Education Week - Sizing Up: Blended Learning - (Page S31)

said John Pane, a senior scientist at RAND and the study's lead author. "But generalizing from that to other blended learning curricula is a risky move. And while many people may be tempted to do that, the devil is in the details of any blended learning curriculum." Software-Textbook Connections When it comes to Cognitive Tutor, those details are not all that revolutionary, at least within the scope of the field of blended learning, which has gained most of its traction in the past half-dozen years. Ms. Brierley's Algebra 1 class- room, and many others that use the program, functions squarely within the commonly used "station rotation" blended learning model, which is seen more often in the elementary and middle grades. After a brief pencil-and-paper warm-up, her second-period class divides into two groups of about a dozen students each. One group of students turns to a problem from a textbook, with clusters of students working together at desks, while members of the other group migrate to the laptop cart in the classroom's corner, take a device back to their desk, log in to their Cognitive Tutor software accounts, and tackle problems tailored to each student's learning progress. After 35 minutes or so, the groups switch tasks. "It does free [teachers] up to be more of a troubleshooter than anything," said Ms. Brierley, an 18-year teaching veteran who has spent the last third of her career working with Cognitive Tutor. "It gives [students] an opportunity to be independent and work through things and sometimes work things out in their head without us telling them what they should be doing." But Cognitive Tutor has some notable nuances for a station-rotation model. Among them, both the print text and the software come from the same provider. So while some students may reach concepts in print first, and others first encounter them online, the terminology and theory behind teaching concepts remains constant. Both branches of the curriculum also stress the manipulation of numbers and variables. The text features perforated tearaway pages so students scribble in or alongside charts and equations rather than on separate scrap paper. (This also means a district implementing the curriculum has the added expense of purchasing new textbooks every year.) The software requires students to set their own bounds for graphs and tables and type key information from paragraph-length word problems into charts before answering a series of questions all based on the same scenario. Perhaps most importantly, the curriculum has undergone an endless evolution since its launch as Carnegie Learning's first product in 1998 and is modeled around research on human cognition conducted by Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, which at one time owned a stake in the company. "It is built on a very well-con- sidered theory of cognition and has been assembled over decades into what it is now," Mr. Pane said. "That's quite in contrast with the great vast set of education technology/blended learning interventions that are out there that are ad hoc." Academic Improvements It's worth noting that RAND re- stricted Carnegie Learning's employees in their interaction with STUDYING ALGEBRA A study found that the math scores of high school students using Cognitive Tutor improved significantly during the second year that schools implemented the program. That growth was equivalent to moving a student from the 50th percentile to the 58th percentile of performance. (See more details on page 32.) Cognitive Tutor group's additional learning growth .22* Typical math learning growth during 9th grade, according to other studies. The SAM process gives principals the time to do evaluation right with frequent coaching to improve teaching. SAM principals are "shadowed" to determine their use of time. They use TimeTrack™ to increase time with teachers and First Responders™ so they are not the first person called for every management issue. The SAM Daily Meeting is a reflective practice and planning session to maximize positive impact. +.20* schools in the study, to ensure schools did not receive an unusual level of assistance in implementing the curriculum. In other words, the study suggests those secondyear results stem from a range of real-world conditions, where some schools and some teachers are implementing the program in more effective ways than others. That's essential in a district like the 78,000-student Anne Arundel County, where every Algebra 1 classroom has used Cognitive Tutor since 2009, but not every teacher is as enamored with the program as Ms. Brierley. While the expectation is for students to spend 30 to 40 minutes of class time twice a week working on the curriculum's computer component, some teachers barely meet the minimum time requirement, said Amy Smith, the district's coordinator of secondary mathematics. Others, meanwhile, allow more class time and encourage students to use the program during study halls or after school, she said. Teachers' responses range from "excellent fidelity," Ms. Smith said, to "'I'm checking the box-yep, I put them on'" the computer. Inevitably, challenges related to Severna Park High School freshman Hannah White, puts away her laptop at the end of her algebra class as her teacher, Mary Brierley, talks to students. Ms. Brierly says the Cognitive Tutor math program used in her class encourages students to take the initiative to work through problems. Better Principals. Better with SAMs . TM Proven to increase time spent to improve teaching and learning www.SamsConnect.com 502-509-9774 NSIP provides ongoing SAM coaching, implementation and professional development support for over 700 schools in 17 states. Denver, Charlotte, Boston and Tampa, have made the SAM process the center of their support for principals. You can too. Better Principals. Better with SAMs™. *Note: The math gains were measured in standardized effect sizes- roughly an additional .20 for Cognitive Tutor, a gain that the RAND Corp. study authors describe as "educationally significant." Source: RAND Corp. EDUCATION WEEK: SIZING UP BLENDED LEARNING > www.edweek.org/go/blended-learning JANUARY 29, 2014 | S31 http://www.SamsConnect.com http://www.SamsConnect.com http://www.edweek.org/go/blended-learning

Education Week - Sizing Up: Blended Learning

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