Another Defensive Post About e-Reading

various e-book readers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Disclaimer: As an administrator in a district where we have provided iPads for all students, I always feel a bit defensive about articles and research studies that are quick to dismiss e-reading in lieu of traditional books. This is especially true when I am quoted in one of the articles.

Caitlin Dewey produced another take on the merits of e-reading in yesterday's Washington Post in her article titled "Why you might want to ditch your e-reader and go back to traditional books."  Dewey's piece highlights a study out of Italy that was highlighted in the Guardian this week where 50 people were asked to read a short story, half of the group on a Kindle and the other half out of a book. The findings here were that the overwhelming majority of the participants who read on the Kindle remembered less of the story than those who read it from a book.

As is usually the case with these types of studies, I have some questions I need answered to help me understand the findings of this study:

• How many of these Kindle readers had done reading electronically before?
• What was the mindset of these people about reading electronically?

The fact of the matter is that only two of the Kindle readers had experience reading on the Kindle, a fact that this story seemed comfortable glossing over. I am a bit at a loss as to how such a significant matter can be considered insignificant. It seems straightforward to me that people tend to perform better in an environment in which they are more comfortable.  I am wondering when I will see a study done with a group of people who consider themselves strong e-readers and face them off with a group of "luddites."

Here's my key takeaway from this article:

"Anne Mangen, the lead author of the new Kindle study, says more research will be needed to determine which devices should be used for what content and which populations benefit from each. It’s also unclear to what extent readers’ own attitudes affect their comprehension; one line of research posits that, as iPads and Kindles become more mainstream, people will approach text on those devices a little more thoughtfully."

I am left with the same conclusion that I had back in April when I wrote A Rant On Reading Online vs. Reading Paper.

Why is it that as we seek the best way to accomplish a task, we cling to the false belief that we are going to find one right answer? Personally, I love reading online and the fact that I can click on hyperlinks, bookmark key points/articles, and interact with others interested in the same topic/novel. Am I distracted or adding a level of interaction to this task that was not possible for previous generations of readers?  

Of course, the answer here is that sometimes I am distracted and less productive and other times I am able to utilize the online resources in a way that adds greater depth to my experience.  My main problem with the alarmists who would prefer that all students read paperbound texts is that they deny these students opportunities to experience the power of Interactive reading, as well as the chance to find their own individual sense of balance in this area.  We need to embrace the struggle that is part of this and have meaningful conversations to guide our own learning and the learning of our children.

Denying these opportunities benefits no one! 

Related articles

• A Great Way To Approach Technology - "Pause -- Think -- Crawl -- Walk -- Run." (patrickmlarkin.com)
• I Am Right! A Follow-up To My Rant About Online Reading (patrickmlarkin.com)

I Am Right! A Follow-up To My Rant About Online Reading

The future of books (Photo credit: Johan Larsson)

On Monday, I posted some thoughts regarding an article from last week's Washington Post that was titled Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say.  I was excited to see a rebuttal to Michael Rosenwald's perspective by his Washington Post colleague Valerie Strauss this week. 

In her article, Actually, online skimming probably hasn’t affected serious reading after all, Strauss notes the skepticism of Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist from the University of Virginia. Here is a bit of what Willingham had to say:

"… teachers aver that students can no longer read long novels. Well, if we’re swapping stories, I — and most of my classmates — had a hard time with Faulkner and Joyce back in the early ‘80s, when I was an English major."

"A more plausible possibility is that we’re not less capable of reading complex prose, but less willing to put in the work. Our criterion for concluding, “this is boring, this is not paying off,” has been lowered because the Web makes it so easy to find something else to read, watch, or listen to...If I’m right, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that our brains are not being deep-fried by the Web; we can still read deeply and think carefully. The bad news is that we don’t want to."

While I find Willingham's feelings on online reading versus more traditional means more palatable than those cited in Rosenwald's artilce, my conclusion is still the same. There is no one right answer! We need to embrace the struggle between reading online and reading from paper-based products. Forcing our students to do one or the other denies them the opportunity to see the benefits that each has to offer.  In addition, there needs to be an increased focus on the advantages of online tools so that students can meet more modern standards of literacy, like the ones below described by the National Council of Teachers of English in its Definition of 21st Century Literacies:

Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology; 

Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought; 

Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes; 

Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information; 

Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts; 

Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments.

Cheating Is Cheating, But Why Does It Happen?

image via http://www.salisburyschool.org/ 

There was an interesting back and forth this week in the Washington Post's The Answer Sheet  surrounding the topic of cheating. The first take on the topic was by Penelope Trunk who kicked things off with an article titled Why Schools Should Relax About Cheating.  Strunk, a successful entrepreneur with two successful startups under her belt, noted the following:

In school, looking at someone else’s paper to get the right answer is forbidden.  But in the work world, the people who rise the fastest are the ones who know the right person to ask to get the answer.

Personally, I find it hard to argue with this logic.  But when I tweeted out the article, I got some pushback from a few folks on Twitter.

As usual, the folks on Twitter got me thinking a bit more deeply on the topic of cheating. The follow-up article that appeared the next day by Elaine Power, a Biology teacher in Maryland also made me reflect on my initial reaction. Power titled her counter to Trunk's point of view Cheating Isn't Networking, It's Cheating.

While putting out the disclaimer here that I do not condone cheating, I think it is important to have a clear definition of cheating while also asking ourselves why cheating occurs.  In regards to the defining cheating, we need to be sure that we are all on the same page. For instance it was not too long ago that some students at Ryerson College were disciplines for starting a Facebook Page to help prepare for their final exam.

Finally while I will not support anyone who copies from someone else's paper, I do think we need to reflect upon assessments and the fact that if there are too many of them that require rote memorization of inane facts that we are the ones cheating. We are cheating our students of valuable time that could be used for something more significant that would better prepare them to be the true collaborators who Power describes as "the gem of the workplace."

Do Schools And Educators Take Too Much Blame For Failed Reform Efforts?

As someone who is passionate about school improvement, I was very interested in a post this morning by Valerie Strauss in her Washington Post column (The Answer Sheet).  The post, titled Why almost all school reform efforts have failed, highlights the findings of David C. Berliner of Arizona State University in a new essay entitled Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America’s Youth just published in the Teachers College Record at Columbia University.

The basic premise of the essay is that the problems in our nation's schools are due more to economic and social policy than to education policy.  Having said this, there are clear examples of a shortsighted education agenda as well, but it is clear that many of our education outcomes are a result of the impoverished conditions impacting many students. Despite the fact that we have tremendous work to do in improving the our educational system nationally, we need to stop targeting poor teaching and inadequate schools as the primary issue that will resolve our country's poor ranking on global measures such as The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).  

While I encourage those interested in schools and school reform to read the entire essay, I have taken the liberty of citing (in italics) some of the excerpts that I found most interesting below.  

This paper arises out of frustration with the results of school reforms carried out over the past few decades. These efforts have failed. They need to be abandoned. In their place must come recognition that income inequality causes many social problems, including problems associated with education. Sadly, compared to all other wealthy nations, the USA has the largest income gap between its wealthy and its poor citizens.

Thus it is argued that the design of better economic and social policies can do more to improve our schools than continued work on educational policy independent of such concerns.

A question we all need to ask! 

The research question asked is why so many school reform efforts have produced so little improvement in American schools.

 The problem with blaming teachers and schools for all of our country's ills... 

What does it take to get politicians and the general public to abandon misleading ideas, such as,“Anyone who tries can pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” or that “Teachers are the most important factor in determining the achievement of our youth”?

But the general case is that poor people stay poor and that teachers and schools serving impoverished youth do not often succeed in changing the life chances for their students. 

America’s dirty little secret is that a large majority of poor kids attending schools that serve the poor are not going to have successful lives. 

Most children born into the lower social classes will not make it out of that class, even when exposed to heroic educators. A simple statistic illustrates this point: In an age where college degrees are important for determining success in life, only 9% of low-income children will obtain those degrees (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011).

Because of our tendency to expect individuals to overcome their own handicaps, and teachers to save the poor from stressful lives, we design social policies that are sure to fail since they are not based on reality.  

The problems with our national Education Reform efforts 

It may well be that the gains now seen are less than those occurring before the NCLB act was put into place. In fact, the prestigious and non-political National Research Council (2011) says clearly that the NCLB policy is a failure, and all the authors of chapters in a recently edited book offering alternative policies to NCLB reached the same conclusion (Timar and Maxwell-Jolly, 2012). Moreover, a plethora of negative side effects associated with high-stakes testing are now well documented (Nichols and Berliner, 2007; Ravitch, 2010).

Nations with high-stakes testing have generally gone down in scores from 2000 to 2003, and then again by 2006. Finland, on the other hand, which has no high-stakes testing, and an accountability system that relies on teacher judgment and school level professionalism much more than tests, has shown growth over these three PISA administrations (Sahlberg, 2011).

Still, most state legislatures, departments of education, and the federal congress cling to the belief that if only we can get the assessment program right, we will fix what ails America’s schools. They will not give up their belief in what is now acknowledged by the vast majority of educators and parents to be a failed policy. 

The Finland Phenomenon is also more about social policy than education policy 

Although we are constantly benchmarking American school performance against the Finns, we might be better served by benchmarking our school policies and social programs against theirs. For example, Finland’s social policies result in a rate of children in poverty (those living in families whose income is less than 50% of median income in the nation) that is estimated at well under 5%. In the USA that rate is estimated at well over 20%!

Virtually every scholar of teaching and schooling knows that when the variance in student scores on achievement tests is examined along with the many potential factors that may have contributed to those test scores, school effects account for about 20% of the variation in achievement test scores, and teachers are only a part of that constellation of variables associated with “school.”

On the other hand, out-of-school variables account for about 60% of the variance that can be accounted for in student achievement. 

What is it that keeps politicians and others now castigating teachers and public schools from acknowledging this simple social science fact, a fact that is not in dispute: Outside-of-school factors are three times more powerful in affecting student achievement than are the inside-the-school factors (Berliner, 2009)?

Berliner goes on to cite a number of possible policy changes that we could implement to do change the course of our failed education reform efforts. Again, I encourage you to read the entire essay.