Schools for Thought
The Peabody Literacy Lab
Computer-Based Measurement and Peer Tutoring
Imagine a typical urban American fourth-grade class of 25 students:
about one-half of the children live in poverty; five come from homes in
which English is not the primary language; only four students are reading
at or above grade level while eight of their classmates still struggle to
read at the first-grade level.
How can a single teacher design daily lesson plans to reach all of these
students and keep track of their varying progress?
Those are serious questions, and they're not the only pressures weighing
on the average American public school teacher. There's also the growing
expectation that each teacher's classroom curriculum - and every student's
level of achievement - will meet the widely touted national standards for
education now being developed for nearly every subject area and grade level.
That's a tall order.
As a result, schools across the country are calling out for new, more effective
ways to help students learn. The educational researchers at Vanderbilt's
Peabody College are answering that call with a wide variety of curriculum
development projects designed to meet the needs of America's ever more diverse
and demanding public school classrooms.
"One of our biggest challenges is to develop curriculum that's really
going to help students learn and, at the same time, that aligns with local,
state, and national standards," said Susan Goldman, professor of psychology
and human development and co-director of Peabody's Learning Technology Center
(LTC).
"The current thinking is that there should be a set of things that
every child is expected to know by the end of a unit or a school year. What
we believe is that there are multiple ways for children to learn those things.
One of the goals of the units we've been developing is to provide multiple
ways for children with different backgrounds and ability levels to learn;
multiple ways for them to both demonstrate their strengths and get help
in the areas where they need it.
"A second challenge," Goldman said, "is developing truly
effective assessment tools so that teachers can have a way to determine
what each student understands and doesn't understand, and as a result, what
they need to teach and how."
The many curriculum projects under way at Peabody are in various stages
of development. Some are still in the basic research stage; others are being
field tested, refined and expanded; others have already begun to yield fully
tested, commercially available curriculum packages that are in use in classrooms
around the country.
While all of these projects differ in significant ways, they share a common
goal: to provide schools with an approach to teaching that helps educators
help all students reach their fullest educational potential. The following
is a look at several of these curriculum development projects and how they
are pursuing that goal.
Schools for Thought
How do you prepare a highly diverse group of students for the technologically
sophisticated world of the 21st century? Metro Nashville Public Schools
and a team of researchers at Vanderbilt University are collaborating on
a project, Schools for Thought, designed to address this question.
After three years of intensive work with Schools for Thought researchers,
the Nashville school system was awarded a $5.1 million Technology Innovation
Challenge Grant from the U.S. Department of Education in October. The five-year
grant - one of only 24 awarded last year - will allow Nashville and Vanderbilt
to extend the Schools for Thought concept, currently in 32 Metro classrooms,
into more than 120 classrooms by 2001.
(Continued below after photo's)
RIGHT: Carter Lawrence Middle School Teacher
Kerry Sinclair discusses with two fifth-graders a possible solution to the
problem posed in one of the installments of "The Adventures of Jasper
Woodbury." The videodisc series, developed at Peabody College's Learning
Technology Center, presents real-life situations to help students develop
problem-solving skills. The series is part of the Metro Nashville Public
Schools' Schools for Thought project with Vanderbilt.
ABOVE: Fifth-graders at Carter Lawrence Middle School
prepare their plan for rescuing an injured eagle - the problem presented
in an episode of "The Adventures of Jasper Woodbury." The videodisc
series, developed at Peabody College's Learning Technology Center, is part
of the Metro Nashville Public Schools' Schools for Thought project with
Vanderbilt.
Working in close collaboration with dozens of Nashville classroom teachers,
Schools for Thought researchers have created several integrated units, each
using a variety of cutting-edge educational technologies and each centering
on an exciting, real-life mission. For example, in one unit, students must
plan a feasible manned space flight to Mars, taking into account such factors
as atmospheric conditions and technological advances. In another unit, the
students develop ways to preserve diverse species and habitats.
"The notion behind this approach is to provide a common experience
for students of diverse backgrounds and ability levels, a rich shared experience
that serves as a starting point and as motivation for working together to
solve a problem," said Nancy Vye, assistant co-director of the LTC
and a researcher with Schools for Thought, which is headed by Goldman, John
Bransford and Peabody Dean James Pellegrino.
"What's more," Vye said, "these problems are multi-faceted.
They don't have just one right answer. That means there are many points
of entry for students of different ability levels."
"You expect students to have diverse capabilities and life experiences,"
said Teresa Secules, a senior research associate at the LTC and a member
of the Schools for Thought team. "And the classroom needs to capitalize
on that rather than penalize children for that."
The approach works; Schools for Thought classrooms fairly buzz with the
excitement of children learning. On one day, students might be working on
an episode from Vanderbilt's Adventures of Jasper Woodbury videodisc series,
a multimedia program that helps students learn about and solve complex math
problems in real-life situations - rather than through the traditional lecture-and-drill
format. In each episode, the hero, Jasper, and his friends encounter a problem,
such as how to rescue a wounded eagle stranded in the wilderness. After
watching and reviewing the video, students, working in teams, must help
Jasper solve his problem. In the case of the stranded eagle, they must plan
an air rescue of the bird, a challenge requiring that they solve a variety
of real-life problems involving many interrelated mathematical sub-problems.
On another day, students might be using CSILE, a computer communications
system developed at Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
to record and reflect on their research about manned space flight.
On yet another day, you might find students involved in team research using
Community of Learners, an approach to scientific inquiry developed at the
University of California at Berkeley, to determine what they need to find
out about spacecraft life support systems in order to plan a mission to
Mars.
What about the students who need help on certain basic skills, the ones
who have difficulties reading or taking notes, or those struggling with
basic computation?
For these students, the Schools for Thought researchers are developing a
variety of different software tools offering kids individual practice on
specific academic skills. Some of the software also evaluates a child's
answers to the questions posed; if the answer is wrong, it gives the student
feedback about why it's wrong. These software tools are being developed
by related projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office
of Education, Research and Improvement and the National Science Foundation.
This information helps the teacher as well as the student, Vye said. That's
because such software, along with other technology available to Schools
for Thought teachers allows them to monitor what each child is learning
and where each needs help.
"There are ways you can make students' thinking visible just by a well-crafted
whole-class discussion," Vye said. "But that information is ephemeral,
it's quickly gone. And in a discussion, you don't always hear from every
child. We've tried to create tools that help teachers collect, store and
analyze that information and that also help children better understand what
they're learning."
"It's very different from the basic teach, test, move on model that
many traditional teachers use," Secules said. "We're asking teachers
to ask themselves, 'What are the children learning? And if they're not learning,
what's getting in the way? And what do I need to do to help them get beyond
that obstacle?'"
The Peabody Literacy Lab
Another approach to the challenge of curriculum development is the Peabody
Literacy Lab, a project headed by Ted Hasselbring, professor of special
education and co-director of the LTC. The Literacy Lab, a completely computer-based
program, uses a variety of technologies to help middle school special education
students improve their ability to read and write while teaching them vital
computer and video skills.
The program works and is used in 120 classrooms for special education and
at-risk students in Orange County, Florida. Hasselbring's research team
recently signed an agreement with curriculum publishing giant Scholastic
to make the program commercially available nationwide.
An important feature of the program is the anchored instruction approach
where everything students do is organized around a particular topic or theme.
The project currently offers units on topics ranging from the civil rights
movement to the history of the hamburger.
Students begin each lesson by viewing a video clip relative to the unit
theme. That's followed by a written passage that relates to the video. As
the student reads, the computer tests the student's mastery of the text
on a word-by-word basis. Each time the student has trouble with a word,
the computer supplies instructions specially geared to the particular problem
the student is having. For example, the computer might provide help in deciphering
the word. Or, for a student who can read but not understand a word or phrase,
it might offer information about meaning and context.
Hasselbring explained the reason this process works so well: "When
skilled readers read a text, such as a novel, they create what's called
a mental model. They actually paint an ongoing and very vivid picture of
what they're reading in their mind. These kids have great difficulty doing
this. By working with the video, we can provide them with the basis for
a mental model, and then, once they start reading the text, we can work
with them at the word level too."
As students learn more about their topic, they are introduced to a variety
of technologies and challenged to research and create a multimedia presentation
on one aspect of the subject they are studying.
"One of my favorite projects was done by a seventh-grader who was studying
the civil rights movement," Hasselbring said. "She researched
voting rights, especially the unfair reading tests that African-Americans
were forced to take before they could vote. Her presentation was called,
'Vote, If You're Not Black.' "
Hasselbring said this "reading to learn" component of the project
is based on research that shows people learn best when they can construct
their own knowledge of a topic rather than simply being told about it. In
other words, the multimedia presentations give students an authentic reason
to search out information and put it together in a meaningful way, a process
that results in deeper learning than traditional lecture and textbook instruction
could provide.
The Peabody Literacy Lab is particularly helpful for teachers of special
education students and students who are at risk for failure.
In such settings, Hasselbring said, teachers are often dealing with a large
number of students who have a wide variety of serious learning difficulties.
The need to individualize instruction is so great that teachers are often
overwhelmed. The Literacy Project computer takes over some of the minute-to-minute
instructional tasks traditionally performed by the teacher, an arrangement
that provides ongoing, personalized instruction to many more students than
would be possible in a traditional classroom.
At first glance, this might sound like a system designed to make teachers
obsolete. Nothing could be further from the truth, Hasselbring said.
"The classrooms where this works the best are the ones where there's
a teacher who really cares and who works closely with the students. In fact
in classrooms where that's not the case, we don't see the kind of gains
that occur in classrooms with truly dedicated teachers."
Those gains are impressive. "We've collected data that show that when
schools use this program, it has a clear effect on the students," Hasselbring
said. "Attendance goes up and grades go up, which indicates to us that
things are changing in the students' lives. And that's our goal, to find
some way for these kids to break out of the failure cycle, so that they
can have success once they're out in the world."
Computer-Based Measurement and Peer Tutoring
Another answer to the question of how a single teacher can tailor instruction
to fit the diverse needs of a classroom full of children can be found in
the work of Lynn and Doug Fuchs, both professors of special education at
Vanderbilt. The husband-and-wife research team has combined two innovative
techniques - computer-based measurement (CBM) and peer tutoring - to help
teachers assess each student's progress and then personalize instruction
to meet their students' individual needs.
The CBM component of their work grew out of concerns that tracking a child's
daily progress in school was nearly impossible.
"In this country if you want to know how many computers were sold at
Circuit City last week, you can find out in an instant," Lynn Fuchs
said with a laugh. "But if you want to know how your child is doing
in math this month, you're out of luck. You have to wait for achievement
test results. The original idea was to create a measurement system that
would provide ongoing information about a student's progress in reading
and math."
In CBM classrooms, students use computers to take a different mini-test
each week. The tests are designed to evaluate each student's progress toward
the year-end goals of the Tennessee State Curriculum in reading and math.
Once a student completes a test, the computer immediately displays the test
results in a graph that the student can read to monitor his or her performance
over time. The goal isn't to make a perfect score, it's to beat your best
and to make progress throughout the school year.
"We've found that students who get this very specific feedback about
how they're learning, rather than how they compare to the rest of the class,
are more purposeful and goal-setting," Lynn Fuchs said. "And we
have evidence that shows that they are more ambitious in the goals that
they set than they might be otherwise."
Just as important, each child's test data is saved for the teacher, who
can quickly note every student's successes and problem areas. "The
assessment information is critical to teachers," Lynn Fuchs said. "It
supplies the necessary data for teachers so they can differentiate the instruction
they provide to each student."
Of course there's one problem with planning personalized instruction for
each student in a classroom of 25 or 30 children: there aren't 25 or 30
personalized teachers to provide it. That's where peer tutoring - known
by the acronym PALS (for Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies) - comes in.
"Usually in schools, there's a sort of one-size-fits-all approach,
which teachers usually aren't very happy with but don't know what to do
about," said Doug Fuchs. "The purpose of PALS, both in reading
and math, is to provide teachers with a way of giving every student practice
at skills at their own developmental level. It's a way to individualize
practice."
In a PALS classroom, students are formed into pairs and carefully trained
to serve as tutors to each other, an elegant solution to the need for dozens
of personalized teachers. The pairs of students work together in structured
30-minute sessions at least three times a week as part of their regular
math and reading instruction. In PALS reading, each pair reads from a text
that suits the reading level of the lower-achieving student. In PALS math,
the students use problem sheets chosen by the computer to fit their current
learning needs.
As each PALS session begins, one student in every pair is designated as
the coach, the other as the player. The coaches use a prepared script to
talk their players through a series of math or reading activities. When
a problem arises, students have been trained to use a repertoire of strategies
to solve it on their own before calling the teacher. Once the players have
finished their work, the two students switch roles. That way, every student
gets to act as both coach and player.
The Fuchs have worked in collaboration with teachers and schools in Nashville
and across the country to develop and refine PALS and CBM and the results
have been more than encouraging. Repeated studies have shown that in classrooms
using these programs students make greater progress in reading and math
than their counterparts in similar classrooms where the programs are not
in use. This is true for all students - including students with learning
disabilities, low-performing students without disabilities, average-achieving
students, and high-achieving students - a sure sign that the goal of creating
a curriculum that serves the diverse needs of the American classroom has
been met.
Beth Monin
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Document updated May 30, 1997