“Reporting Research for Practitioners: Proposed Guidelines”
NCTM Research Committee
March 2012, Volume 43, Issue 2, Page 126
Abstract:
The NCTM Research Committee developed this article to address a distinctly important activity that links research and practice: writing research-based articles for practitioner journals. Six guiding principles are described.

http://www.nctm.org/publications/article.aspx?id=32222

Like vinyl vs CD it will change into something else like MP3 vs CD then the Cloud vs MP3.

I very much think with the speed of advance of technology and the growth of connectivity that Academia must adapt or become like the vinyl in the attic.

I think we are kidding ourselves to believe that papers written in journals are being read by the teachers in the classroom. The time lag in new research being filtered out to those who are practitioners is way too long. While the researchers are keen to see things put into practice their ‘reach’ at present is very limited. The students may have graduated by the time the ‘latest stuff’ reaches the humble teachers who also want to make a difference to their students.

I am sure most involved involved wants to do better but it’s a matter of politics, cost and accepting a massive change to the way things have worked from the dawn of time in academia, that is required to do thing differently. I will not hold my breath.

Conversely you can read blogs like Dan’s try things out, see if it works, get involved in the discussion and create a new order that believes the world is not flat because we have not fallen off the edge when we have travelled beyond where others have said we cannot go.

I believe teachers are smart, curious people, and I reject the notion that we researchers, the “knowledge elite,” should be deciding on their behalf that there’s knowledge to which they don’t need free and open access. Yes, some (most?) research might be things they find irrelevant or incomprehensible, but that should be for them to decide, and they deserve help from “translators” who speak both languages.

Do we need visionary thinkers who can see beyond the horizon and search for yet-unsought knowledge? Certainly. But I’m not sure with the current state of education, including negative attitudes toward schools of education, that researchers can afford the luxury of *not* listening to the questions teachers are asking. I think there are many researchers who would agree with this belief, but haven’t figured out how much the internet has made listening to teachers so much easier than it used to be.

I rarely talk to any researcher who doesn’t want to have an impact at the classroom level. Those same researchers express frustration at how the current system in academia restricts them from having that impact. But rare is a researcher who expresses the belief that they have the power to change the system, and it’s a cruel irony how intelligent scholars can spend a career discovering ways to improve educational systems other than the one they work in.

A fleeting thought: There’s a tendency for some math teachers to have a sadistic side: “Learning math was hard and uncomfortable for me, and so it shall be for you.” (I’ll admit it…I have been guilty of this, particularly in my first year of teaching.) Does the same thing happen to researchers? I think we preserve some bad traditions because somehow we fear our accomplishments will lose value if we discard the system that provided for them.

Well-said. The instructional core (student-teacher-content) that Dan spoke to in his recent IBooks censure is really the holy grail. Are these high-performing schools changing that dynamic in some critical way that we can learn from? I strongly doubt that any of the schools in those studies revolutionized math pedagogy, but what *did* they do?

I guess the conclusions you draw from the studies is a referendum on how you view state achievement tests: either a) a sucker’s game or b) meaningful information on schools, teachers, and students. To the degree that you believe the latter: those math gains are enormous, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to look at best practices around math instruction in those schools.

Andy:
“But that aside, what can one really make of these results? There is no way to disaggregate impacts of the various changes made at the schools (new admin, mostly new teachers, tutoring, longer days, longer year). And most districts don’t have the resources to do what these schools did (over 2K/year in additional cost/student).”

I don’t understand that first point. Fryer’s concludes that it takes a transformed culture, not one individual component. Is there an need to disaggregate?

Agreed on the cost (although he does some beautiful work on the Social Return on Investment in one of the appendices). 2k a year extra isn’t cheap. I also think he understates the political challenges, which are far greater in most districts. He also got lucky with a bold Superintendent.

1. How many hours of professional development were offered?
2. Who conducted the PD and what was their expertise in student thinking?
3. Did teachers implement the program with fidelity or were their issues such as support, or teacher knowledge holding them back.

I do completely think that if CGI can’t be scaled up because it depends on having too many hours of PD with experts who don’t have much time then that does reflect poorly on the actual effectiveness of the program. Before deeming their ideas a failure, I’d have to wonder about how well they were implemented. Most districts don’t have elementary teachers with the knowledge to implement that type of thing, and given that issue,perhaps CGI wasn’t the solution.

Also-I once asked a ninth grader. What is 3 times 7? She told me in all seriousness “Miss, that one doesn’t exist.” I would have been way happier if she had drawn a caterpillar than basically telling me that multiplication facts only exist if she remembers the teacher saying them to her. I like that the caterpillar kids will at least know that there is always a meaning to multiplication and how to figure it out. I do know that multiplication schemes emerge from counting schemes(see Steffe’s work) but I don’t know if 4th graders should be able to generalize the meaning of multiplication or if it is appropriate for them to draw pictures of it. I do know that at my university we have pre-service secondary teachers draw pictures of multiplication and it can be really hard for them to do.

And yes, I do realize that in later math courses you have to know how to multiply quickly with large numbers.

Cameron

I don’t know that I’ll have the time to go through the papers completely, but I’ll note one item on the Kane paper. What happened in those schools, apparently, was real and great remediation in math in some grades — this is good, of course. But, the report is clear that the kids coming in to those schools were at a much lower level than the comparison schools or other district schools, making improvement perhaps easier?

But that aside, what can one really make of these results? There is no way to disaggregate impacts of the various changes made at the schools (new admin, mostly new teachers, tutoring, longer days, longer year). And most districts don’t have the resources to do what these schools did (over 2K/year in additional cost/student). The study isn’t long enough to tell us if the system can repeat at bringing gains to students who have been remediated. One also has to wonder — since the math outcome isn’t in any way correlated with the LA outcome — what is really going on.

I really don’t like the implication that throwing out the admin and many teachers was positive for the school, when the evidence – from a report standpoint – doesn’t support that. Still, the school may be a better place than the school in the past by other measures that we should care about, but really all we know is that they did a good job remediating math.

I’m also troubled that all of these studies are done by people who seem to have a bias – a vested interest in charters. It sure would be nice if people would throw their hypotheses to other, independent, researchers to provide a better basis for drawing conclusions.

KIPP Lynn typically asked 5th grade applicants to repeat. These applicants might be expected
to do better on 5th grade MCAS tests just by virtue of repeating. We therefore assume that all 5th
grade applicants repeat and look only at their 6th grade and higher scores.

This strikes me as fairly significant to that group of students just past the 5th grade and makes me wonder what sorts of policies the schools has beyond the generic KIPP ones.

In any case plenty of schools both charter and public have had turnaround success before but duplicating their success is another matter; at the high school I teach at we modeled our recent reform efforts around a public school that had eye-popping numbers but we have not found anything close to the same success even with efforts that look identical on paper.

Even given all that I believe there are certain principles at a school policy level that are well-established through research, but the math-teaching level (the concern of Cognitive Guided Instruction and so forth) is another quandry altogether.