyzed it, discussed their thoughts on the author’s intent, their reactions to it and more.

“Here and there the teacher used the term ‘thinking aloud’ in her classroom and framed thinking in different ways,” Kim said. “As the class moved on, I saw that thinking is something constructed, and I wanted to research that more and interviewed the teacher about thinking processes and how she teaches them.” 

Through observation and the interviews, Kim found the framework of “languaging” — using gestures, facial expressions and other forms of nonverbal communication along with speaking about the material — to be more useful than traditional views of language to construct how they thought about the poem.

In addition to the modeling of a way of thinking, the teacher held the students accountable for what they thought and how by asking them why they had certain thoughts, ideas and reactions or how they came to their conclusions. That led to students articulating their thoughts, explaining why they came to certain methods of thinking and how together they formed a method of thinking about the material and modeled it not only through their linguistic repertoire, but through posture, gestures and expressions.

Lastly, Kim noted that the teacher acknowledged the students’ ideas and contributions. She said yes to their ideas and added to them. In essence, this made the entire class co-authors in the construction of how they thought through and about the poem, Kim wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Reading Research Quarterly.

The findings show that languaging thinking aloud engages the students on a deeper level and makes them the authors of how the class thinks about the subject matter, instead of simply being told how to think about it.

“I am arguing in this study that with languaging thinking practice, students are not passive receivers. It’s not just transfer, but students are part of constructing what they think about in the class,” Kim said. “It’s more than the assumption of knowledge transfer. Instead, it’s a dynamic construction. They articulated their thinking practices, and the teacher acknowledged them.”

Kim, who has also studied how teachers teach argumentation, said future research could further examine how students use similar practices to construct how they think about class material in small group settings. Similar studies could also go beyond English to classes including science, history, arts, physical education and more to better understand how classroom culture influences how students thinking about various subject matter. 

Traditionally, research has focused on instruction and how best to convey knowledge to students, but not how they can contribute to the ways the class thinks about topics and thereby becomes more engaged in the material.

“I think this paper gives us a tool or framework to look at how we can analyze thinking construction in many different kinds of classrooms and what kind of thinking practices take place and what more needs to be done to engage students in the social construction of how they think,” Kim said.

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Journal

Reading Research Quarterly

DOI

10.1002/rrq.70008 

Mathematics and Science PD Interventions and Student Achievement

 Despite evidence that teacher professional development interventions in mathematics and science can increase student achievement, our understanding of the mechanisms by which this occurs – particularly how these interventions affect teachers themselves, and the extent to which teacherlevel changes predict student learning – remains limited. 

The current meta-analysis synthesizes 46 experimental studies of PK-12 mathematics and science professional development interventions to investigate how these interventions affect teacher-level outcomes, including knowledge and classroom instruction, and how these impacts relate to intervention effects on student achievement. 

Compared with controls, treatment group teachers in PK-12 mathematics and science PD intervention studies demonstrated stronger performance on teacher-level outcomes (pooled average impact estimate: +0.52 SD). Programs with larger impacts on teacherlevel outcomes also tended to have significantly larger mean impacts on student achievement. 

Complete report

Daily Air Pollution Exposure and Schooling

Elevated air pollution levels increase student and teacher absenteeism as well as the number of disciplinary referrals. Over 6 million children in the United States attend public schools located within 250 meters of a major roadway. In The Effects of Daily Air Pollution on Students and Teachers (NBER Working Paper 33549), Sarah Chung, Claudia Persico, and Jing Liu examine how daily variation in ambient air pollution influences student and teacher behavior in school settings. They study comprehensive administrative data from a large urban school district in California spanning 2003 to 2020. To address measurement error in pollution exposure and reduce concerns about endogeneity, such as the issue of schools in high-pollution areas potentially attracting students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the researchers implement an instrumental variables strategy using daily variation in wind direction. Specifically, daily wind direction serves as an instrument for local air pollution exposure, measured by PM2.5 concentrations. On days when the wind blows from a nearby highway toward a school, for example, schools located downwind experience higher pollution exposure, while schools located upwind remain relatively unaffected. The researchers find that a 10μg/m3 increase in daily PM2.5 concentration is associated with a 5.7 percent increase in full-day student absences over a three-day window beginning with the day of exposure. It also corresponds with a 28 percent rise in office discipline referrals, with particularly pronounced effects on referrals for violent behavior, defiance, and interpersonal conflicts, and a 13.1 percent increase in teacher absences. The researchers estimate that a sustained 10μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 for the entire school year would result in approximately 4.9 additional absence days per student, or 355,647 absences across the district. The research reveals significant heterogeneity in pollution effects across demographic groups. Black students experience the largest impacts. Specifically, a 10μg/m3 increase in daily PM2.5 leads to a 9.6 percent increase in full-day absences and a 32 percent increase in office referrals for violent behavior. Hispanic students and those from lower-income households also show heightened sensitivity to pollution exposure. These disparities are reflected in school-level analyses: schools serving predominantly lower-income populations exhibit substantially larger effects on both absences and behavioral issues than schools serving higher-income students. The researchers also identify a dose-dependent relationship between air pollution levels and educational outcomes. Days with Air Quality Index (AQI) values exceeding 100 are associated with the largest effects on both student and teacher absences and on disciplinary referrals. This nonlinear response to pollution intensity suggests that reducing pollution in urban areas might yield disproportionate benefits for school functioning.

What Explains Growing Gender and Racial Education Gaps?

 In the 1960 cohort, American men and women graduated from college at similar rates, and this was true for Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. But in more recent cohorts, women graduate at much higher rates than men. Gaps between race/ethnic groups have also widened. 

To understand these patterns, this study employed a model of individual and family decision-making where education, labor supply, marriage and fertility are all endogenous. Assuming stable preferences, themodel explains changes in education for the ‘60-‘80 cohorts based on three exogenous factors: family background, labor market and marriage market constraints. 

1. Changes in parental background account for 1/4 of the growth in women’s college graduation from the ’60 to ’80 cohort. 

2. The marriage market accounts for 1/5 and the labor market explains the rest. Thus, parent education plays an important role in generating social mobility, enabling  a prediction of future evolution of college graduation rates due to this factor: White women’s graduation rate will plateau, while that of Hispanic and Black women will grow rapidly. But the aggregate graduation rate will grow very slowly due to the increasing Hispanic share of the population.

Helping college students understand why mathematics classes matter

 

West Virginia University researchers are changing how college mathematics is taught by evaluating and sharing a model for problem-solving that supports what students learn in other courses like business or biology.

The new model for teaching mathematics hinges on faculty from different departments collaborating in ways that transform the traditional mathematics syllabus. It’s part of an effort to increase mathematical literacy among college graduates nationwide and ensure the U.S. can meet its scientific and technological challenges. 

The project, which has received National Science Foundation funding since 2016, is seeing renewed NSF support this year and is led by mathematician Susan Ganter, senior associate director of the WVU Center for Excellence in STEM Education.

“Most students have difficulty applying knowledge from their mathematics courses to problem-solving in other classes like engineering, economics or chemistry. There’s an urgent need for an integrated science, technology, engineering and mathematics curriculum that prepares our future workforce to make those connections and articulate all kinds of problems in quantitative terms,” Ganter said.

“Mathematics classes and other classes should align. The key element of our model, known as SUMMIT-P — or Synergistic Undergraduate Mathematics via Multi-institutional Interdisciplinary Teaching Partnerships — is the immediate reinforcement of mathematics concepts in a variety of classrooms, creating shared context across different content areas. That happens through interdepartmental partnerships between faculty.”

Ganter first envisioned SUMMIT-P more than two decades ago, after many years as a mathematics professor watching students struggle. She and her colleagues knew 95% of their students weren’t going to be mathematics majors, but they also knew virtually every major required mathematics in some form.   

“Our question was, ‘Are we giving students what they need?’” she said. “We ran many workshops with people from other disciplines and put out a report on the commonalities across 22 disciplines in terms of what their students need from mathematics. The similarities in how faculty across departments answered our questions about mathematical content was amazing — faculty from physics and engineering to the arts and humanities all said the same thing about the mathematical skills their students need, including the ability to apply mathematical concepts and think across disciplines.” 

SUMMIT-P was the response — a guide to redesigning introductory college mathematics courses and the partner discipline courses they support so the ideas resonate across students’ academic experiences, supporting their ability to solve real-world problems.

Ganter said the SUMMIT-P model already has proven successful at about 15 institutions that have seriously implemented it over the past 10 years.

At one university, students studied social work and nursing using algebra and precalculus to assemble a monthly budget for a shelter for victims of human trafficking. At another, students applied differential calculus to chemistry in their mathematics class to understand how the body absorbs sugar in the context of diabetes. One group of students used polynomials for engineering applications to calculate the energy collected by a local Native American tribe’s solar array. Elsewhere, students learned to mathematically model the wave patterns of EKGs of real patients, including EKGs of their own hearts. These modules and others are now available for any institution wanting to implement the SUMMIT-P model in its courses. 

More than 170 faculty members representing various disciplines at over 40 colleges and universities are part of the effort to make SUMMIT-P accessible and sustainable for different kinds of institutions. Their work to date has affected an estimated 90,000 undergraduate students.

“Already, outcomes indicate students are seeing more connections between mathematics and partner disciplines,” Ganter said. “SUMMIT-P is giving students an answer to the question, ‘Why do I have to take this mathematics class?’ Now we’re researching which aspects of the SUMMIT-P model have really been impactful at some institutions, while also trying to understand why other institutions still are struggling to make it work. We’re creating a short list of criteria that we hope will be the formula needed to implement this model successfully and keep it going — at any institution.”

WVU undergraduate students will assist with the project, which also involves Gay Stewart, the Eberly Professor of STEM Education in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, and director of the Center for Excellence in STEM Education.

“Student success in mathematics is a key factor in overall college success,” Stewart said. “Particularly for students pursuing degrees leading to some of the higher paying careers, it can be the primary obstacle. Our students often come to us not seeing what mathematics is for, which impedes their ability to learn it, and SUMMIT-P specifically addresses this problem. We are so pleased to be able to help lead this effort.”

Stewart and Ganter have seen changes in faculty attitudes about the role of mathematics in the undergraduate curriculum, with faculty developing teaching modules in response to each other’s “wish lists.”

“This project has validated what many faculty knew,” Ganter said. “Now they have a venue to make transformation happen and find support for questions and challenges. Seeing so many who are now engaging with us to do the best for their students is very rewarding and gives me renewed energy.”

Early-life low lead levels = poor academic achievement in childhood and adolescence

 In this cohort study assessing early life low lead level and children’s and adolescents’ academic achievement, a 1-unit increase in lead levels in the range currently considered low for further interventions was associated with worse academic performance throughout school grades comparable to that for lead levels in the range recommended for additional interventions. These findings support the need to reconsider and potentially lower current blood lead reference values for recommending further interventions.

Early college programs ihad a positive impact on college enrollment two years after high school

Rhode Island has invested substantial resources in early college opportunities for high school students in an effort to increase college degree attainment. The Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast & Islands collaborated with the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) and the Rhode Island Office of the Postsecondary Commissioner (RIOPC) to investigate the impact and costs of participation in each of the state’s three early college opportunities—dual enrollment, concurrent enrollment, and Advanced Placement—on college enrollment and persistence. For each early college opportunity, researchers examined the costs associated with providing the program beyond the cost of a typical high school course, and the per-student cost associated with improved outcomes. To evaluate program impacts, this study used data for first-time grade 9 students in Rhode Island public schools who graduated high school on time in the 2014/15 school year. To examine costs, researchers drew on statewide administrative records and conducted interviews with staff from a sample of 12 local education agencies. Key findings include the following: Dual enrollment, concurrent enrollment, and Advanced Placement each had a statistically significant positive effect on college enrollment within one year of high school graduation, as well as on students’ being enrolled in college two years after high school graduation. Average estimated annual incremental per-pupil costs for the early college programs in 2017/18 ranged widely both overall—from $900 to $6,400—and within each program. The cost-per-outcome for each program also ranged widely, with the highest costs per outcome seen for dual enrollment. Because dual enrollment in Rhode Island reaches a higher proportion of historically underserved students than either AP or concurrent enrollment, the higher costs may reflect the resources required to support these students successfully. RIDE and RIOPC can use the findings from this study to inform policy decisions on early college opportunity scale up and expanded access. Policymakers nationwide can use the findings to make informed decisions about supporting students’ access to similar programs offered in their states. Read the report at: https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/resource-library/report/descriptive-study/rel-report-cost-effectiveness-providing-early-college-opportunities-rhode-island.