In this post: http://mizmercer.edublogs.org/2008/03/19/math-and-technology/
I show how out of alignment the standards and the teaching materials are in elementary, including fourth grade, the level you cited in your prior post. This means that how students do on the state test is very dependent on how well the teacher supplements the text. HOWEVER, the assessment you are looking at in that chart is a special National test, not the state, so I think there is a little apple/orange comparison going on. The fact is that the text/materials are out of alignment with state standards and testing (which is high, a tweet I got on that post from someone on the east coast indicated she was teaching similar concepts to her 10th graders), but the students still aren’t learning enough to do well on the national standards test.

It’s difficult to get mixed up in all the layers, so I’m not going to beat you up any more about this. I could find myself in a similar position commenting on High School standards. I think it’s worth consider what the data tells us, but it’s also worth taking a hard look at the data itself.

I think the points about HOW computers are used in Title One schools made earlier are spot on. The tech gap between schools is closing, but much of what poorer students do is testing, and drill oriented, while more well-off students get to create and discover. I can safely say that I’m one of the few teachers doing content creation type work on the computer with students in this SES bracket.

We do have a good number of computer labs, and a set of roaming laptops, but even given that it’d be logistically impossible in our standard classes to be using the computer “every day”.

The statistical difference in the other categories is too minimal to comment.

I know, big whoop, right.

But Calculus is a thing of beauty. Some of the most beautiful work I’ve ever done. I never understood the world as well as I did after those two semesters Sophomore year.

So that’s (one of) the problem(s). In secondary math ed, we have all our kids on a really onerous train ride towards an awesome destination. If you disembark early, you incur a lot of loss. In fact, you’d have been better off on a train with a less spectacular destination and a really pleasant journey.

What algebra teaches is not a set of formulas to memorize or obscure techniques to solve contrived situations (”A train leaves Buffalo at 6pm…”). Rather, what a student should take away from an algebra course is a methodology – a process to look at real-world problems and translate them into a more universal grammar that facilitates solving.

Just had a very similar conversation with a kid in our at-risk-kids-need-very-special-support-study-hall room, who is missing a ton of math homework with two days remaining in the third quarter. We were talking about how math class isn’t about learning the formula, or solving for x, or whatever you people do, but about training your mind to solve problems and focus on the details. I told him that 13 years out of high school, I couldn’t tell him where to begin on solving an algebra II problem–I haven’t looked at that stuff since ’93–but I do credit my math teachers with giving me a way to practice slowing down, checking my work, and being confident in the solution to a problem.

Then again, I’m an English teacher, so I might not know what I’m talking about here.

As I recall, my precal students and I used that lab to develop regression models for predicting (eg.) the number of Starbucks worldwide in 2050.

The remedial classes used it for completing pre-programmed math drills.

I’m not sure what to make of that.

For a long time now, there has been grant money available to low-end Title One schools to buy computer labs for individualized practice of basic skills in reading and math.

Ergo, the schools who score lower and got these grants will be on the higher end of math “technology use” because the kids do practice sessions in the computer lab — individualized practice targeted where each kid needs it, which you can call drill-and-kill but math skills do need to be practiced!

The tech-use-in-math didn’t *make* them score lower. They are using the stuff *because* they scored lower. Couldn’t this explain it?

My experience in a portfolio-based school which did not do much in the way of traditional test-based assessments meant that I saw kids who could write incredible essays, deconstruct complex pieces of literature and powerfully represent themselves in all four of the major NY state standards in English (Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking.)

However, what they rarely did was score all that high on the NY State English Language Arts test. In fact, often the scores on those tests were not at all correlative to what I saw as my students’ abilities. And this wasn’t just true in my class, but in classes throughout our school. And I’ve worked with enough teachers and seen enough classrooms to feel qualified to say that our classrooms — while certainly capable of improvement — didn’t suck.

In fact, progressive, project-driven schools often score lower on standardized tests despite the fact that if you look at other metrics (first year college GPA, attendance in HS, student / parent satisfaction surveys), they are often considered exemplary schools.

Now, I know that progressive != technology, so I’m not quite arguing the same thing, but I think there *may* be an analogous situation here. Is there some bad teaching with technology? Yes… of course. Is the bad teaching in technology so much more widespread than bad teaching in non-technology infused classrooms as to explain the test scores, I am unconvinced.

Data-driven decision-making is at its most dangerous when we look at incomplete or poor data to make big decisions.

Seriously. If you’ve got a dozen well-trained educators on this blog asking double the amount of critical questions about this cute little NAEP Excel doppleganger, most of which questions completely debunk not nuanced “implications,” but the very parameters of one’s x (math curriculum being assessed) and y (use of technology) values– I mean, come on. The *X and Y* values?!? Doesn’t that indicate on its face that we should throw out the whole damn graph?

Let’s do that, shall we? Then we can talk about Dan’s super question about relevant curriculum, which, by the way, springs like Aphrodite from the foam of Dan’s brain, and ironically is not supported– or unsupported– in the slightest by the data he posted.