An Open Letter From Arne Duncan to America's Teachers
In Honor of Teacher Appreciation Week
By Arne Duncan
I have worked in education for much of my life. I have met with thousands of teachers in great schools and struggling schools, in big cities and small towns, and I have a deep and genuine appreciation for the work you do. I know that most teachers did not enter the profession for the money. You became teachers to make a difference in the lives of children, and for the hard work you do each day, you deserve to be respected, valued, and supported.
I consider teaching an honorable and important profession, and it is my goal to see that you are treated with the dignity we award to other professionals in society. In too many communities, the profession has been devalued. Many of the teachers I have met object to the imposition of curriculum that reduces teaching to little more than a paint-by-numbers exercise. I agree.
Inside your classroom, you exercise a high degree of autonomy. You decide when to slow down to make sure all of your students fully understand a concept, or when a different instructional strategy is needed to meet the needs of a few who are struggling to keep up. You build relationships with students from a variety of backgrounds and with a diverse array of needs, and you find ways to motivate and engage them. I appreciate the challenge and skill involved in the work you do and applaud those of you who have dedicated your lives to teaching.
Many of you have told me you are willing to be held accountable for outcomes over which you have some control, but you also want school leaders held accountable for creating a positive and supportive learning environment. You want real feedback in a professional setting rather than drive-by visits from principals or a single score on a bubble test. And you want the time and opportunity to work with your colleagues and strengthen your craft.
You have told me you believe that the No Child Left Behind Act has prompted some schools—especially low-performing ones—to teach to the test, rather than focus on the educational needs of students. Because of the pressure to boost test scores, NCLB has narrowed the curriculum, and important subjects like history, science, the arts, foreign languages, and physical education have been de-emphasized. And you are frustrated when teachers alone are blamed for educational failures that have roots in broken families, unsafe communities, misguided reforms, and underfunded schools systems. You rightfully believe that responsibility for educational quality should be shared by administrators, community, parents, and even students themselves.
The teachers I have met are not afraid of hard work, and few jobs today are harder. Moreover, it’s gotten harder in recent years; the challenges kids bring into the classroom are greater and the expectations are higher. Not too long ago, it was acceptable for schools to have high dropout rates, and not all kids were expected to be proficient in every subject. In today’s economy, there is no acceptable dropout rate, and we rightly expect all children—English-language learners, students with disabilities, and children of poverty—to learn and succeed.
You and I are here to help America’s children. We understand that the surest way to do that is to make sure that the 3.2 million teachers in America’s classrooms are the very best they can be. The quality of our education system can only be as good as the quality of our teaching force.
So I want to work with you to change and improve federal law, to invest in teachers and strengthen the teaching profession. Together with you, I want to develop a system of evaluation that draws on meaningful observations and input from your peers, as well as a sophisticated assessment that measures individual student growth, creativity, and critical thinking. States, with the help of teachers, are now developing better assessments so you will have useful information to guide instruction and show the positive impact you are having on our children.
Working together, we can transform teaching from the factory model designed over a century ago to one built for the information age. We can build an accountability system based on data we trust and a standard that is honest—one that recognizes and rewards great teaching, gives new or struggling teachers the support they need to succeed, and deals fairly, efficiently, and compassionately with teachers who are simply not up to the job. With your input and leadership, we can restore the status of the teaching profession so more of America’s top college students choose to teach because no other job is more important or more fulfilling.
In the next decade, half of America’s teachers are likely to retire. What we do to recruit, train, and retain our new teachers will shape public education in this country for a generation. At the same time, how we recognize, honor, and show respect for our experienced educators will reaffirm teaching as a profession of nation builders and social leaders dedicated to our highest ideals. As that work proceeds, I want you to know that I hear you, I value you, and I respect you.
Arne Duncan is the U.S. secretary of education.
Vol. 30, Issue 3
What do you think?
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Cheating's effeccts on learning
Studies Find Cheaters Overinflate Academic Ability
By Sarah D. Sparks
That time-honored anti-cheating mantra, “You’re only hurting yourself,” may be literal fact, according to new research.
Emerging evidence suggests students who cheat on a test are more likely to deceive themselves into thinking they earned a high grade on their own merits, setting themselves up for future academic failure.
In four experiments detailed in the March Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Harvard Business School and Duke University found that cheaters pay for the short-term benefits of higher scores with inflated expectations for future performance.
The findings come as surveys and studies show a majority of students cheat—whether through cribbing homework, plagiarizing essays from the Internet, or texting test answers to a friend’s cellphone—even though overwhelming majorities consider it wrong. The Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics, which has been tracking student character and academic honesty, has found that while the number of students engaging in specific behaviors has risen and fallen over the years, the number of students who have cheated on a test in the previous year has not dipped below a majority since the first biennial study in 1992. In its most recent survey, conducted in 2010, the study found that a majority of students cheat at some point during high school, and the likelihood of cheating increases the older students get.
Of a nationally representative sample of more than 40,000 public and private high school students responding to the survey, 59.4 percent admitted to having cheated on a test—including 55 percent of honors students—and one in three had done so twice or more in the previous year.
Cheating: Delusions of Success
Test 1- The first test involved a short 10-item quiz in which some participants had access to an answer key, which they were not supposed to use. This group had much higher mean scores than the control group, suggesting they cheated.
Test 2- After taking the test, both groups were asked to predict how well they would do on a second test on which there was no way to cheat. Those who cheated on the first test were overoptimistic about their performance on the second test, and saw a much bigger gap between their expectations and actual performance than those in the control group.
SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesIn addition, more than 80 percent of the respondents said they had copied homework, more than one-third had plagiarized an Internet document for a class assignment, and 61 percent reported having lied to a teacher about “something important” at least once in the past year. By contrast, only about 20 percent of students surveyed reported having cheated in sports.
“One of the sad phenomena is that, on average, one of the things they are learning in school is how to cheat,” John Fremer, the president of consulting services at Caveon LLC, a private test-security company in Midvale, Utah, said of students.
While most academic interest in cheating has focused on how students cheat and how to stop them, the Harvard-Duke study joins a pile of emerging research suggesting that the mental hoops that students must leap through to justify or distance themselves from cheating can cause long-term damage to their professional and academic habits. The findings also suggest that changes in both school climate and instructional approach can help to break the cycle of cheating and self-deception.
“We see that the effect of cheating is, the more we engage in dishonest acts, the more we develop these cognitive distortions—ways in which we neutralize the act and almost forget how much we are doing it,” said Jason M. Stephens, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, who studies cheating among secondary school students.
Moreover, the more students learn to focus on grades for their own sake, rather than as a representation of what they have learned, the more comfortable they are with cheating.
Mr. Stephens, who was not involved in the Harvard-Duke study, quoted one high school student, “Jane,” who insisted that cheating on a test does nothing to lessen the value of the grade. “It says an A on the paper and you don’t go, ‘Oh, but I cheated.’ You’re just kind of like, ‘Hey, I got that A,’ ” she said.
That, said Zoë Chance, the lead author of the Harvard-Duke study, is where cheaters start lying to themselves.
Self-Deception
In the first of the four experiments by the Harvard-Duke team, researchers asked 76 participants on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus to take a short test of “math IQ” and score their own sheets. Half the tests had an answer key at the bottom of the page. After completing the test, all participants were asked to predict how many questions they would answer correctly on a second, 100-question test without an answer key.
The other related experiments repeated the scenario with 345 students at the University of North Carolina, but required the participants to actually take the test after predicting how well they would do. In one variation, the participants were told they would receive money for the second test based on both the number correct and how close the participant’s predicted score came to the actual score.
Participants who had access to the test answers tended to use them. In the first rounds of testing in each scenario, mean scores were significantly higher among students who could sneak a peek at the answer key at the bottom. That fits with previous studies showing that, all else being equal, a majority of those who can cheat, do.
Yet the Harvard-Duke research also showed that cheaters lied to themselves.
In a preliminary experiment involving 36 Harvard students, participants were asked simply to imagine cheating on the first test and then taking the second without an opportunity to cheat. Those participants predicted that they would perform worse on the second test, without the opportunity to cheat.
When faced with the real situation, they weren’t nearly so objective. Across the board, cheaters tended to predict they would perform equally well on the next, longer test, though they knew they would not have a chance to cheat. In the experiment involving money rewards for the second test scores, cheaters missed out on getting money because their actual scores were so much lower than the predictions they made based on their first test scores. If participants received a “certificate of recognition” for scoring well on the first test, they became even more likely to be overly optimistic about their success on the second test.
“In our experiments, we find that social recognition reinforces self-deception,” said Ms. Chance, a Harvard doctoral student. If a student focuses on the high test score by itself, rather than cheating as the reason for it, she said, then “getting a high grade will lead ‘Alex’ to feel smart, and being treated as smart by the teacher will lead Alex to feel smarter still.
“Because Alex wasn’t conscious of cheating, there’s no reason to question the performance evaluation or the social feedback.”
That means students may feel they are getting ahead in class, but actually they are falling into a feedback loop in which they fall further and further behind, according to Mr. Fremer of Caveon, the test-security firm. His firm was not part of the Harvard-Duke study.
“If the test scores misrepresent what kids know, [teachers] may have the wrong sense of where they need help,” he said.
Moreover, such self-deception can lead to a “death of a thousand cuts” for a student’s honesty, Mr. Stephens of the University of Connecticut said.
“Kids start to disengage [from] responsibility habitually; cheating in high school does lead to dishonesty in the workplace as an adult,” he said.
Overwhelmed, Unengaged?
Not only does one instance of cheating lead to another, but the school environment can make it easier for students to mentally justify their dishonesty, research shows. Studies by Mr. Stephens and others that show students are more likely to cheat when they are under pressure to get high grades, uncertain about their own ability, unengaged in the material, or some combination of the three. In addition, students are better able to justify cheating in classes in which they feel the teacher is unfair or does not attempt to engage them in learning.
Yet the entirety of the studies also suggests that making students more aware of the importance of academic integrity and learning, not just grades, can make them less likely to cheat.
In a previous study, Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke and a co-author of the Harvard-Duke study, found test-takers became less likely to cheat if they were reminded of a school honor code, or if they saw someone they considered an outsider cheating.
Ms. Chance and Mr. Fremer said teachers and administrators should try to reduce opportunities for students to cheat, but should also help them establish classwide and schoolwide codes for academic integrity, and then reinforce the importance of that code before every assignment.
“When it comes to recidivism, question your assumptions about motivation to inform your decisions about punishment,” Ms. Chance said. “Try out the assumption that kids cheat because they are stressed out about college, and afraid they aren’t smart enough.
“Think about helping cheaters find alternative means to get what they want,” she said, “so that they don’t react by cheating more or giving up.”
Vol. 30, Issue 26
Is this true? What harm do students do when they cheat? Why do students cheat? How can teachers prevent cheating?
By Sarah D. Sparks
That time-honored anti-cheating mantra, “You’re only hurting yourself,” may be literal fact, according to new research.
Emerging evidence suggests students who cheat on a test are more likely to deceive themselves into thinking they earned a high grade on their own merits, setting themselves up for future academic failure.
In four experiments detailed in the March Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Harvard Business School and Duke University found that cheaters pay for the short-term benefits of higher scores with inflated expectations for future performance.
The findings come as surveys and studies show a majority of students cheat—whether through cribbing homework, plagiarizing essays from the Internet, or texting test answers to a friend’s cellphone—even though overwhelming majorities consider it wrong. The Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics, which has been tracking student character and academic honesty, has found that while the number of students engaging in specific behaviors has risen and fallen over the years, the number of students who have cheated on a test in the previous year has not dipped below a majority since the first biennial study in 1992. In its most recent survey, conducted in 2010, the study found that a majority of students cheat at some point during high school, and the likelihood of cheating increases the older students get.
Of a nationally representative sample of more than 40,000 public and private high school students responding to the survey, 59.4 percent admitted to having cheated on a test—including 55 percent of honors students—and one in three had done so twice or more in the previous year.
Cheating: Delusions of Success
Test 1- The first test involved a short 10-item quiz in which some participants had access to an answer key, which they were not supposed to use. This group had much higher mean scores than the control group, suggesting they cheated.
Test 2- After taking the test, both groups were asked to predict how well they would do on a second test on which there was no way to cheat. Those who cheated on the first test were overoptimistic about their performance on the second test, and saw a much bigger gap between their expectations and actual performance than those in the control group.
SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesIn addition, more than 80 percent of the respondents said they had copied homework, more than one-third had plagiarized an Internet document for a class assignment, and 61 percent reported having lied to a teacher about “something important” at least once in the past year. By contrast, only about 20 percent of students surveyed reported having cheated in sports.
“One of the sad phenomena is that, on average, one of the things they are learning in school is how to cheat,” John Fremer, the president of consulting services at Caveon LLC, a private test-security company in Midvale, Utah, said of students.
While most academic interest in cheating has focused on how students cheat and how to stop them, the Harvard-Duke study joins a pile of emerging research suggesting that the mental hoops that students must leap through to justify or distance themselves from cheating can cause long-term damage to their professional and academic habits. The findings also suggest that changes in both school climate and instructional approach can help to break the cycle of cheating and self-deception.
“We see that the effect of cheating is, the more we engage in dishonest acts, the more we develop these cognitive distortions—ways in which we neutralize the act and almost forget how much we are doing it,” said Jason M. Stephens, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, who studies cheating among secondary school students.
Moreover, the more students learn to focus on grades for their own sake, rather than as a representation of what they have learned, the more comfortable they are with cheating.
Mr. Stephens, who was not involved in the Harvard-Duke study, quoted one high school student, “Jane,” who insisted that cheating on a test does nothing to lessen the value of the grade. “It says an A on the paper and you don’t go, ‘Oh, but I cheated.’ You’re just kind of like, ‘Hey, I got that A,’ ” she said.
That, said Zoë Chance, the lead author of the Harvard-Duke study, is where cheaters start lying to themselves.
Self-Deception
In the first of the four experiments by the Harvard-Duke team, researchers asked 76 participants on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus to take a short test of “math IQ” and score their own sheets. Half the tests had an answer key at the bottom of the page. After completing the test, all participants were asked to predict how many questions they would answer correctly on a second, 100-question test without an answer key.
The other related experiments repeated the scenario with 345 students at the University of North Carolina, but required the participants to actually take the test after predicting how well they would do. In one variation, the participants were told they would receive money for the second test based on both the number correct and how close the participant’s predicted score came to the actual score.
Participants who had access to the test answers tended to use them. In the first rounds of testing in each scenario, mean scores were significantly higher among students who could sneak a peek at the answer key at the bottom. That fits with previous studies showing that, all else being equal, a majority of those who can cheat, do.
Yet the Harvard-Duke research also showed that cheaters lied to themselves.
In a preliminary experiment involving 36 Harvard students, participants were asked simply to imagine cheating on the first test and then taking the second without an opportunity to cheat. Those participants predicted that they would perform worse on the second test, without the opportunity to cheat.
When faced with the real situation, they weren’t nearly so objective. Across the board, cheaters tended to predict they would perform equally well on the next, longer test, though they knew they would not have a chance to cheat. In the experiment involving money rewards for the second test scores, cheaters missed out on getting money because their actual scores were so much lower than the predictions they made based on their first test scores. If participants received a “certificate of recognition” for scoring well on the first test, they became even more likely to be overly optimistic about their success on the second test.
“In our experiments, we find that social recognition reinforces self-deception,” said Ms. Chance, a Harvard doctoral student. If a student focuses on the high test score by itself, rather than cheating as the reason for it, she said, then “getting a high grade will lead ‘Alex’ to feel smart, and being treated as smart by the teacher will lead Alex to feel smarter still.
“Because Alex wasn’t conscious of cheating, there’s no reason to question the performance evaluation or the social feedback.”
That means students may feel they are getting ahead in class, but actually they are falling into a feedback loop in which they fall further and further behind, according to Mr. Fremer of Caveon, the test-security firm. His firm was not part of the Harvard-Duke study.
“If the test scores misrepresent what kids know, [teachers] may have the wrong sense of where they need help,” he said.
Moreover, such self-deception can lead to a “death of a thousand cuts” for a student’s honesty, Mr. Stephens of the University of Connecticut said.
“Kids start to disengage [from] responsibility habitually; cheating in high school does lead to dishonesty in the workplace as an adult,” he said.
Overwhelmed, Unengaged?
Not only does one instance of cheating lead to another, but the school environment can make it easier for students to mentally justify their dishonesty, research shows. Studies by Mr. Stephens and others that show students are more likely to cheat when they are under pressure to get high grades, uncertain about their own ability, unengaged in the material, or some combination of the three. In addition, students are better able to justify cheating in classes in which they feel the teacher is unfair or does not attempt to engage them in learning.
Yet the entirety of the studies also suggests that making students more aware of the importance of academic integrity and learning, not just grades, can make them less likely to cheat.
In a previous study, Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke and a co-author of the Harvard-Duke study, found test-takers became less likely to cheat if they were reminded of a school honor code, or if they saw someone they considered an outsider cheating.
Ms. Chance and Mr. Fremer said teachers and administrators should try to reduce opportunities for students to cheat, but should also help them establish classwide and schoolwide codes for academic integrity, and then reinforce the importance of that code before every assignment.
“When it comes to recidivism, question your assumptions about motivation to inform your decisions about punishment,” Ms. Chance said. “Try out the assumption that kids cheat because they are stressed out about college, and afraid they aren’t smart enough.
“Think about helping cheaters find alternative means to get what they want,” she said, “so that they don’t react by cheating more or giving up.”
Vol. 30, Issue 26
Is this true? What harm do students do when they cheat? Why do students cheat? How can teachers prevent cheating?
Good News
I have stopped watching the news. I dislike that the only topics discussed are negative- flooding, tornadoes, death, killing, murders, rapes, abuse. You name a terrible event and the news will report it. I watch the weather on the computer, so I don't have to view the disturbing topics on the news broadcast. Why can't the news programmers have more that a two-minute segment on the scholar of the week or on someone paying it forward or doing good for others? The only good I have seen for the past week happened in another country- the wedding of William and Kate, but that is done with and now we see nothing. Even then, the broadcasters over analyze the subject and make predictions they have no business making. We see 25 minutes of negative and 2 minutes of positive. Why is that?
The Killing of Osama Bin Laden
Well, after 10 years, the US has finally managed to kill Osama. As an American, I am resigned to the fact that his death was necessary in order to exact vengeance for the 9-11 bombings and the killing of thousands of Americans then and in the last 10 years in the fight against Al Qaeda. The Christian in me finds the celebration and constant news footage a bit disturbing. After all, aren't Christians supposed to forgive and then let it go. He is dead and buried and the military is doing its job fighting the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why do we have to celebrate the death of a man that we should just forget? Wouldn't the constant news footage of Americans cheering Osama's death just stir up those who would retaliate his killing and cause them to take revenge on the Americans on foreign soil, or here on our soil? Why can't we just state that he is dead, drop the subject, and finally, finish the job in the Middle East and bring the troops home? What do you think?
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