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Every college student understands the pressure associated with timed exams.  This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the high stakes situation of the ACT and SAT.  With so much riding on a few tests, students are under tremendous pressure to perform well and to do it as quickly as possible.  But an increasing number of people are asking if timing these exams is in the best interest of the students and if such rapid-paced test taking is truly an accurate reflection of a student's academic ability.

Valerie Strauss writes in Stop timing the ACT and SAT for The Washington Post that part of the challenge lies with the companies who administer the tests:

Why, exactly, are these tests timed the way they are? Why, for example, do students have exactly 60 minutes to take the ACT math section but 25 minutes to write an SAT essay?

It’s not because extensive research has shown that subjecting students to exactly this amount of time to complete these academic problems reveals something important about a teenager.

It’s because the entities behind the tests, ACT Inc., and the College Board, say so. The big thinking is that high school students need to be tested under pressure to see how they will fare in the pressure-filled environments in college. The other problems cited is the problem of securing and paying proctors and test sites for unspecified amounts of time.

Strauss is not the first person to suggest that timing should be eliminated.  In 2002, Howard Gardner, professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggested that tightly timed, high-stakes testing proves very little in terms of future success in college and beyond.  Gardner wrote in The New York Times op-ed, Test for Aptitude, Nor for Speed:

Nothing of consequence would be lost by getting rid of timed tests by the College Board or, indeed, by universities in general. Few tasks in life -- and very few tasks in scholarship -- actually depend on being able to read passages or solve math problems rapidly. As a teacher, I want my students to read, write and think well; I don't care how much time they spend on their assignments. For those few jobs where speed is important, timed tests may be useful. But getting into college, or doing satisfactorily once there, is not in that category.

Indeed, by eliminating the timed component, the College Board would signal that background knowledge, seriousness of purpose and effort -- not speed and glibness -- are the essentials of good scholarship. What matters is not what you have at the starting point, but whether and how well you finish.

Strauss further explains that it is challenging for students who truly need more time to qualify for it.  There are numerous hoops to jump through, many of which involve expensive testing to prove a true need and cooperation with already overburdened high school guidance counselors. She suggests that many students who do need extra time in order to successfully take the tests never get it because they do not have access to the additional expensive advocacy they need.

It is a widely acknowledged fact that many students need individualized instruction or accommodations in order to be successful in school.  Their struggles are not due to a lack of intelligence or desire.  Some students simply learn differently and can be very successful when given the opportunity to approach school in a different way. Eliminating the timed aspect of the ACT and SAT would give all students the opportunity to perform to the best of their ability and demonstrate their true knowledge and aptitude.

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The lure of the television, video games, and online activities means that children today are spending less and less time outside.  Recently labeled Nature Deficit Disorder, there is growing concern that children today are completely disconnected from any meaningful interaction with nature.

Education.com offers a list of The Ten Actions Parents Can Take to Prevent Nature Deficit Disorder.  Among the ten are:

• Plant a garden
• Plan a weekly or monthly surprise outdoor adventure
• Take a daily or weekly walk together as a family after dinner

The article provides other ideas for getting children involved with the great outdoors including a list of links to organizations with helpful suggestions for making the most of a child's time in nature.

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Students today spend copious amounts of time multitasking.  Whether it is listening to music, texting, surfing and chatting online, or playing games, young adults view multitasking as a completely normal way of life.  But research is showing that multitasking is not nearly as effective as many people believe.

Clifford I. Nass, professor of psychology at Stanford University, published a study that indicates people who heavily multitask consistently overestimate their abilities. In Divided Attention from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently—so the worry goes—students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.

"Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. "But there's evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people."

But perhaps of even greater concern is the idea that chronic multitasking diminishes a person's ability to reason.  From the same article:

In a recent unpublished study, he and his colleagues found that chronic media multitaskers—people who spent several hours a day juggling multiple screen tasks—performed worse than otherwise similar peers on analytic questions drawn from the LSAT. He isn't sure which way the causation runs here: It might be that media multitaskers are hyperdistractible people who always would have done poorly on LSAT questions, even in the pre-Internet era. But he worries that media multitasking might actually be destroying students' capacity for reasoning.

Students today are different from any previous generation in terms of how they interact with technology.  Their desire to constantly be plugged in and connected impacts how they view their educational process as well.  Finding a way to meet them where they are while also delivering the important skills they will need will be an increasing challenge for educators and parents in the years ahead.

Was the promise of efficiency and a uniform product a la the assembly line perhaps a siren's song for schools and educational leaders over the past several decades?  Ryan Oliver, a social studies teacher at City Charter High School in Pittsburgh, believes this to be true.  Rather than providing students with a solid education that will prepare them for the world they will face upon graduation, the current assembly-line model produces students lacking critical skills.

In Assembly-line schools from a bygone era from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Oliver writes:

The traditional high school structure emerged as a parallel to the factory model that saw a division of labor, mechanical routines and large-scale production as the most efficient way to make things -- whether the products were steel beams, automobiles or productive citizens.

Consider the origins of seven classes a day, 45 minutes each, in rooms filled with students sitting in orderly rows writing down notes and completing repetitive exercises in preparation for multiple-choice exams. This is an efficient method of material production, but it's no way to educate human beings.

Under such conditions, it should not be surprising that the "products" these industrial-era schools release into our communities often lack the ability to collaborate with others and engage in the critical analysis necessary for success in a complex society. Many of our young people are set adrift in a world they don't fully understand and have few skills to influence.

Oliver further observes:

What is desperately needed is a change in the understanding of the high school teacher's role and a dramatic shift in school design. Instead of demanding that high school teachers be subject experts alone, we should expect them to be experts in student development, capable of forming strong academic relationships and constructing bridges to the wisdom and knowledge that lie beyond school walls.

The notion that teachers should be highly skilled in developing relationships is commonplace at the elementary level, but discussions of education reform, both locally and nationally, continue to ignore the central role academic relationships play at all levels of education.

Oliver goes on to explain the way his school has tackled the problem.  This includes implementing interdisciplinary groups of teachers who work with the same students for four years, a senior year social studies curriculum with extensive discussions on wide-ranging topics with professionals, and an International Service Learning Program.  In each case, students are prepared for life after high school through relationship-based learning experiences which translate into significant life preparation.  By implementing such changes throughout the country, Oliver argues, high school will not merely be an assembly line of future citizens but instead will produce thoughtful, prepared young men and women.


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Parents across America rushed out to purchase classical CDs when the Mozart effect was first reported in the early 1990's.  The promise of boosting a child's IQ even while in the womb simply by listening to music by composers such as Mozart, Vivaldi and Hadyn was too great to ignore.

Almost twenty years later, most experts are calling the hype and excessive promises false.  Even the author who wrote the study so often cited has said that the information was misapplied and over-exaggerated.

But while the promise of a virtuoso might have been over-hyped, subsequent research has shown that there is a different kind of Mozart effect.  And it is not based on listening, but on learning to actually make music.

From the Los Angeles Times article: The Mozart effect: Studies of music's affect on children:

In a 2004 study, he and his colleagues randomly assigned 144 6-year-olds to receive instruction in keyboard, voice, drama or nothing. After a year, kids who got keyboard or voice lessons showed a 3-point IQ boost on average over the kids taking drama or no lessons at all.

It's a modest improvement but one that may build on itself since, for all its faults, IQ is a reliable predictor of a child's performance in school. Better performance in school typically leads to more and better schooling — which, in turn, further increases IQ.

So how does learning to make music make a difference?

For those receiving musical instruction, "there is evidence that music changes the brain in positive and permanent ways," says Laurel Trainor, professor of psychology, neuroscience and behavior, and director of the auditory development lab of McMaster University in Toronto. Yet like a medication that powerfully treats an illness, but in mysterious ways, the means by which music might enhance cognitive powers has eluded scientists so far.

And does starting earlier make a difference?

Years ago, Schlaug found a glaring and suggestive difference between the brains of 30 professional musicians and 30 non-musician adults of matched age and gender.

In the musicians, the bundle of connective fibers that carry messages between the brain's right and left hemispheres — a structure called the corpus callosum — was larger and denser on average than that of their non-musical peers. The brawnier bridge was particularly notable toward the rear of the brain, at the crossing that links areas responsible for sensory perception and voluntary movement.

It suggested not only that musicians might be able to more nimbly react to incoming information but also that their brains might be more resilient and adaptable, allowing right and left hemispheres, which specialize in separate functions, to work better together.

Schlaug and colleagues also found that the musicians who had begun their musical training before the age of 7 showed the most pronounced differences — suggesting an early start might rewire the brain most dramatically.

So while it may not be necessary to stock up on Mozart performances, insisting that Aiden or Olivia try at least a few years of music lessons might be a worthwhile investment of time and money.

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Recent generations of Americans have regarded a college degree as the ticket to a better life with more income, options and prestige.  Parents and grandparents who are college educated more often than not simply assume that subsequent generations will attend college as well.

According to a recent USA Today article, What if a college education just isn't for everyone?, 55% of people surveyed believe a college education is essential to succeeding in the world today.  This is up from 31% just ten years ago. From the article:

Long before President Obama vowed last year that America will "have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by 2020, the premium placed on going to college was firmly embedded in the American psyche.

The case is compelling: As good jobs increasingly require more education, college is widely seen as the ticket to personal economic security and to global competitiveness. And the message has gotten through: The percentage of students who went on to college or trade school within a year of high school climbed from 47% in 1973 to 67% in 2007, Census data show.

As a result of this prevailing view, high schools have continued to move toward the college prep arena.  Students are expected to follow a college prep path with the default expectation being that college is the next logical step. 

But there is a growing concern amongst educational leaders that some students should not pursue college. They argue that many students would better benefit from apprenticeships and other kinds of training and certification. But deciding who should pursue non-college options can lead to criticisms of elitism and putting students on less profitable education tracks.

With the cost of a college education becoming increasingly beyond the resources of many families, the question of whether or not a young adult should pursue college or something else will continue to be a topic of discussion in many homes around America.

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A new study released by The Kaiser Family Foundation stated that tweens and teens (ages 8 - 18), spend approximately 7 hours and 38 minutes a day engaged in media.  That is a total of 53 hours a week.  When media multitasking was included, the number was even more astounding:

The numbers zoom even higher if you consider kids' multitasking — such as listening to music while on the computer. Those data show young people are marinating in media for what amounts to 10 hours, 45 minutes a day — an increase of almost 2.25 hours since 2004.

The report, M2: Media in the Lives of 8-to 18-Year-Olds, suggests that excessive media usage may have a negative impact on student learning:

When it comes to report cards, the Kaiser report finds a difference between heavy and light media users, though researchers note that they haven't determined cause and effect. Nearly half of all heavy media users, those who consume more than 16 hours a day (including time spent multitasking), say they usually get "fair or poor" grades compared with about a quarter of light users (less than 3 hours).

The full article and study (PDF) are both available online.
 

Whether you call it wired, plugged in, or just plain "on", students today are writing constantly.  Texting, emails, and online chatting are big among students.  Each involves writing in one form or another.  Someone's first instinct might be that all of this casual interaction is creating a new generation of students who can't write a decent sentence.  But a professor at Standford University thinks that just the opposite may be happening.

In Clive Thompson on the New Literacy from Wired.com, Andrea Lunsford states that we may be in the midst of one of the biggest literacy revolutions since Greek civilization.  From the article:

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

Thompson goes on to explore the idea that students today are much more in tune with writing for an audience than perhaps any recent generation.  And rather than all of this casual writing and chatting being a detriment in the classroom, Lunsford argues that students are still adept at focusing on the appropriate audience and writing in an appropriate style.

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