Author Archives: Tom Miles

Kids With ADHD Can Train Their Brains, Study Finds

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Because there’s so much in the media about ADHD and medication and behavior and side effects, I thought many would find this article interesting.

Kids With ADHD Can Train Their Brains, Study Finds

BY LINDA CARROLL
Kids with ADHD may be able to learn better focus through a computer game that trains the brain to pay attention, a new study suggests.

The game was part of a neurofeedback system that used bicycle helmets wired to measure brain waves and gave immediate feedback when kids were paying attention, researchers reported Monday in Pediatrics.

Giving kids feedback on what their brains are doing is “like turning on a light switch,” said Dr. Naomi Steiner, the study’s lead author and a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center. “Kids said ‘Oh, this is what people mean when they tell me to pay attention.'”

To test the system, Steiner and her colleagues randomly assigned 104 Boston area elementary school children to one of three groups: no treatment, 40 half-hour sessions of neurofeedback or 40 sessions of cognitive therapy.

The kids getting neurofeedback wore standard bicycle helmets fitted with brain wave sensors while they performed a variety of exercises on the computer. In one exercise, kids were told to focus on a cartoon dolphin.

When people pay attention, theta wave activity goes down while beta waves increase, Steiner explained. If the kids’ brains showed they were paying attention, the dolphin would dive to the bottom of the sea.

Parents’ reports on ADHD symptoms six months later showed a lasting improvement in kids who had done neurofeedback. Perhaps more telling, kids in the other two groups needed an increase in medication after six months, while those in the neurofeedback group did not, said Dr. Anthony Rostain, an expert unaffiliated with the new study and a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It is good news,” Rostain said. “But the results were modest. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s not going to replace medication.”

One major weakness of the new study is that it depended on parental observations, said Sandra Loo, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCLA. It’s possible that some of what the researchers are seeing is a placebo effect, Loo said.

I Got Schooled – Practice #5 – More Time in School

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Here is the final I Got Schooled  practice #5 – More Time in School

M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has written a book (I Got Schooled)  describing how – and how not –  to close the education gap in the U.S. It should be very supportive in the current conversation and climate regarding what’s wrong with – and how to fix – New Mexico education.

For five years through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan studied what is succeeding in closing the education gap — that depended only on practices inside the classroom itself and that were scalable.

He discovered closing the achievement gap depended on five practices and couldn’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself.

These five practices must be implemented together to have any substantive effect:

•            Effective teachers – dropping poor; hiring good; why it’s important; how to do it

•            Leadership – how it’s important; what it looks like; how to do it

•            Feedback – critical: frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability

•            Smaller (high) schools –part of the “system” that turbocharges the other practices

•            More time in school – summers matter – children of low income and of color fall behind a month every summer; by the time they reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up

Covered: successful schools, programs, clinical studies, and data and statistics, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.

The study also found four popular, expensive practices contribute little to closing the education gap:

•            Small classroom sizes

•            Master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers

•            Paying teachers like doctors

•            Funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil

MORE TIME IN SCHOOL

  • More time in school is needed to overcome the deficiencies inherent in low-income, inner-city family environments
  • Upper-income families use an average of 2,153 words every hour; middle-income families use 1,251; welfare families use 616
  • Average words per year for upper-income are 11.2 million; middle-income families 6.5 million; welfare families 3.2 million words
  • By age four that is a gap of some 30 million words
  • The number of words a four-year-old can understand and speak relates directly to the number of words they have heard
  • By the time poorer kids reach third grade, they are already so far behind it is virtually impossible to catch up
  • Early intervention (preschool) with significant hours of exposure closes the gap
  • Consistency and good quality here are critical
  • Our natural tendencies are to blame failures of others on something flawed inside them, and while attributing our successes to merit and our failures on chance
  • American families that tend to obsess about pre-K education are the ones that need it least
  • The children who would most benefit from preschools are the least likely to be enrolled in them
  • Even then, generally, preschool effects disappear nearly completely by the third year after the program
  • Lower-income and African-American kids stay more or less even with upper-income, white suburban classmates – so long as school was in session
  • They fell behind a month or more every summer!
  • Summer matters far more than any has thought
  • Student test scores change powerfully by what happens between June and September
  • Lower-income student families cannot compensate for middle- and upper-income families’ ability to continue to enrich their children’s experiences over the summer
  • Current standard in most places is 180 days of school a year, each one between six and seven hours long
  • Before the Civil War, Philadelphia’s schools were in session more than 250 days a year; New York’s were open all year except for a two-week break in August
  • While more classroom hours is a serious part of closing the gap, five hundred additional low-quality hours taught by a teaching staff full of below-average instructors who are neither observed regularly by their principals nor given the quantitative and qualitative feedback they need is a waste
  • Keep kids in school longer during the year and you won’t need superheroes to close the gap. Most teachers can do the job just fine
  • And this practice is scalable

I Got Schooled – Practice #4 – Smaller schools

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Here is I Got Schooled  practice #4 – Smaller schools

M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has written this book to describe how, and how not, to close the education gap in the U.S. It should be very supportive in the current conversation and climate regarding what’s wrong with, and how to fix, New Mexico education.

For five years through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan studied what is succeeding in closing the education gap — that depended only on practices inside the classroom itself and that were scalable.

He discovered closing the achievement gap depended on five practices and couldn’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself.

These five practices must be implemented together to have any substantive effect:

•            Effective teachers – dropping poor; hiring good; why it’s important; how to do it

•            Leadership – how it’s important; what it looks like; how to do it

•            Feedback – critical: frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability

•            Smaller (high) schools –part of the “system” that turbocharges the other practices

•            More time in school – summers matter – children of low income and of color fall behind a month every summer; by the time they reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up

Covered: successful schools, programs, clinical studies, and data and statistics, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.

The study also found four popular, expensive practices contribute little to closing the education gap:

•            Small classroom sizes

•            Master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers

•            Paying teachers like doctors

•            Funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil

SMALLER SCHOOLS

  • Again, small size is only one part of the “system”
  • Smaller size turbocharges each of the other practices
  • The current school size debate is almost entirely focused on high schools, grades 9 through 12
  • National average elementary school size is 451 students; middle schools average 575; high school averages are 900 to 4,000 students
  • In the 1920s, the ‘high school movement’ promoted ‘comprehensive high schools’ that accepted everybody and required them to take mostly the same coursework
  • Before that time, exam requirements meant only 20 percent of kids attended high school and the rest were expected to go to work; even then, only half of the students graduated
  • Vocation training began to be thought of as a ‘less than’ education endeavor
  • This helped white suburban families a lot more than nonwhite urban ones
  • Weekly exam results for a thousand high school students’ produces an overwhelming amount of data which must/should then be analyzed, evaluated, and returned to instructors as meaningful, useable feedback
  • School size is a key part of any gap-closing strategy
  • It’s a lot easier to find principals who can effectively run schools with four hundred to six hundred kids (scalability and sustainability)
  • Attendance, graduation rates, and attitude toward learning rise as school populations fall – violence rates decline
  • Smaller schools are an environment in which other gap-closing practices can flourish
  • Implementation over some period of time, grade-by-grade allows teachers and faculty to acclimatize to the newness
  • And this practice is scalable

Only $1.50-per-day more for a healthy diet! Really!

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This seemed like a timely and useful article – Tom

“If you want to eat a more healthful diet, you’re going to have to shell out more cash, right? (After all, Whole Foods didn’t get the nickname “Whole Paycheck” for nothing.)

But until recently, that widely held bit of conventional wisdom hadn’t really been assessed in a rigorous, systematic way, says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

So he and his colleagues decided to pore over 27 studies from 10 different developed countries that looked at the retail prices of food grouped by healthfulness. Across these countries, it turns out, the cost difference between eating a healthful and unhealthful diet was pretty much the same: about $1.50 per day. And that price gap held true when they focused their research just on U.S. food prices, the researchers found in their meta-analysis of these studies.

“I think $1.50 a day is probably much less than some people expected,” Mozaffarian tells The Salt, “but it’s also a real barrier for some low-income families,” for whom it would translate to about an extra $45 a month or $550 a year.

Still, from a policy perspective, he argues, $1.50 a day is chump change. “That’s the cost of a cup of coffee,” he says. “It’s trivial compared to the cost of heart disease or diabetes, which is hundreds of billions of dollars” — both in terms of health care costs and lost productivity.”

Read the whole article  here.

I Got Schooled – Practice #3 – Feedback

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So, here is Practice #3 – Feedback that is timely, consistent and teacher/principal-usable

M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has written a book (I Got Schooled) describing how, and how not, to close the education gap in the U.S. It should be very supportive in the current conversation and climate regarding what’s wrong with, and how to fix, New Mexico education.

For five years through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan studied what is succeeding in closing the education gap — that depended only on practices inside the classroom itself and that were scalable.

He discovered closing the achievement gap depended on five practices and couldn’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself.

These five practices must be implemented together to have any substantive effect:

•            Effective teachers – dropping poor; hiring good; why it’s important; how to do it

•            Leadership – how it’s important; what it looks like; how to do it

•            Feedback – critical: frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability

•            Smaller (high) schools –part of the “system” that turbocharges the other practices

•            More time in school – summers matter – children of low income and of color fall behind a month every summer; by the time they reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up

Covered: successful schools, programs, clinical studies, and data and statistics, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.

The study also found four popular, expensive practices contribute little to closing the education gap:

•            Small classroom sizes

•            Master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers

•            Paying teachers like doctors

•            Funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil

FEEDBACK

  • Some way is needed to improve the performance of teachers that are retained
  • To increase the value of existing teachers, some way to measure that performance will be needed
  • Value Added Method (VAM – in its ideal form) compares students’ actual progress to predicted progress, and assumes that differences are due to the instruction they received
  • While it is true, “kids can’t be reduced to a test score,” subjective grading is even worse; a flexible yardstick may not have created the achievement gap, but definitely perpetuated it
  • Measuring progress in literacy or math requires more than just observing reading or math level at age seven. It needs to include:
    • Family income
    • Parents’ educational background
    • Geographic location
    • Inner city versus suburbs
    • Past performance by other kids in same school
    • Past performance by the individual student
    • That is to say, some form of VAM
  • VAM works generally quite well so long as
    • good data are available, and
    • when it’s used to measure GROWTH rather than ACHIEVEMENT
    • important: these two measures are easily and frequently confused
  • The most effective schools are focused on GROWTH; based on their scores in the first grade, did our eighth-graders do better than predicted
  • An even more valuable way to use VAM data is for improving teachers and improving instruction; make the practice of teaching data-driven
  • Figure out the reasons for failure and success
  • A successful organization is one that goes through cycles of planning, doing, studying, and acting, over and over again, i.e., continuous Improvement
  • End-of-year tests tell a school whether it is doing its job, but not how to do it better
  • Value-added data adds value only when someone actually uses it
  • To work, data-based instruction can’t be just voluntary
  • Teachers and principals opting out of the feed-back loop system destroy the possibility of positive results
  • Data is collected everywhere, but no one has taught teachers and principals how to analyze, interpret, and use the data that are being collecting
  • Teachers at high-achieving schools receive some kind of feedback from classroom visits and student achievement between 16 and 13 times a semester
  • High-achieving schools make 4 interim assessments (tests) every semester in math and language arts
  • High-achieving schools have more strategies for using data to customize instruction for different students, i.e., different data-driven ways to create individualized lesson plans
  • The frequency of this feedback is critical
  • The effect size for employing effective feedback is twice as large as the effect size for reducing class size
  • The effect size for employing effective feedback is even larger for the estimated effect-size from replacing the lowest-performing 8 percent of teachers with average ones
  • Feedback and consistency are also important for empowering students
  • Feedback must be meticulous, frequent, and mandatory
  • Feedback must be produced in a form that is usable by teachers and principals
  • Keep realistic the number of teachers that every principal is responsible for; maybe schools need to be smaller
  • And this practice is scalable

The Heckman Equation – economic development and education

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This article in Businessweek January 20-26, 2013 is a wider public distribution of the concept, problem, and solution early child education speaks to that Governor Martinez spoke of in her State of the State address today. Heckman’s Equation brings hard, observable data into the realms of making public policy.

James Heckman, is a PhD economist at the University of Chicago and views education for 3- and 4-year olds as fix to a current serious market failure.  In terms of economic development, early child education is a hard-nosed investment that pays off in lower social welfare costs, lower teen pregnancy rates, decreased crime rates, and increased tax revenue, as opposed to  spending on prisons, health and adolescent special education remediation.

Through the Heckman Equation, he found that an initial investment in free instruction of $17,758 per child per year in 2006 dollars, yielded between $60 and $300  return on investment (ROI) in state and federal welfare monies, increased tax revenues, and, most significantly, savings in police and court costs. As an economist, he finds this is  a 7% to 10% annual ROI.

So, not only did this turn out to not be a cost, it more than paid for itself in annual ROI in improved human capital to business and society, he also found it consistently beat historical ROI on equity (the stock markets) of around 5.8%.

The data further show that the earlier a child gets help, the better the results continue to be through each stage of education. Literally, the greatest ROI or ‘bang for the buck’ exists in early intervention – early child education, and this effective ROI reduces throughout adolescence.

A big problem arises when kids ought to be in early education programs which most young parents can’t afford. Heckman says, “The accident of birth is a huge, huge imperfection in the (economic) market.”

The good news is, and data show, this is overcome-able through targeted early child education and it appears to be scalable.

As an aside, in a 2011 Heckman lecture, he points out that cognitive testing stressed by NCLB and Race to the Top, only speaks to one dimension of a multidimensional system that includes, at least: integrity, socio-emotional skills, character, collaboration, grit. Yet data strongly indicates these untested characteristics may account for the largest share of human development, effectiveness in life, and contribution to the economy and society. These are the “soft” skills that are so widely reported today to be both in short supply and increasing demand.

Beyond interesting, the data also show these “soft” skills even affect scores on cognitive tests!

Just for fun – Carl Jung on history

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There are ongoing, and often heated, conversations regarding New Mexico education, curriculums, strengths and weaknesses. It feels like this quote from Carl Jung on history presents an interesting context for these deliberations – what is wanted and needed, who are the important individual players, what is the nature of the epoch we are inevitably making?

“The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.  We make our own epoch.”

Tom