VirtEd

Zero to Eight: How Are Youngest Children Are Using Media

Commonsensemedia.org has released the results of its survey "Zero to Eight: Children's Media Use in America".

Among its key findings and links to the details;

Download the full report

Key Finding 1: Young Children Use Digital Media Frequently

Key Finding 2: Substantial Digital Divide

Key Finding 3: Kids Under 2 Spend Most Time Watching TV

Key FInding 4: TV Dominates Young Child Media Time

Key Finding 5: Broadcast TV Most Accessible

Key Finding 6: Demographic DIfferences in Media Use

Key Finding 7: Media Multitasking

MATH DISABILITY LINKED TO PROBLEM RELATING QUANTITIES TO NUMERALS

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 
NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH NIH News 
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) <http://www.nichd.nih.gov/>
For Immediate Release: Monday, October 24, 2011

CONTACT: Robert Bock or Marianne Glass Miller, 301-496-5133, <e-mail:bockr@mail.nih.gov>

MATH DISABILITY LINKED TO PROBLEM RELATING QUANTITIES TO NUMERALS
NIH-funded study also finds math disabled students fail to catch up to classmates

Children who start elementary school with difficulty associating small exact quantities of items with the printed numerals that represent those quantities are more likely to develop a math-related learning disability than are their peers, according to a study supported by the National Institutes of Health.

The children in the study who appeared to have difficulty grasping the fundamental concept of exact numerical quantities-- that the printed numeral 3, for example, represents three dots on a page-- went on to be diagnosed with math learning disability by fifth grade.

Other early factors correlated with a math learning disability were difficulty recalling answers to single-digit addition problems, distractibility in class, and difficulty understanding that more complex math problems can be broken down into smaller problems that can be solved individually.

Although the math learning disabled children did make limited progress in subsequent grades, by fifth grade they had not caught up to their typically achieving peers in the ability to recall number facts or in their ease of adding sets of dots and numerals together.  The authors note that the math disabled students did catch up in other areas, such as the use of counting to solve problems.  

The study was not designed to prove cause and effect, so the researchers do not know whether the factors they identified caused the children's math learning disability or were linked to other, unidentified factors.

"The search for factors underlying difficulty learning mathematics is extremely important," said Kathy Mann Koepke, Ph.D., of NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which funded the study.  "Once we identify such factors, the hope is that we can modify them through appropriate teaching methods to help people who have difficulty learning and using math."

Dr. Mann Koepke directs the NICHD's Mathematics and Science Cognition and Learning Development and Disorders program.

"Math skills are important for higher education and for entry into many higher paying technical fields," she said.  "Math skills have many health implications.  For example, many American adults lack even the basic math skills necessary to estimate the appropriate number of calories in their diets or to calculate the time intervals at which to take their medications."

The study was conducted by Mary K. Hoard, Ph.D., Lara Nugent, Drew H. Bailey and David C. Geary, Ph.D., all of the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Their findings appear in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

The researchers' analysis was based on a battery of tests they gave one to three times each year to 177 students at 12 Columbia, Mo., public schools.  The testing process took place from kindergarten through fifth grade.  The researchers measured several factors: 

-- math achievement 
-- reading ability
-- intelligence and general cognitive ability
-- paying attention in class
-- working memory, the ability to hold one idea or concept in mind while switching between tasks
-- an understanding of numbers and their relation to each other
-- understanding of the number line
-- aptitude for solving simple and complex addition problems

The researchers classified the students into three groups based on their early achievement and the subsequent progress they made in math from kindergarten to fifth grade.  One group-referred to as typically achieving students-had average scores in kindergarten and developed their skills at an average rate during their early school years (132 students).  Low-achieving students had an average score in kindergarten and made inconsistent and slow progress (29 students). Students with a low initial score and consistently slow progress were described as learning disabled with regard to math (16 students).

After their analysis, the researchers found that differences between groups in kindergarten scores were correlated with the result of one test in particular.  For this test, students were asked to look at a series of rectangles, resembling dominoes, on a computer screen. Each domino was each divided into two or three areas; some areas contained one to nine dots, and others a written numeral.  Students were asked to quickly circle any dominos in which the number of dots, together with the numeral, matched the target number and to not circle those that did not match. 

The researchers found that the difference in scores from this test was linked to the overall gap in math scores between typically achieving and math learning disabled groups.

"Our findings suggest that children who generally struggle with math-the low achievers-may have a poor sense of numbers, but they can narrow the achievement gap in part because most of them can memorize new math facts and, thus, learn some aspects of math as quickly as their typically achieving peers," said Dr. Geary.

Dr. Geary added that, in contrast to the low achievers, students with a math learning disability not only have a poor concept of numbers, but also have difficulty memorizing math facts.

Clarifying the factors that contribute to a math learning disability may lead to the development of teaching methods that help students overcome difficulties with number concepts and skills, Dr. Mann-Koepke said. It is important to identify potential difficulties early, when chances for successfully overcoming them are greatest.

Other NICHD-funded investigators have also identified basic risk factors for math learning disability.  These researchers have shown that math skills are linked to the approximate number system, a person's intuitive ability to estimate quantities or identify the approximate number in a set. One study of grade school children showed that this ability is impaired in children with a math learning disability.  A related study showed that difficulty with estimating such quantities is apparent in children as young as 3 and is correlated with later poor math performance in school.  Researchers do not yet know if the ability to distinguish between small, exact quantities is related to the approximate number system.

About the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD): The NICHD sponsors research on development, before and after birth; maternal, child, and family health; reproductive biology and population issues; and medical rehabilitation.  For more information, visit the Institute's website at <http://www.nichd.nih.gov/>. 

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit <www.nih.gov>.

Girls STEM-ing the Tide

The AP reports that as girls earn the majority of undergraduate and graduate degrees, they are also making inroads in the last frontier, STEM majors.

Will this trump previously believed truisms about gender and subject abilities?

When it comes to the STEM fields, women have been most successful in medicine and biology - and least successful in engineering, math and computer science.

But experts hope that, too, will change. 

A recent report from the American Association of University Women notes that, 30 years ago, the ratio of seventh- and eighth-grade boys who scored more than 700 on the SAT math exam, compared with girls, was 13 to 1. Now it's 3 to 1.

 

Is Tech An Educational Necessity? Not In One Silicon Valley School

The New York Times reports on the Waldorf School in Silicon Valley where three quarters of the students' parents work in tech - and where there are no tech devices or computers in the classrooms.  Tech use isn't encouraged until middle school.

What do these parents know from the inside that others on the outside do not?  This adds to the debate about what and when technology is appropriate in the K-12 level.  

This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.

 

Districts Deal With (BYOT) "Bring Your Owm Tech"

One of the real conundrums schools have to deal with is student owned technologies place in the instructional setting.  While there are clear benefits to being indivdually wired, it can also be disruptive, allow students to graze at inappropriate sites and opens new opportunities for cheating.  

Districts wading into the “bring-your-own-technology,” or BYOT, waters are wrangling with which issues should be tackled through districtwide policy, and which should fall under school-level procedural codes. In the process, they’re trying to leave room to solve unanswered legal questions about Internet security and privacy.

 

 

Digital Badges To Measure Students 21st Century Skills: Can Badge Creation Keep Up With The Pace of Technical Innovation?

The MacArthur Foundation hoping to assess students' 21st century skills with a new competition that calls on participants to create what is known as a “digital badge.”

Will this effort be able to keep up with the break neck page of technical innovation

Digital badges and the digital badge system would, advocates say, help define the skills and knowledge students pick up in an informal way, such as through internships, online courses, open courseware, competitions, and much more.

Mozilla, which is partnering with the MacArthur Foundation to announce the $2 million Digital Media and Learning Competition, said the badge system “will let you gather badges from any site on the internet, combining them into a story about what you know and what you’ve achieved. … This sort of badge collection may eventually become a central part of [one's] online reputation, helping you get a job, find collaborators, and build prestige.”

 

Colleges Powering Up Natural Gas Programs

Colleges are powering up programs in natural gas as this area has boomed nationally.  

Vast stores of natural gas in the Marcellus and Utica shales running under Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia have set off a rush to grab leases and secure permits to drill using the extraction technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

 

Infusion of Cash & Students from India: Can We Keep Them Here?

The New York Times reports that bright students from India and their cash are being welcomed at US universities as there aren't enough quality schools in India to absorb them.  

With fewer donations and endowments being given to higher education institutions, support from emerging economies is appreciated.  Will the US entice the best and the brightest to stay here and become citizens after this investment in their futures?

American universities and colleges have been more than happy to pick up the slack. Faced with shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the United States and growing economic hardship among American families, they have stepped up their efforts to woo Indian students thousands of miles away.

Representatives from many of the Ivy League institutions have begun making trips to India to recruit students and explore partnerships with Indian schools. Some have set up offices in India, partly aimed at attracting a wider base of students. The State Department held a United States-India higher education summit meeting on Thursday at Georgetown University to promote the partnership between the countries.

 

 

 

More Online Course, More Financial Aid Fraud

The New York Times on Friday reports that as more online courses proliferate, more financial aid fraud has followed.  

This isn't a surprise as the federal money pot is an attractive and lucrative source for "waste, fraud and abuse with this the latest scam involving many iterations.

With the huge expansion of online college courses, financial aid scams have become a serious problem: as of Aug. 1, the inspector general had opened 100 investigations into distance-education fraud involving thousands of suspects; such crimes now make up about 17 percent of the agency’s open cases, and investigators are working on 49 new complaints, scrambling to keep up. “Because of the sheer volume of referrals, finite resources and other external limitations,” the report said, “we cannot investigate all of the referrals we receive concerning distance-education fraud rings.”

 

 

Speech Therapy Goes Online

Speech therapy is going online as computers and the web are able to deliver audio content in a better fashion.  Once again, this isn't to replace the professionals but to complement them.  It also allows more opportunities for practice for students.  

The use of online speech therapy is growing, said Janet Brown, the director of health-care services in speech-language pathology for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, or ASHA, based in Rockville, Md. The organization endorses online or teletherapy as long as the quality of the service is the same as for in-person therapy, said Deborah Dixon, the director of school services for ASHA.

Schools need to provide the right equipment, including computers with high-speed Internet access and webcams, and, in some cases, an aide or parent might have to supervise while the child is working with a therapist.