Amanda Ripley: The smartest kids in the world
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Ripley promotes "high order thinking".  Great, but what is it?  It
certainly sounds better than "low order thinking".  Can you teach
it?  Can you even give assignments that encourage it *and* help
students learn how to do it?

One hopeful clue that Ripley gives is the suggestion that schools
and teachers "teach for a purpose" and that students should "learn
for a purpose".  The thinking is, I suppose, that students learn
better (in some sense of "better") when (1) they have a goal and (2)
they understand why they are learning something.  That certainly has
an intuitive good feel to it, but I'd like to see some evidence
for that claim.  And, I'm guessing that we have plenty of evidence
that there is lots of successful learning in plenty of successful
schools where the only goal students have is to learn what they need
to pass a test.  Is that the kind of "learning for a purpose" that
Ripley is talking about?

And, what about students in first and second grades?  Are we going
to explain to them why they need to learn?  And, do we need to give
them a goal to guide and drive their learning?  That claim seems
quite a bit less intuitive to me.

It might be helpful and interesting to compare Ripley's book with
the writings of Diane Ravitch, especially Ravitch's latest book
"Reign of error".  (1) Ripley's goal seems to be to help students
and their parents be able to identify "good" schools and get to them
even it that means moving to a foreign country.  Ravitch's goal is
to fix and save schools in this country, *if* they are in need of
fixing.  (2) Ripley assumes that the problems are endogenous to the
schools, that is those problems originate and are caused by
conditions and problems in the schools themselves, for example
because of poor teachers.  Ravitch makes no such assumption, and in
fact stresses that much of what we need to do in order to improve
students' performance must change conditions outside the schools.
Ravitch claims that students who live in poverty do not perform
well, that hungry students do not perform well, that students in
families with turmoil and disruption do not perform well.

Ripley's recommendations how to evaluate schools are: (1) Find out
whether the parents are interested and involved.  Yes, but, more
importantly she suggests, find out what the parents are interested
in.  An interest in sports improves school spirit.  An interest in
grades puts pressure on teachers to grade more leniently.  An
interest in what their children are learning might actually result
in better educational outcomes.  (2) Find out whether the students
are interested and pay attention during class.  And, Ripley also
recommends asking whether students know what topic they are trying
to learn and why they are studying a that topic.

Some simple lessons that I took away from Ripley's book: (1)
Students learn better when they are interested and motivated. (2)
Students are more motivated when the feel that it matters what they
learn and when they understand why they need to learn it.
(Presumably, this applies more realistically to students above
grades 1 or 2.)  And, (3) students are better motivated when they
have a goal and they believe in the value of that goal.

12/30/2013

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