Latest news with #Zearn
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Yahoo
Math Study Shows Difficulty in Motivating Teachers to Change Behaviors
Like an online retailer trying to woo a customer back by offering a 10% discount on the boots they've been eyeing, education researcher Angela Duckworth wanted to understand how to incentivize teachers to log in regularly to an online math platform that aims to help them improve their students' academic performance. 'Today is perfect for checking your Pace Report!' 'Keep Zearning!' 'By opening this email, you've earned another 100 digital raffle tickets in the Zearn Math Giveaway!' Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter In partnership with Zearn Math, a nonprofit online math instruction platform used by roughly 25% of U.S. elementary school students, Duckworth and a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Behavior Change for Good Initiative launched a megastudy that peppered 140,000 teachers with different types of email prompts to log into the platform's dashboard each week and check their students' progress. Behavioral scientists like Duckworth, who popularized the 'power of grit' about a decade ago, spend a lot of time trying to pinpoint what, exactly, it is that prompts an individual to sign a form, become an organ donor or click an ad that promises a secure and safe retirement now. 'In the case of education there's the idea of nudging the students directly,' Duckworth said. 'But there's also the idea that's less commonly studied, which is, what do you do to nudge the teachers, who are not in complete charge, but have a lot of authority about what is going to happen in the classroom that day? It was clear to us that if we could get the students onto the Zearn platform that their learning would progress. But are they actually going to log in?' To that end, the team developed 15 different types of intervention emails featuring things like planning prompts, teaching tips, learning goals, digital swag and celebrity endorsements. The goal was to change behavior without mandates, bans or substantial financial incentives — though teachers were enrolled in a giveaway and earned digital raffle tickets every time they opened an email, increasing their chances of winning such prizes as autographed children's books, stickers and gift cards. The researchers then compared the average number of lessons the teachers' students completed on the Zearn Math platform over four weeks to a control group using Zearn that received only a simple weekly email. Related So did it work? Did the emails prompt teachers to log in more regularly? And if so, did the number of lessons their students completed increase? To some degree, yes, it did work. But not at all to the extent that Duckworth and researchers had anticipated. The best-performing intervention, which encouraged teachers to log into Zearn Math for an updated report on how their students were doing that week, produced a 5% increase in students' math progress. Emails that referenced data specific to a teacher's students — versus those without that information — boosted students' progress by 2.3%. And teachers who received any of the behaviorally informed email nudge saw their students' math progress increase by an overall average of 1.9% Duckworth was sure that the emails featuring famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and literary rockstar Judy Blume would move the needle more than anything else. But teachers were virtually unaffected. 'We had sexier treatment conditions,' she said. 'But no, it turns out, a simple message that says, 'Hey, your students' data are here, remember to log in,' that is what worked the best.' Notably, the intervention effects were consistent across school socioeconomic status and school type, both public and private. Moreover, they persisted for eight weeks after the email intervention period ended. Collectively, the reminders resulted in students completing an estimated 80,424 additional lessons during the four weeks their teachers received emails, and an estimated 156,117 additional lessons during the following eight weeks. Yet the limited impact of the email reminders surprised virtually everyone involved with the study: Students whose teachers received any type of behaviorally-informed email reminder only marginally outperformed students whose teachers received a simple email reminder. In fact, the effect was at least 30 times smaller than forecasted by the behavioral scientists who designed interventions, by Zearn Math staff and by a sample of elementary school teachers. 'It's a sober reminder that big effects are very rare,' said Duckworth. 'In general, we're finding in our megastudies and what's emerging across the social sciences is that intervention effects tend to be very small.' 'One of the things that this megastudy has reinforced is a kind of humility about how complicated human beings are and how challenging it is to durably change behavior. A kid is a complicated organism. Teachers are complicated. Schools are complicated,' she continued. 'It would be naive to think that you could radically change behavior with these like light touch interventions.' The findings not only underscore the difficulty of changing behavior, but also the need, Duckworth said, for large-scale, rigorous, empirical research on how to drive impact in math, which is a high-priority subject for education policy experts at the moment. Indeed, the findings come at an inflection point for math in the U.S. The most recent release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that, nationally, average mathematics scores in 2024 were lower by 3 points among fourth-grade students and lower by 8 points among eighth-grade students compared to their scores in 2019 – the most significant drop since 1990. School districts have struggled to rebound after significant academic setbacks incurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. For math in particular, by the spring of 2022, the average public school student in grades three to eight had lost the equivalent of a half-year of learning. Compared to students in other developed countries, Americans have ranked in the bottom 25% of students globally on standardized tests of mathematics for decades. U.S. students saw a 13-point drop in their 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment math results when compared to the 2018 exam — 'among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics' for the U.S., according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which administers the exam. As a result, a contentious debate has erupted surrounding whether educators are effectively teaching the subject — and whether they themselves are being effectively taught how to teach it. 'There was a dawning realization that there's a real urgency around math achievement in the United States,' Duckworth said when her team decided to design the megastudy. 'This very light touch nudge was helpful, but it does underscore how hard behavior is to change. And if there are bigger levers to influence teacher behavior, I think we would have found a bigger downstream effect on student achievement.'
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
At their own pace: Wichita's ‘one-room' school model focuses on creativity, projects
At the Learning Lab in Union Station, more than a dozen students showcased their inventions as part of the Wichita school district's new Creative Minds project, a one-room classroom of kindergarten through sixth grade students. A self-watering device for indoor plants, a karaoke-like doll and a 'robot' that could be a child's new best friend were among the projects on display. Creative Minds features project-based learning, where a student picks what they want to do and then the teacher creates a curriculum based on that. 'I have the freedom and flexibility to build based on what their interest is, and their engagement is just so high because of it,' teacher Olivia Sumner said. While lessons are taught differently than in a traditional classroom, students go through all the same standardized testing as their peers at other schools – and their scores showed increased fluency in several different subjects throughout the year, according to their teacher. 'It's exciting how we've seen the growth from any of the core curriculum,' Sumner told the Wichita school board. Now the district plans to double Creative Mind's capacity, adding another classroom and growing from 16 students to more than 30 for the next school year. It's an effort to bring back students and give parents another option amid declining public school enrollment. The district has lost lost nearly 10% of its students since the 2014-15 school year. Sumner says the program works because as the students take ownership of their lessons, they become more invested in school. 'They decided what they wanted to research, and they decided what they wanted to create, and then we are learning through all of that creation,' Sumner told the school board at a recent meeting. 'It's awesome to see their confidence grow… 'One of our third-graders said he can finally be a kid again, they get to learn their way.' That's also allowed students to feel more comfortable in the classroom. 'The inclusivity of our room is a really rare feeling. They're so quick to just be like, 'I'm struggling right now because of my ADHD,' 'My autism is not letting my brain do this right now,' and so, like, there's just no stigma in here,' Sumner said in an interview with The Eagle. Students learn at their own pace. In math, their teacher explained, lessons are taught through Zearn, an educational software. If she sees that a student may be struggling with a particular lesson, they can do more practice on their own to advance to the next section. 'It allows them to grow wherever they are,' Sumner said. 'When I have a student who hits the end of a grade level, I give them an end of that grade level assessment, and if they pass it, we keep going. If there's something I see a gap in, we come back.' Candice Spires has two students in Creative Minds. She's also a paraprofessional that works with students who may need extra help throughout the day. 'They get to express themselves creatively,' Spires said. 'It's not just, 'do this, do that.' They get to stick to a certain standard and then choose what they want to do with it. 'It's very much whatever works for them, works for them, versus everyone sticking to the same thing.' Her kids participated in the invention showcase – with one of them, fifth-grader Devaylee Ingram, being part of a team that's working with Groover Labs on its invention: Cameron Bot. The robot has a projector that projects videos for children to learn various interactive lessons without connecting to YouTube or the internet. Devaylee was upbeat and charismatic as she gave a pitch about the robot with her classmates. 'You can take it anywhere you want, and your child can watch the video. It's wireless, by the way,' she said in her pitch. 'It doesn't require use of the cloud either, which means your child's data is safe.' The program is seeing high demand. Its wait list is approaching 100 students, according to the district. Parents can get their students on the wait list for the next school year by filling out an interest in enrollment form. Students will be chosen through a lottery by grade level. Parents must provide transportation to and from the school. As the program doubles in size, it will add another classroom inside the Learning Lab. The district has been leasing space at the for-profit Learning Lab, which has ties to Koch Industries, for $6,000 this school year. That amount will increase for the next school year, but details have yet to be finalized, according to the district. Administrators and Sumner haven't decided what next year will look like with two classrooms, but there will be another teacher. Reading lessons are likely to be split up, similar to how they are now between Sumner and a para. Younger students, likely kindergarten through second or third grade, will go with one teacher to learn how to read, while older students will split off with another teacher. 'We'll play it by ear based on student needs at the beginning of the year,' Sumner said. Creative Minds will also use lessons learned in this trial year, including offering breakfast and lunch. Unlike a regular public school setting, breakfast and lunch weren't initially offered through the school and students had to pack their own food. That'll change next year. 'We'll be delivering a large refrigerator to the Learning Lab this summer to deliver breakfast and lunch,' USD 259 Chief Information Officer Rob Dickson said.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Schools closed and went remote to fight COVID-19. The impacts linger 5 years later.
American schools and the ways students learn have both changed since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. After local and federal health officials ordered schools to closein March 2020, most campuses in the U.S. shuttered and educators pivoted to virtual learning. Many students lost fundamental reading and math skills after learning remotely for months and some teachers left the profession altogether by the time schools returned the next school year, national data from the U.S. Department of Education shows. Educators nationwide have said that their students returned to classrooms after the pandemic with lower academic skills than before and it's been a challenge to catch kids up. Student academic setbacks are proving difficult to reverse. Recent national test scores from the National Center for Education Statistics show a bleak picture of recovery in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reading scores are worsening and math scores haven't recovered on a national average. "The abrupt shift to remote learning challenged student and teacher engagement, dramatically decreased instructional time, and hindered student understanding," reads a report about the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on education from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a philanthropy focused on ensuring young people have access to opportunity. Michael Petrilli, president of the national education policy think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said the recent test results showing dismal academic recovery lead him to believe American education won't return to pre-pandemic levels until there's "a generation of kids who were not impacted by the pandemic." Many of the kids affected by school closures during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and lost some of the most foundational skills in reading and math, Petrilli said. "The fourth graders now were in kindergarten when they were sent home. Many were doing Zoom school," Petrilli said. "It's absolutely worth noting that this is a precious period – the early grades." While educational impacts linger, supporters of school closures have said it was the right choice. Last year, Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., a former high school teacher of 15 years, pushed back against Republican criticism and said closing schools was a safety response based on information available at the time. 'We don't need Brookings (Institute) data to tell us that if kids are not in school, they won't learn. That's pretty basic,' Hayes said, referencing the Washington think tank. 'But we also know if kids are dead, they don't learn.' Here are a few ways education has changed in the past five years. What's going on? Kids' reading, math skills are worsening, new test scores reveal. Many internet tools that educators used during pandemic-based remote learning ‒ from math learning platform Zearn to game-based platform Kahoot! ‒ have a lasting presence in American classrooms today. "One of the most immediate and visible changes brought about by the pandemic was the rapid integration of technology into the classroom," reads a recent report called "Rewiring the Classroom: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Transformed K-12 Education" from the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization. "Before COVID-19, many schools were easing into the digital age," wrote Brian Jacob and Cristina Stanojevich for the Brookings Institution. "The switch to remote learning in March 2020 forced schools to fully embrace Learning Management Systems (LMS), Zoom, and educational software almost overnight." Teachers now frequently use these digital tools – along with artificial intelligence – in their classrooms. Educators are struggling to teach kids the skills they lost out on during remote learning while managing a surge in post-pandemic misbehavior, recent data from EdWeek shows. More than 70% of 1,000 educators said in an EdWeek Research Center national survey that students were misbehaving more than they did before the pandemic. Several studies show that kids lost out on fundamental socialization skills during pandemic school closures. Student behavioral problems and mental health needs have become a persistent problem for schools since then. A spike in outbursts in America's classrooms coincides with a national youth mental health crisis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Several educators have also told USA TODAY over the last few years that students misbehave in class more often since the onset of the pandemic. Wendy Gonzalez, a fourth-grade teacher at Downer Elementary School in Richmond, Calif., said that many of the students in her class didn't "know how to talk to each other" during the 2022-2023 school year. 'These are kids who spent most of their formative years – kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, when you're supposed to be learning social skills – not learning them. They don't have those social skills,' Gonzalez said. More recently, Brittany Archibald-Swank, a veteran fourth-grade teacher at a public school in Urbana, Illinois, said she has had to pause her lessons almost daily over the last several years to help or comfort a student who is off task. Many students in her class "bring a lot of trauma with them that impacts how they learn and how they react in a school setting," she said late last year. Behavior vs. books: US students are rowdier than ever post-COVID. How's a teacher to teach? Educators who were frustrated by remote learning and other conditions quit teaching and departed from classrooms across the nation, leaving school administrators nationwide with shortages of teachers and substitutes on staff, according to a RAND survey from 2021. About 8% of educators left the teaching profession after the 2020-2021 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. New teachers have replaced some veteran educators since the pandemic, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. New research on the lingering effects of the pandemic on teachers from University of California, Santa Cruz Professor of Education Lora Bartlett and her colleagues show that the pandemic-era "hastened a downward spiral in career satisfaction and longevity for teachers." "The biggest declines in satisfaction took place in places where teachers described experiencing a lack of support and respect from school leaders and the public during the pandemic and felt that their expertise was often ignored, including in plans to address post-pandemic learning loss," Bartlett wrote in an email. Some educators shared in the research that "increased political intervention" during the COVID-19 pandemic "that sought to curtail teacher freedom and decision-making around curriculum materials and instruction" also played a factor, Bartlett said. Disadvantaged students were the most likely to enter classrooms with new teachers, substitutes, teachers with the least amount of training, and a shrinking number of the most experienced teachers, based on a USA TODAY analysis. To address teacher shortages, some states have tailored their requirements and funded programs to attract teachers to the profession, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. Many parents who were upset by school closures opted to move their kids outside of their neighborhood public schools – and have kept them there, according to data from EdChoice, a nonprofit organization which advocates for school vouchers. One set of survey results by the National School Choice Awareness Foundation shows that interest in school choice grew during the pandemic. More than half of the 3,820 parents of school-aged children the group surveyed in 2023 either had considered or were considering a new school at the time. Some families chose to enroll their kids in micro schools or other small learning communities while others moved to charter schools, homeschooling or private schools that were open for in-person learning during the pandemic, according to data from EdChoice. School choice advocates also capitalized on parent dissatisfaction with public schools to create new alternatives to traditional education. Several states have since passed legislation that entitles every child's family to use public funds for other schooling options, according to EdChoice's "School Choice in America" dashboard. President Donald Trump has elevated the modern school choice movement since his first presidential term during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now in his second term, Trump signed an executive order in January directing his newly-appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to bolster school choice programs and calling on Congress to pass two related bills: the School Choice Now Act and the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act. Trump signs executive order Bolstering school choice New data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that student attendance dipped during COVID-19 and student attendance rates haven't recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Chronic absenteeism rates among students grew from 15% to 26% between 2018 to 2023, due to the pandemic, according to an analysis from the American Enterprise Institute. Chronic absenteeism refers to when a student misses 10% of more of the school year. Chronic absenteeism Is schools' 'biggest problem.' Five reasons kids are missing school. The organization reports the trend began during the COVID-19 pandemic and continued when schools returned to in-person learning. "The urgent need to recover from pandemic learning loss will be severely hampered by current rates of chronic absenteeism, making it the most pressing post-pandemic problem in public schools," according to the American Enterprise Institute's analysis. Contributing: Savannah Kuchar, USA TODAY Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@ Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 5 years after schools closed during COVID-19 pandemic, impacts linger
