Research and development of software to harness artificial intelligence for scoring student essays has many significant obstacles. Using machine learning techniques requires massive amounts of data and computing power far beyond what is available to the typical secondary public school. The cost and effort to devise such technology does not seem to be juice worth the squeeze, since it is still more time efficient and cost effective to just have a human do the job. However, the potential exists to devise AI-assisted grading software whose purpose is to increase the speed and accuracy of human raters. AI grading that is “assisted” applies natural language processing strategies to student writing samples in a narrowly defined context and operates in a mostly “supervised” fashion. That is, a human rater activates the software and may make scoring judgments with the advice provided by the AI. A promising area for this, more narrowly contextualized application of artificially intelligent natural language processing, is in scoring summaries and short answer tests. This also poses interesting possibilities for automated coaching for students while they write. This study examines a set of algorithms that derives a suggested score for a secondary level student summary and short answer test response by comparing a corpus of model answers selected by a human rater with the student work. The human rater stays on duty for the scoring process, adding full credit student work to the corpus such that the AIs is trained and selecting student scores.
Features of Text for Comparison
The AI examines the following text characteristics to evaluate a student work by comparison to one or more models:
“readability” as determined by the Flesch-Kincaid readability formula
the percent difference in number of unique words after pre-processing. “Preprocessing” refers to text that has been scrubbed of irrelevant characters like HTML tags and extra spaces, has been lemmatized, synonymized, and finally stemmed.
intersecting noun phrases
Jaccard similarity
cosine similarity of unigrams
cosine similarity of bigrams
cosine similarity of trigrams
intersecting proper nouns
cosine similarity of T-score
intersecting bigrams as percent of corpus size
intersecting trigrams as percent of corpus size
analysis score2
The program first compares the student text to each model using cosine similarity of n-grams. The most similar model in the corpus is then compared to the student work. Four hundred and twenty-six short answer questions that had been scored by a human rater were compared using the algorithm. From these results was developed scoring ranges within each text feature typifying scores of 100, 85, 65, 55, and 0. Outliers were removed from the dataset. Next, sets of student summaries were scored using the ranges for each text feature and the program’s scoring accuracy was monitored. With each successive scoring trial, the profiles were adjusted, sometimes more intuitively that methodically, until over the course of months the accuracy rate was satisfactory.
When analyzing a student writing sample for scoring, the score on each text feature is compared to the profiles and the program keeps a tally of matches for each scoring category (100, 85, 65, 55, and 0). The “best fit” is the first stage of suggested score. Noun phrases, intersecting proper nouns, and bigram cosine were found to correlate most highly with score matching the human rater, so an additional calculation is applied to the profile scores to weight these factors. Next, a set of functions calculates partial credit possibilities for scores in the category of 94, 76 and 44 using statistics from the data analysis of the original dataset of 426 samples. Finally, samples where analysis are important in the response have their score adjusted one final time.
The development of the scoring ranges for text features proceeded somewhat methodically and at times more intuitively or organically. Over the course of months, when error patterns in AI scoring became apparent, adjustments were made to improve performance. Natural language processing, even at this basic level, is very demanding on computer memory and processing resources. At this writing, the server running this software has 6GB of RAM and work is often being done on the code to reduce processing time. One strategy is to store both “raw” and processed versions of the student work products as they are written so that processing time can be shortened at the end. the corpus of model responses is also saved in this way.
Training the AI
Upon creation of an assignment, the teacher can save model responses to the corpus. Once students have completed the assignment, the teacher can begin by reviewing and scoring the work product of students who usually score full credit. Upon confirming that these are indeed full credit models, the teacher can click a button to add the student sample to the corpus of model answers. The software limits the teacher to five models in short answer testing and seven models in composition assessment.
Once trained, the teacher can run the scoring algorithm on each student submission. At this writing, processing takes about nine seconds on average per sample, depending on the text size. This program works best for assignments where there is a narrow range of full credit responses. Its primary purpose is to score writing samples by comparing to a limited number of full credit responses. Its strength is in recognizing similar meaning across texts in varying ways to say the same thing. This program does not assess spelling or technical / mechanical writing conventions, although it does rely on student accuracy for scoring to the extent that adherence to certain conventions are necessary for the program to operate. Examples: proper noun count requires that students capitalize them; sentence count requires that students apply standard rules of punctuation.
The debriefing is a powerful tool for teaching to which students readily respond. I have had students tell me they really felt they benefited from these activities.
In general, the debriefing is a lesson that consists of analyzing student errors and offering corrections. Naturally, this is done anonymously so as to avoid embarrassment. It is particularly useful in teaching writing, computer programming, and similar complex tasks that can be broken down into smaller skill sets for training.
For example, when I teach French composition, I select errors from student compositions and present them anonymously to the class. I explain the error, I correct the error, and students then proceed to practice recognizing and correcting the error themselves. Innovation has a number of these lessons for sale at one of our online stores.
By way of another example, when teaching social studies, I help students develop skills for analyzing historic documents using constructed response tasks. This assignment calls upon students to provide historical or geographical context for a document and then to analyze its reliability and relationships with other documents such as cause-effect, turning point, or to compare and contrast. Especially for the reliability element, it is useful to display student work, both strong and weak, for commentary and analysis.
If you’ll indulge a final example, when I teach persuasive writing I like to display student samples in class and we can practice together identifying claims, warrants, rebuttals, and so forth. We can weigh the strength of arguments and of writing style.
21st century learning spaces are designed to facilitate debriefing for all sorts of tasks. Since this is a key feature of my own teaching practice, it is really baked in to the Innovation platform:
Multiple-choice: Teachers can start up a “live session” after a test to review. In the live session, the host displays the question and students join the session from their own devices and interact. (Kahoot! is a well-known example).
Short Answer: Teachers can initiate a “live session” for short answer that works the same way.
Jeopardy-Style Review: It is easy to select questions from a set of recent tasks such as quizzes or short answer prompts and then generate a Ventura game.
Analytics: Innovation has a complete set of analytics tools for all online tasks. This includes multiple-choice and short answer item analysis, standardized (“curved”) grading functions, and statistical analysis tools to evaluate and compare assessments. Analytics tells teachers what to debrief; what has priority for review and remediation.
Item Analysis: The test “master” for each assessment presents an item analysis of student work and a ready-to-display version of the test.
Debriefing lesson planning can be very arduous. It can be time-consuming to create a slide show or document with copy-pasted elements of student work submissions for analysis. The Innovation platform facilitates this in multiple ways with a few clicks, in true form to a strong 21st century learning space.
When digital natives, native to the world of online commerce, gaming, and entertainment (digital commercial spaces), come to the 21st century learning space, they bring with them customs from their native shores that are maladaptive. Guardrails are features of software applications that prevent students from engaging in counterproductive activity. Training wheels are app functions that assist students to meet their objectives by coaching, scaffolding, and offering interim assessment of progress.
Focusing Attention
For one thing, the native of yonder shore is accustomed to dividing their attention continuously from one phenomenon to the next. They call it “multi-tasking”, but we know in our land that this is a myth. On social media, advertisers call out to them like hawkers in a busy marketplace. In video games, the constant drive toward increased and sustained stimulation calls their attention elsewhere each moment. Even passive entertainment programs (what we used to call “TV shows”) change scene every few bewildering seconds. Notifications and popups clamor for attention at frequent intervals. Often in place with multiple devices (phone and laptop), the native of digital commercial space is drawn from one virtual event to the next … text from a friend … notification of en email message … ads offering discounts on the item recently searched …
Distractability is the principle maladaptive trait for the 21st century learning space. An unwillingness to ignore and delay some stimuli in favor of sustained attention to one task is the first transformation the native of digital commercial space needs to make. The mechanism of learning, of activity in the working memory that leads to encoding into long-term memory, is not well served by constant interruptions. Studies in cognitive load reinforce the idea that, while varying from individual to individual, there are limits to what can be held in working memory and that overload means information loss.
21st century learning spaces include guardrails to help focus attention and train executive functioning. There are a variety of ways to do this. Third party apps that force students to share their screens with the teacher and which limit the number of browser or window tabs that can be opened are key. Apps should react to loss of focus, such as a multiple-choice test that locks up if a student opens another browser window or one which reports this activity to the teacher. Video monitoring software can track when a student starts, pauses, and stops an embedded video for study.
Academic Honesty
Academic honesty is a new dialect that natives of the commercial world need to learn to speak. In that environment, liberal copy-paste and derivative creation is almost de rigueur. The 21st century learning space provides some guardrails and training wheels. For guardrails, there are apps that check for plagiarism and app features such as recording and reporting on student paste and right clicks in working space.
Studying sometimes means learning information, studying facts, old-fashioned memorization. In 21st century learning spaces, apps for this purpose have features that allow the student to limit the number of items to learn at a time. They also manage the items being studied such that things the student has already learned are hidden away from view so that energy is focused on what has not yet been learned.
The algorithmic AI in the tutor app at Innovation trains students in keywords to remember. The app discards questions students get right so they only work on those they do not yet know.
Composing longer text responses can benefit from coaching. For example, the algorithmic AI at Innovation can be easily trained to provide students immediate feedback on the composition of a summary or an outline. This is an important example of training wheels that supports skill development. The AI can detect copy-paste from an article as well, so as to provide a guardrail against plagiarism.
The algorithmic AI can coach students on composing a summary and estimate the grade they would earn on the work as it progresses.
Accountability: Tracking Activity
In the traditional physical classroom, we can track students’ activities and refocus when students are misdirected. Once we enter the digital world, it is important that 21st century learning spaces permit teachers to maintain the same level supervision. Such spaces need to include extensive auditing capabilities to see when students log in, start a task, finish a task, score on an assessment, how long they spent on the task, and so forth.
Sample fragment of an audit at Innovation showing student activity.
Screenshot of an audit showing student activity at Innovation. These reports can be shared directly with parents.
Support Staff
21st century learning spaces facilitate support staff participation. Software features should easily allow teaching assistants and parents to access selected student’s on-task audits, assignments, scores, and so forth. Proctors for tests in separate location would benefit from access codes allowing them to easily support student learning and testing security.
At Innovation, teachers can let teaching assistants and parents access coursework and student information.
Special Education
Individual education plans (IEPs) offer students the equal opportunity afforded by testing modifications. A 21st century learning space will have these modification options built right in.
Innovation has a number of features to support program and testing modifications:
Feature that allows a proctor to unlock and monitor tests
Automated extended time on tests
Option to attach an alternative, lower-level reading assignment to standard tasks
At Innovation, teachers can set testing accommodations like extended time for individual students in compliance with IEPs.
Guardrails and Training Wheels
21st century learning spaces stand in contrast to commercial digital spaces in providing the support systems that middle and high school students need developmentally. If your experience is like mine, you will find the classroom learning environment much tamed and more effective with these elements in place. Trying to apply apps designed for a commercial environment (sales, games, social media) leads to a wild west effect in classrooms where learning opportunities are lost to distractions.
The development of generative AI and lesser algorithmic AI both offer opportunities to aid the instructor in one of the core strategies of teaching: break it down into manageable pieces to master the goal. 21st century learning spaces could include coaching on spelling, grammar, and even content.
Computer software opens the door to more efficient content management. Teachers curating their classroom resources online have organizational tools that exceed old fashioned binders and notebooks. Addressing the needs of students with disabilities is a key efficiency of 21st century learning spaces: presenting modified texts and assignments becomes more manageable.
Training wheels are temporary assistive devices for young people learning new things. They are a modification to the program that is usually temporary; a scaffolding that brings students upward in the zone of proximal development.
Students have the tools they need to manage their own learning experiences.
21st century learning spaces incorporate a system of badges and rewards as well as provide visualization of students’ progress and achievements.
Guardrails
Young people are easily distracted, especially since their main use of digital devices as been entertainment. 21st century learning spaces have guardrails to limit distractions and develop executive functioning. Examples of such features include extensive logging of online activity in the learning space, a system of scoring and accountability, a “proctor” feature that tracks student interaction with the content.
Plagiarism has never been easier than in the digital realm. Guardrail features of educational apps help prevent academic dishonesty by making it harder to go undetected.
Moderated social engagement apps reinforce learning through shared experiences, discussions, and study groups with confidence that inappropriate content is avoided.
Guardrails are there to protect us from error, safety features along the road at dangerous points to avoid a pitfall.
Debriefing Kit
In a learning community, it is helpful to study our errors to learn from them. This is especially useful in teaching writing, but it has applications to all subjects. Anonymity is very important: if we’re going to display student errors for analysis, everyone must be confident and assured that no one will be humiliated.
Learning analytics available to teacher in the 21st century learning spaces provide detailed information about student progress to inform lesson plans and follow up.
Creating debriefing lessons is time consuming. For example, when I taught social studies I would display anonymous passages from student essays to work on form or content in a whole class activity. When I taught French, I found it very useful to display selected sentences from compositions for correction or improvement.
21st century learning spaces lend themselves to debriefing: they are designed such that the anonymous presentation of teacher-selected student work is easily generated for debriefing.
Swiss Army Knife
Saved data exists in database tables in the digital world. 21st century learning spaces should leverage this flexibility to facilitate lesson planning in multiple modes. Multiple-choice questions can be short answer questions, test questions can be Jeopardy review games, notes taken on lecture can inspire questions for discussion, and so forth. All this should be easy and fast.
21st century learning spaces are a Swiss army knife. Such collections of applications serve many functions from the same core.
Locus of Data Control
When you post to FaceBook, Twitter, or any other public commercial platform, where is your data? If you use FaceBook to moderate a class discussion, what control do you, the teacher, have over your students’ contributions?
21st century learning spaces are those where the teacher rules the roost and student privacy protection is a high priority. In this paradigm, student work is licensed to the teacher’s control for a specified period, after which it is auto-deleted. Inappropriate content posted by students can be edited, hidden, retained for investigation by authorities, or deleted per the instructor’s decisions.
In the commercial domain, data is the valuable commodity used by tech companies. Our data. It is important that student work and teacher’s intellectual property are in safe digital locations and under the teacher’s control.
Marc Prensky’s 2001 article “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” sparked a lot of conversation, even debate, about the use of computers in education. Mr. Prensky proposed that students who grew up with digital devices integrated into their lives “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” and he posited that it’s “very likely that our students brains have physically changed” as a result of how they grew up (Prensky, 2001). Prensky characterized the older generation as populated by digital immigrants, whose more limited command of computer use was an obstacle to teaching these digital natives. His recommendations focused on what we would now call “gamification” of learning; “edutainment”.
In the two decades since the coining of the term, information and communication (ICT) technology has changed and many challenges legitimately arose to Prensky’s depiction.
I need a term for young people with extensive experience and skill with the digital world of commerce, entertainment, and social media. I would like to borrow Marc Prensky’s term “digital native”.
ICT Skills
The digital native is said to “possess sophisticated knowledge of and skills with information technologies” and to “have particular learning preferences or styles that differ from earlier generations of students”. (Bennett, et al. 2008).
Prensky, in my view, was asking teachers to bend their lessons away from sound educational practice to match the entertainment that students were used to experiencing when using computer technology. I believe this was his mistake.
The ensuing decades saw some challenge to these notions. Scholars posed legitimate challenges for the basis on limited and anecdotal evidence (Bennett, et al. 2008). Further research in the first decade after Prensky’s papers, while confirming the near ubiquitous use of digital devices by adolescents, found that “a significant proportion of students had lower level skills than might be expected of digital natives” and that “only a minority of the students (around 21%) were engaged in creating their own content and multimedia for the Web” (Kvavik, Caruso & Morgan, 2004, as cited in Bennett, et al. 2008).
I would propose that computer software, especially at this early period in the 2000’s but even still today, has been designed primarily for commerce, entertainment, and socializing. This is what Prensky and his supporters were seeing students use; skills in using this software was what students were developing. I submit that software designed to sell, entertain, and socialize has some features that are not supportive of an effective educational tool. Education needs platforms that engage students in what we know to be good learning practices. Prensky, in my view, was asking teachers to bend their lessons away from sound educational practice to match the entertainment that students were used to experiencing when using computer technology. I believe this was his mistake.
But we know that something is different. Those of us who were born before 1980 can attest to changes in adolescents that is associated with the digital age. In my view, this shift is better understood in less dramatic terms: as a cultural change of the sort that has been going on in civilization for millennia. The point is well taken that educators should adapt to this kind of cultural shift.
Thinking and Information Processing
Prensky posits that the extensive use of digital devices has changed how students think and process information. Digital natives are characterized as “accustomed to learning at high speed, making random connections, processing visual and dynamic information and learning through game- based activities” as well as multi-tasking (Bennett, et al. 2008). Not only do these assertions lack evidence, but I would argue that none of them lend themselves to right learning practice. Multi-tasking does not work for human beings (Napier, 2014), since it interferes with encoding in long-term memory and increases cognitive load.
In addition to the lack of evidence to support the assertion that digital natives thinking is significantly different from previous generations, Bennett et al note that “the claim that there might be a particular learning style or set of learning preferences characteristic of a generation of young people is highly problematic.”
While there is some overlap between engaging in digital experiences for commerce, entertainment, and social media and for education, experience has taught me that there are some fundamental differences. Digital teaching platforms should reflect sound educational practice and practical application to classrooms.
But we know that something is different. Those of us who were born before 1980 can attest to changes in adolescents that is associated with the digital age. In my view, this shift is better understood in less dramatic terms: as a cultural change of the sort that has been going on in civilization for millennia. The point is well taken that educators should adapt to this kind of cultural shift. However, where I diverge from Prensky is here: effective teaching practice does not mean that we adopt the ways of commerce, entertainment, ans social media in wholesale fashion.
What are young people doing with media? An alternative framework for understanding how adolescents use technology is one which maps out the skills adolescents possess across different digital media. “[T]ransmedia skills are understood as a series of skills related to the production, management and consumption of digital interactive media” (Scolari, 2019).
“[T]ransmedia literacy turns [the] question around and asks what young people are doing with the media. Instead of considering young people as consumers taken over by the screens (television or interactive screens, large or small), they are considered ‘prosumers’ able to generate and share media content of different types and levels of complexity” (Scolari, 2019).
Let us redefine the “digital native” as the typical adolescent who has an uneven skill set for media, having come from immersive digital experiences in games, commerce, and social media. Let us recognize that, while there is some overlap, the approach students need to be taught to cultivate toward digital devices as learning tools has some important and very fundamental differences from what they have done before.
“[T]he concept of “digital native”, understood as a young person who “comes with a built-in chip” and who moves skillfully within digital networked environments, shows more problems than advantages” (Scolari, 2019).
In terms of transmedia skills, we still have some things to teach students. Strong skill sets are not evenly distributed (Scolari, 2019). Students come to us skilled in the areas they use most, engaging in entertainment, commerce, and informal social interaction. Skills linked to production are usually strong in adolescents, but those associated with related to ideology and values are more limited.
Scolari writes: “at an individual level, a young person who demonstrates that they have advanced photographic production skills (creation of memes) or audiovisual management skills (a YouTube channel) can, at the same time, have less developed abilities in, for example, detecting stereotypes or managing privacy.”
A Revised Definition
We who have been teaching for decades know that there is a cultural shift going on that is related to information and communication technology. The term “digital native” coined by Prensky lacks a firm foundation and may well be more a reflection of the time it was conceived than anything else. In addition, it seems to me that the current generation of beginning teachers are in no way digital immigrants, having themselves grown up with extensive digital experience.
Adolescents use technology extensively and this does affect their starting point for education. We teachers can capitalize on the skills they possess already in the classroom while refining those they may lack and discouraging adolescent practices that are detrimental (like attempting to multi-task).
Let us redefine the “digital native” as the typical adolescent who has an uneven skill set for media, having come from immersive digital experiences in games, commerce, and social media. Let us recognize that, while there is some overlap, the approach students need to be taught to cultivate toward digital devices as learning tools has some important and very fundamental differences from what they have done before. The platforms we use to teach them in the digital world should reflect this. I would term these apps “21st century learning spaces“.
When I was developing an app for synchronous chat, my eighth, ninth, and tenth graders were only too happy to be my beta-testers. It was in the last month before I was to retire and so I wanted to make good use of my time remaining, especially preparing students for the conversation part of the regional world language examination in French. The chat app arose out of the desire for an effective method for students to communicate in the lesson in a paired situation, in a 21st century learning space.
Synchronous Online Discussion in a Co-located Classroom Setting
A number of advantages to blending online discussion tools in the classroom present themselves. In peer face-to-face interactions, “student differences in social status, verbal abilities and personality traits cannot guarantee equal participation rates (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). High-status, high-ability and extrovert peers may often dominate the discussion and group decision making” (Barron, 2003, Caspi et al., 2006, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). Online discussion tools can reduce these factors and present a more egalitarian framework for participation.
Having students in the same room communicating with each other on a chat system may seem odd at first glance, but in addition to the benefits noted above, there are some practical benefits especially for the secondary level. The presence of an adult will ensure more on-task behavior and more appropriate behavior (no “flaming”, for example). Students may not all have equal access to home internet services such an an asynchronous model would demand. Furthermore, the synchronous model greatly ensures that the task will get done. Asynchronous assignments often fall down to procrastination, a typical foible of the adolescent. A literature review by Asterhan and Eisenmann reveal that “[c]ommunication in synchronous discussion environment is closer to spoken conversation and therefore likely to be more engaging and animating than asynchronous conferencing (McAlister, Ravenscroft, & Scanlon, 2004, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). Students have also been found to be more active and produce more contributions in synchronous, than in asynchronous environments (Cress, Kimmerle, & Hesse, 2009, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann).”
When used during the class period, synchronous chat is a small part of a larger lesson which includes scaffolding, participation, and debriefing.
Early synchronous chat software such as reviewed in the study by Asterhan and Eisenmann had some practical limitations for class discussion. Instant messaging or threaded discussion boards both work on precedence by chronology, which makes conversations difficult to follow and so may actually defeat the purpose of the exercise. Some teachers have attempted to use FaceBook or Twitter to facilitate class discussions. These platforms were designed to satisfy a commercial interest.
A 21st century learning space paradigm provides the necessary structure (guardrails and training wheels) to maximize quality participation frequency while eliminating concerns about privacy and advertising.
How it Works
The chat app works like this: the teacher opens a chat session and displays the host control dashboard on the large screen. Next, students join the session from their devices and once everyone is onboard, the teacher explains the assignment. The teacher then clicks the control to generate random partners and then to enable the chat session. A timer can optionally be set. Students engage in a real time discussion to carry out the task for the allotted time. During this session, the teacher can display the current chats going on (anonymously, of course) and offer any coaching that would be useful. At the conclusion of the time, the host closes the chat session and can debrief by displaying the chats and offering comment. The chats are anonymous: unless students introduce themselves in live session, they do not know necessarily who their partner is. The pairs are organized by “city”, a nickname generated by the app to identify them from a list of world capitals.
Host Screen Displayed at Front
The first issue that developed was that they enjoyed it (not necessarily a problem but…). It caused a lot of “real” chatter in class as students chuckled about funny things others had said or trying to find out who their partner was. Older students who were more serious about their studies also were motivated to communicate outside the chat session to strategize in real time addressing their assignment. My tenth graders were assigned to use the chat as a writing exercise, such that they answered the prompt by collaboratively composing a paragraph. When a class is engaged in this activity, they need to be trained to maintain a mostly silent room, focused on the task and not the distractions.
A second issue that arose in the early version of the app was that students would forget the prompt or instructions. It was easy to modify the app to allow the teacher to attach “accessories”: text, video embed, and/or a PDF document with the assignment and rubric displayed. Now students could refresh their understanding of the assignment by clicking a button.
Sometimes a student would leave the chat window to another browser tab to look something up. For situations where is is not allowed, I modified to app to include a “proctor” that records right in the app when a student leaves the window and when they paste in text.
Research on this sort of application support the practice of including assessment in the activity (Gilbert and Dabbagh, 2005, as cited in Balaji & Chakrabati, 2010). Students are aware of the rubric and are graded, which has an enhancing effect on their performance as they are often more mindful of their progress. Using the timer, which displays in the front of the room from the teacher’s host screen is also helpful. If one is pressed for time, one is less likely to be off-task without knowing it.
In keeping with the paradigm of the 21st century learning space, the app lends itself well to assessment and debriefing. The assessment screen makes it easy to assess student work on a built-in rubric.
Scoring Controls
Students can see their scores and comments.
I developed this in the context of teaching French, but its application to other subjects is clear. For example, a social studies lesson could include a document or video segment for students to analyze or a short discussion on a topic from lecture.
The chat application is designed as a 21st century learning space .
Guardrails: The proctor for the chat app reports on text paste-ins and leaving the browser tab.
Training Wheels: The optional accessories can provide the scaffold support for the discussion. The optional timer supports on-task behavior.
Debriefing: In debriefing mode, anonymized student contributions to chat can be displayed for analysis and discussion.
Assessment and Feedback: In scoring mode, an efficient system of evaluation saves time and offers students significant feedback.
Swiss Army Knife: The chat can be viewed in discussion mode, where other features can be applied such as identifying logical fallacies and replying to the posts of students other than one’s assigned partner. In forum mode, the teacher can participate.
Locus of Data Control: The student chat submissions are stored on a server licensed to the teacher’s control. Commercial apps such as FaceBook and Twitter may be less dedicated to the kinds of privacy and control exigencies of education.
Synchronous chat turned out to be a hit in my French class. It provided a solid and effective tool for engaging everyone in the lesson and made me feel like my time was well spent. In the next academic year (2023-24), I will be teaching an online synchronous college level French course. Look for posts next fall where I share how the new app went over in that class.
During the pandemic, many office workers moved to remote work from home. This precipitated a rise in monitoring software that companies could use to ensure that, being at home, workers were productive. An article in Forbes Magazine from 2021 reports that “[d]emand for worker surveillance tools increased by 74% compared to March 2019.” This rush to monitor and micromanage turned out to be unnecessary, as fears of a loss or productivity proved unfounded and “94% [of companies] reported that worker productivity either stayed at the same levels or improved.”
But this is not the case with adolescents.
The traditional classroom had to be a “very supervised” place because, by virtue of the fact that they are immature, most of our charges need guidance to get back on track. It is one reason why remote learning went so badly for many youngsters: it is not in the nature of most to be focused. The executive functioning needed to ignore distraction, set goals and reasonable timelines for work, even to break a longer task up into smaller, achievable segments is rarely present in adolescence. Until this develops, the role of the instructors includes teaching this skill and guiding students to follow the right course. Teaching with digital devices at present has reduced much of this supervisory ability. 21st century learning spaces would come with an array of monitoring and accountability features.
Data […] promotes accountability, but it also puts the student potentially in the driver’s seat and that is what developing executive functioning is all about.
I recall an instance where a student of mine was completing the essay portion of an examination remotely. I was able to monitor his examination in real time using software that shared his screen with me. When I noticed that he was typing sentences that appeared beyond his ability, I was able to google those phrases and find the source he was plagiarizing from online (he had his phone with him to cheat). This monitoring software allowed me a virtual way to simulate normal classroom supervision and to take the natural step of concluding the examination and award no credit.
After the pandemic, I continued using digital tools for student work. My students all had ChromeBooks. I had a student who was clever in taking advantage of a certain doubtfulness about technology by some adults around him. Faced with an incomplete assignment, he would claim he did it and that the app must have “lost his work”. He would claim that it “did not save”. In a traditional classroom, I would have seen his paper and whether it was written on, but the digital work did not include this monitor yet. I adjusted the software for his writing assignments to report when a response was deleted, when a student left the browser page for another, when students pasted text in, and even double-check the server to ensure an answer was saved. These application features returned important accountability assurances that were initially lost when moving to digital devices.
As time went on, my colleagues and I devised further modifications to the software at Innovation. I developed the “proctor” on important apps for testing and writing.
The proctor records data about the page and the students’ interactions with the assignment. Depending on the particular assignment, it records when work has begun, when an ancillary resource like a video has successfully loaded, when a student leaves the page and for how long, when text is pasted in, and when answers are saved. The proctor is visible to students (see illustration above) so they know their work is being monitored.
My colleague in the science department uses a flipped classroom technique. He made a great suggestion for the development of an app to monitor student interaction with a video assignment. As a student watches a video assignment, proctor records events like start video, stop video, how long between pauses, when the video ended, and how long the student was there.
The tracking monitor helped maintain a system of accountability for students.
Besides the proctor, Innovation tracks student activity around the site. The auditor maintains a record of logging in, accessing a course, starting a task, saving work, getting a score, etc.
The critical work of developing executive functioning in adolescents can be enhanced by providing youngsters the kind of data that, if they attend to it, can inform their decisions about what they should do. The proctor and other reporting tools are available to all students. Although consequences for missing the mark on attention to task can and should be part of the program, it is not great practice to be all sticks and no carrots. Objective data on what a teenager is actually doing (rather than what they remember they did or want you to think they did) can be the focus of discussions about on-task behavior and how the individual can take responsibility for it. We can take a look at performance on as assignment and examine on-task behavior related to its production. Could on-task behavior have improved the final product?
Data like this promotes accountability, but it also puts the student potentially in the driver’s seat and that is what developing executive functioning is all about.
My first experience using computers to teach was in 1993 when I was teaching French at a small, rural school in the Adirondacks. When the US Air Force base in Plattsburgh, New York closed, it donated its old computers to regional schools. They were “286s” that basically only ran, well, BASIC! Fascinated, I taught myself BASIC and started writing programs to drill vocabulary and verb conjugations. I really have not stopped coding educational apps since. It turned into a very stimulating hobby and very useful for my teaching practice. (When we were doing remote learning during the pandemic, my students were already operating in a digital classroom and remote learning was easy!)
Those old “IBM Compatible” computers were designed by computer engineers for the business world. The input interface was a keyboard (for typists and secretaries who, in the old days, were the only ones in the office who needed to learn to type). The big, boxy device was designed to sit on an office desk. The software ran programs like simple word processors and spreadsheets. These are also office utilities. You begin to see where I am going here?
Computers like these were initially devised to increase the efficiency of offices. They were for business.
I saw my first computer game at my cousin’s house when I was in middle school. His family had an Atari system. That was also where I first saw coding in BASIC. I saw the early computer game, Pong, at a restaurant when I was in my early teens. And there was Space Invaders at the arcade in Old Forge… And there was an arcade at the Fairmount Fair mall … You begin to see where I am going now?
Computers like those were devised for entertainment. Whether for entertainment or for commerce, the whole paradigm was intended for purposes other than education.
I was computer coordinator in my school at the time when computers and internet first migrated into schools. I was there in the heated discussions over whether we use Mac or IBM. I helped wire our school for internet and networking. I ran cables through crawlspaces and attic spaces in the 70-year old school. Talk was about what kids will need in this computer age and mainly we felt they needed skills associated with business, so when we adopted devices that were primarily designed for offices and plunked them in classrooms we figured it was good. Computer labs were de rigueur in the late 90s and early 00’s. Each classroom in my school had four or five PCs, which we built in a basement workshop. We were running Windows, Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, and so forth. We were trying to bend a device and its software that was designed for business and entertainment to classroom use.
By 2012, smartphones had become ubiquitous among students and this led to a number of other problems. Young people mainly play games and socialize on their devices. Socializing mediated by social media platforms has made changes and caused problems we are only beginning to unravel.
People use digital devices to engage in commerce, participate in entertainment, and to socialize. These being the principle purposes of the devices, they shape the course of design not only of the physical device itself but the software and features that the devices host.
My thesis is that when we brought these devices into schools, right from the beginning, we were trying to repurpose things meant for commerce, entertainment, and socializing into an environment where none of those was our pedagogical purpose. Sometimes it fits, sometimes it does not.
What do apps look like that are devised for education?
I use the phrase “21st Century Learning Spaces” to refer to a digital device and its software that fit education well because it is designed for that purpose and not repurposed from some other setting. I don’t build digital devices, but I do write software. For the past ten years, my colleagues and my students and I have been dissatisfied with bending apps to serve an educational function and having it not quite fit. Every try to use Google Forms to give a quiz? Is that really easier than what we used to do?
I hope you will join me in the next few posts and permit me to unpack the 21st Century Learning Space concept with its implications, limitations, and applications to education. I hope teachers will try out Innovation Assessments and see whether I have managed to meet some of the criteria for educational apps in a 1:1 device classroom.
Play is an important part of growing up. Trying out roles, acting out adventures… imagination! Here are some improv activities adapted to the classroom with some rubrics.
I first saw these on a TV show in the ’90s called “Whose line Is It Anyway?” where comedians performed improv scenes. I adapted them to teaching French at the time in order to develop conversation skills and improvised speaking in a fun lesson. When I switched to social studies in ’04, I sometimes used these at the end of a unit.
Stranger in Town
This activity must have a real name among improv comedians, but I just called it this. Three volunteers come to the front of the room. One goes out into the hallway briefly, out of earshot. The two who are left quickly agree on a scene they will perform for 3 minutes. The person in the hall, the “stranger”, is invited in and the scene commences. After 3 minutes, the stranger has to guess who they are based on the scene, in which, by the way, they had to participate. Imagine walking into a room and finding out you’re Henry VIII!
Here’s a sample setup for a social studies class where students had chosen their activity in advance and I had prepared it. To save time, I would sometimes generate the scenes for stranger in town and have teams roll the dice to see which to play. The identity of the person playing “stranger” was always a surprise!
The volunteer goes to the front of the room, preferably to a lectern, and pretends to be some famous person in history. The class are reporters whom she will call upon to ask questions. Pretend you’re Hannibal and you’ve just gotten your army with your elephants over the Alps. Can you answer some questions from our reporters before you disembark?
Although I often had students prepare for these if they weren’t confident, it can be an improv exercise for the brave and bold. Let it be a surprise to the volunteer whom they will play!
Newscast
Two volunteers for newscast come to the front of the room to play reporters who are to report on a scene from history. They don’t know what they scene is until they get there! (Presumably this is at the end of a unit and the scenes are from the current topic of study). One student plays the anchor at the desk which the other is “in the field”, a reporter on the scene. A third student may participate as a bystander whom the reporter will interview.
In artifact, students create a quick construction paper cutout of some object associated with our unit. It could be an Egyptian scroll or a Greek sword or Thomas Jefferson’s quill. The student presents the artifact to the class as an archaeologist at a conference. For teaching world language, the artifact is something from our current vocabulary or reading.
I used all of these to teach French as well. For teaching world language, these scenes would not be about history, but of everyday life. Stranger in Town could be a scene in a restaurant and the stranger is a waiter serving a fussy customer. Press conference or newscast could be an event of current interest.
Improv is fun, but may not be for everyone.
Improv is fun. If you have time for it, dive in! Some kids are uncomfortable with this and I never made them play. I confess that in my later years teaching social studies, I was forced by time constraints to abandon these for my older kids. The demands of curriculum and remediation and state tests were such that the minimal content reinforcement provided by these activities, well, the juice was just not worth the squeeze.
Not all classes are right for this kind of thing. If you have a middle school class that has trouble self-regulating or is over-excitable, this may not be a good idea. It also does not work well with students who feel very uncomfortable in ambiguous situations or in performing. You will know who can benefit from this and who might not because you know your kids.
“General History”, A Local Diploma Secondary Social Studies Course
Originally printed January 2017
Abstract
“General History” is a proposal for a district-approved regular education class designed for students with an IEP seeking a local diploma via the safety net options. Students will be able to earn local credit working at a course within their proximal zone of development such that their effort can be rewarded and the data on their achievement be truthful. They will remain in the society of their peers in the regular classroom but the report card and school official transcript will identify the class distinctly as “General Global History”. Content will be limited to about half of that typically tested on the NYS Global History and Geography Regents exam. Reading and writing tasks will be designed and assessed at the Common Core State Standards’ fifth grade level.
The Problem
For some students, the Regents level standard high school course is too difficult. In the small, rural school there may be circumstances which impede the creation of self-contained 15:1 special education classes or consultant teaching arrangements for students with an IEP who cannot earn passing marks in regular secondary classes. This may be especially true for content courses such as social studies and science where the qualification for passing legitimately rests on the student’s understanding and recall of a minimum quantity of content material. There is a finite range of student ability served even by a highly differentiated classroom situation. Some students face obstacles beyond their power to ever passing these classes. Simply passing the student by fiat or simplifying the curriculum continually until she or he passes could easily be construed as an act of fraud. If the report card and transcript identify the class by its regular name, someone outside the district would never know that the evidence collected in support of the student’s grade assignment was not the same as for the rest of the class. It reduces passing to an arbitrary and capricious political expediency.
In many cases, such students fail and then are assigned to summer school, where they participate in some sort of credit recovery course which may not be equivalent to the original class that they failed. It happens sometimes that participation alone will earn the student credit in summer school no matter the competency level actually achieved and then as a formality the student is advanced to the next course. It may be argued that this is something akin to simply assigning a student a passing mark without possessing competency with only the twist of demanding seat time for six weeks in summer. It is a compromise situation.
This post discusses a way to address this situation by creating a regular education “class within a class” for students with an IEP who lack the capability to meet the minimum standards of a secondary course. This class creates a different set of standards for the special education student in the regular classroom such that the district will offer local credit for passing the class at a reduced difficulty level. The training program offered to the student will prepare him or her to score in the range of 45-55 on a standardized test of the subject and graduate on one of the four safety net options currently in place in NYS regulations.
Research and Principles of Information Rationing
One of the most common misconceptions regarding learning is the effect of the amount of information on how well one learns it. Some believe that the amount has no effect on learning and that a student who applies him- or herself to any body of knowledge no matter how large or elaborated will just hopefully come away with a passing amount. A strong body of research contradicts this view. Trying to learn less results in learning more.
Frank N. Dempster was a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In an article was published in Phi Delta Kappan in February 1993, and subsequently in two books on effective teaching practices, he makes the well-researched case that “… our students are exposed to too much material and that this practice is antithetical to what is known about effective learning.” Dr. Dempster points out that research shows “… exposing students to information has a potential downside: it may actively interfere with the acquisition and retention of other information.” He goes on to exhort educators to “…think about separating the wheat from the chaff, so that they can get on with the serious business of effectively teaching the essentials” (Dempster).
Research in the area of cognitive load supports the idea that students with more limited working memory capacities will learn significantly less unless the quantity they address is limited. Cognitive load is the term for the burden working memory has to carry “in the form of information that must be held plus information that must be processed” (Clark & Mayer 41). “[I]f cognitive overload takes place, then learners will be more likely to make errors, not fully engage with the subject materials, and provide poor effort overall. The change in the schematic structures and pathways will not occur, simply because the learner cannot process the information being offered within the lesson” (Pappas). There is ample evidence supporting the idea that working memory is absolutely key to academic success and that it is an “even better predictor of academic success than I.Q.” (Alloway).
“Information rationing” means that the amount of information that the student is directed to learn is limited to only the most important. “Important” can be defined as including content which is
foundational to understanding the topic,
simple enough to connect with most students’ prior knowledge, and
most often asked on standardized tests of the subject.
It is based the premise that information overload will cause the student to learn less or none. It recognizes inborn differences in working memory that may not be ameliorated by any amount of drill and practice. In General Global History, information will be rationed to optimize the student’s learning. This is the key feature of the course that will give the student a true opportunity to pass.
How the Curriculum will be Developed
The first question in a content course is how much information to teach and which information to teach. It is difficult to itemize information, since it can be broken down into innumerable elaborated components and understandings. Nonetheless, the amount of content should not be an arbitrary list and should not be without basis in any known measurable standard. The New York State Regents Examination in Global History and Geography is a valid and reliable examination that may serve as a reasonable standard for determining the quantity and selected content to teach (as opposed to the teacher simply selecting content that is pertinent in his judgement).
New York State Education Department provides technical reports on the Global History and Geography Regents examinations (http://www.p12.nysed.gov/assessment/reports/). These reports document the psychometric properties of the examination, the procedures used to analyze the results of the field test of the examination items, and are cited as evidence of test validity and reliability. There is no teacher-made assessment or textbook publisher test that would meet the rigor of an analysis of validity and reliability found in that of the Global Regents exam for this subject. Whatever one’s personal opinion on standardized testing, it is hard to dispute the benefit of basing decisions on a standard assessment administered annually to over 200,000 students for decades. Decisions about what to teach for content in General Global History will be based on this examination. It is a valid and reliable assessment, it provides a norm against which to measure competence in the subject, and it is the same standard against which student work in the Regents level class is judged. The latter will make it possible to reasonably accurately compare student’s performance to the regular class and for reliable and valid progress monitoring.
In high school, “General Global History” is a “class within a class” for students with an IEP who will be seeking a local diploma by any of the four safety net options. As such, the educational program will be directed at delivering enough content to score 55 on the New York State Global History and Geography Regents exam. This will be the determining factor in the selection of which content to learn. Ten years of exams (that is thirty exams, since they are given three times a year) will be analyzed to see what is normally tested in the multiple-choice portion of the test. 55% of this itemized content will be selected for learning by the student in the General Global History class. A score of 100 on a content test in General Global History will be equivalent to a score of 55 in the regular curriculum. Accurate comparative progress monitoring is now possible. This will also make it possible for the student in General Global History to be in the Regents Global History physical classroom setting, following along the same topical content as the rest of the class but in their own fashion throughout the year.
Specific Example of Method of Curriculum Design
An example of the information rationing method proposed here is in order. The following table illustrates the content called for by the curriculum objectives and what has been typically tested on that over a decade of examinations for topic 9.1.
NYS Social Studies Frameworks ObjectivesTopic 9.1
What is actually asked on the Global Regents, topic 9.1
Students will analyze the political, social, and economic differences in human lives before and after the Neolithic Revolution, including the shift in roles of men and women. Students will explore how the Mesopotamian, Shang, and Indus River valley civilizations adapted to and modified their environments to meet their need for food, clothing, and shelter. Students will explore the Mesopotamian, Shang, and Indus River valley civilizations by examining archaeological and historical evidence to compare and contrast characteristics and note their unique contributions.
Hammurabi’s codeWhich statement most accurately describes how geography affected the growth of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia? / One reason early civilizations developed in China, Egypt, and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley in Mesopotamia is because / Which revolution led to the development of these civilizations?Characteristics of civilizationsOne similarity found in both Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations is that each developed aWhat is the main reason the Neolithic Revolution is considered a turning point in world history?* Planting wheat and barley * Domesticating animals * Establishing permanent homes and villages — At the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, the most direct impact of these developments was on Which name identifies the region located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers? The development of which early civilization was influenced most directly by the Tigris River, the Zagros Mountains, and the Syrian Desert?
The right hand column is drawn from Global Regents examination multiple-choice questions for ten years of tests. Duplicates have been deleted. These are the only questions that have been customarily asked for ten years on topic identified as 9.1 (grade nine, topic one). A cursory review will reveal that these questions do not cover all of the objectives. A reading of the technical report on the Global Regents will reveal that the designers of the assessment work hard to create tests that are statistically equivalently difficult from year to year. Given the long period of asking mainly these same things, it is reasonable to assume that these are the only things likely to be asked in future administrations of the exam.
In the information rationing scheme for General Global History, 55% of the content that is usually tested will be identified for study. The following table illustrates how that decision could be made.
Teacher Selections from what is actually asked on the Global Regents, topic 9.1
Target Learning in General Global History
Hammurabi’s codeWhich statement most accurately describes how geography affected the growth of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia? / One reason early civilizations developed in China, Egypt, and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley in Mesopotamia is because / Which revolution led to the development of these civilizations?Characteristics of civilizationsOne similarity found in both Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations is that each developed aWhat is the main reason the Neolithic Revolution is considered a turning point in world history?* Planting wheat and barley * Domesticating animals * Establishing permanent homes and villages — At the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, the most direct impact of these developments was on Which name identifies the region located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers?The development of which early civilization was influenced most directly by the Tigris River, the Zagros Mountains, and the Syrian Desert?
Hammurabi’s Code – What is it? Why is it important? What were some things it said?Characteristics of CivilizationWhy did civilizations developed in China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia?What is the Neolithic Revolution? Why is the Neolithic Revolution is a turning point in history?
Student learning in topic 9.1 General Global History would be focused only on these four items with only limited necessary elaborations. Students who could answer these to a level of satisfactory completeness would earn a 100 in General Global History. Knowing only these things on topic 9.1 would be worth a score of 55 on the Regents and in the regular class. Since knowing only about 65% of this list of four is all that’s required to “pass” General Global History, passing should be within reach of a large number of students.
It would seem important to illustrate why student achievement in General Global History cannot be construed as passing a high school level class as defined by the New York State Social Studies Frameworks. The following table illustrates how far General History is from the standard curriculum.
NYS Social Studies Frameworks ObjectivesTopic 9.1
Target Learning in General Global History
Students will analyze the political, social, and economic differences in human lives before and after the Neolithic Revolution, including the shift in roles of men and women. Students will explore how the Mesopotamian, Shang, and Indus River valley civilizations adapted to and modified their environments to meet their need for food, clothing, and shelter. Students will explore the Mesopotamian, Shang, and Indus River valley civilizations by examining archaeological and historical evidence to compare and contrast characteristics and note their unique contributions.
Hammurabi’s Code – What is it? Why is it important? What were some things it said?Characteristics of CivilizationWhy did civilizations developed in China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia?What is the Neolithic Revolution? Why is the Neolithic Revolution is a turning point in history?
Answering the four General History questions in the right hand column could not be construed as meeting the curriculum standards at even a minimum level. On average around 62% of students statewide (67% in rural schools like ours) can pass a test of the content in that right hand column (King). It is clear to any reader that the general history goals do not even really represent half of what is implied by the standard curriculum. This same process will be applied to the creation of each topic of the General Global History curriculum in the selection of content targeted for students to learn. Being in the regular class will at least give students in General Global History exposure to the full expression of the curriculum even if they are not responsible for learning it, with the caveat that over attention to too much information may be an impediment.
Reading materials will be provided at a fifth grade level.
With regard to writing assignments, a variation on the same writing rubrics used for the class will be devised based on the Common Core State Standards for writing in social studies for the developmental level in which the student is functional at a passable level. Most high schoolers who fit the profile of student for this program, for example, will be functioning at a fifth grade level in their writing. By way of example, here are the CCSS for writing arguments (persuasive pieces) for different grade levels. The grading rubric for the rest of the ninth or tenth grade class class assesses the elements listed in column A. Students in General Global History that function at a 6th-8th grade writing level will be graded on column B on the very same task assigned to the whole class. Students functioning at a 5th grade writing level will be assessed according to column C on the same task.
Precedents
Since 2000, a variety of similar strategies at my school had been applied to the problem posed by a class that is too difficult for a student and there being no alternative placement. Student X’s grades were simply artificially inflated to passing. Student Y was enrolled in a class-within-a-class for mathematics similar to the notion proposed here. Students Z and Q were enrolled in special segregated “intensive” classes. This writer’s classes are still differentiated by two tiers: “basic proficiency” and “standard inquiry”, basic being delivering just enough information to score 65% on a content test.
There is precedent for class-within-a-class for regular education students. Often times over the years, there have been classes in science, social studies, or English in which a portion of the class was earning community college credit while the other earned regular high school credit. In such cases, students working for college credit were graded differently and had more elaborate assignments. The example of the one room schoolhouse of days past goes without saying.
Conformity to Regulatory and Legal Mandates
Although initially envisioned as a special education class within a regular education class, “General Global History” cannot be claimed as such. The term “special class” now has a specific definition in New York State: “an instructional group consisting of students with disabilities who have been grouped together in a self-contained setting” (Continuum of Special Education Services, §52). When a special class exists within a regular education class, it must be configured as “integrated co-teaching services” where one of the co-teachers is a certified special education teacher. “General Global History”, proposed here, is a district approved regular education class designed for students with an IEP seeking only a local diploma. It is not a special education class.
Access to successful completion of General Global History is created by removing four main obstacles for students who fit the profile of those for whom this course is intended: time to complete tasks, amount and complexity of content, expectations for reading, and expectations for writing. Part 200 regulations express the expectation that “…specially designed instruction and supplementary services may be provided in the regular class, including, as appropriate, providing related services, resource room programs and special class programs within the general education classroom” (Regulations of the Commissioner of Education – Parts 200 and 201, §206(a)(1)). “General Global History” falls under the category of a special class program within the general education classroom. It is a locally-established regular education offering in which
the amount of information for which the student is held accountable is rationed to an amount around half of that of regular education students,
reading and writing expectations are set to the zone of proximal development, and
there are fewer tasks assigned to afford longer working times for unit of study completion.
Regulatory support for the course is drawn from current graduation requirements. Students enrolled in General Global History are not seeking a Regents diploma and so will not be prepared to qualify for one. “General Global History” is designed to help students earn a local diploma and it will “apply only to students with disabilities who are entitled to attend school pursuant to Education Law section 3202 or 4402(5)” (Part 100 Regulations, §105(b)(7)(vi)(b)). It is designed to prepare students to graduate on the basis of any one of four “safety net options” for graduation:
Low Pass Rate Safety Net Option (Five required Regents exams with a score of 55 – 64).
Low Pass Rate Safety Net Option with Appeal (Students who score up to three points below a score of 55 on a Regents exam are eligible to receive the local diploma via appeal if all of the conditions of appeal are met.)
Compensatory Safety Net Option
Graduation by superintendent’s determination
Students with disabilities entitled to attend school pursuant to Education Law section 3202 or 4402(5) have met the passing qualification on a Regents examination if they score 55-64. “General Global History” holds students accountable for the amount of content to earn 55 on a Global History Regents exam. In comparing score on a General Global History Interim to score on a NYS Global History and Geography Regents examination, a 100 on a General Global History exam is worth 55 on the Regents.
Some students cannot attain that level. NYS local diploma regulations also provide that “… a student’s score of 45-54 on a Regents examination required for graduation, other than the English and mathematics examinations, may, for purposes of earning a local diploma, be compensated by a score of 65 or higher on one of the other required Regents examinations” (Part 100 Regulations, §105(b)(7)(vi)(c)). A student who can learn 80% of the content offered in General Global History can quite likely score 45. Passing on this plan requires that students earns a grade in the course that “meets or exceeds the required passing grade by the school” (Part 100 Regulations, §105(b)(7)(vi)(c)(2)) and has satisfactory attendance (Part 100 Regulations, §105(b)(7)(vi)(c)(3)). Given the drastically reduced content knowledge and that the reading and writing expectations are set for the grade level in which the student functions passably, it would seem highly likely that a student would pass the course so designed.
There is also the option of a local diploma with superintendent’s determination. In a press release in June 2016, the NYS Education Department explained that “School superintendents are now required to determine, at the local level, if a student with a disability is eligible for graduation. […] Specifically, the superintendent must review, document and provide a written certification that there is evidence that the student has otherwise met the standards for graduation with a Local Diploma”. “General Global History” could provide the superintendent with the “evidence that demonstrates that the student passed courses culminating in the exam required for graduation” (Regents Expand Diploma Opportunities).
Implications
The first implication of General Global History for the student enrolled is that there is no going back. The course cannot be listed on a report card or transcript as a Regents high school course and the training provided by the course will only lead to graduation under the safety net. General Global History is not a high school level course by any reasonable construction of the Common Core State Standards nor of the New York State Frameworks for Social Studies. It is a local high school course meeting the requirements for a local diploma for students with an IEP who have no reasonable expectation of meeting the state standards at the minimum level of competency.
The second important implication of the student enrolled in General Global History is that s/he will be doing noticeably easier work and less of it than the other students in the class. This cannot reasonably be kept a secret any more than eyeglasses or a wheelchair. Some students may need counseling to help them process the difference in expectations for them. Classes will need to be well managed by the teacher such that it is a community that welcomes differences with respect, empathy, and equanimity.
As a practical matter, regular classroom teachers deal with protocols for groups of students. This is a necessity because their “caseload” numbers 50 to 100 students. Highly individualized instruction is impossible. General Global History creates a separate standard protocol for a group of students representing probably between 5%-10% of the roster and it is not intended to be a highly individualized curriculum that will be tailor made for each student enrolled. Typically the student who would be recommended for enrollment in General Global History would score in the mid-30s on a content test where the rest of the class average score is in the low 70s and who reads and writes mostly at a fifth or sixth grade level.
How is this Different from “Basic Proficiency”?
“Basic Proficiency” refers to a package of differentiated lessons unique to this writer’s social studies classes. It is defined as “just that knowledge required to pass the NYS regents Exam”. It is open to any student at will and has these modified features: one less assignment than the standard curriculum, the amount of content reduced to “just enough to pass”, a single persuasive writing piece (instead of two), a summary (instead of a composition quiz), and a vocabulary quiz. It was created with the struggling student in mind. In terms of content quantity, insofar as that may be quantified, it represents 65% of the Regents high school Global History and Geography curriculum. Students on this plan usually have GPAs in the mid-70s.
Put in other terms, Basic Proficiency is the least difficult possibility for configuring the class while still earning Regents high school credit. General Global History is different from Basic Proficiency in that it represents a level of difficulty below Regents high school credit. The difficulty level of General Global History is below the minimum high school level competency.
General Global History differs from Basic Proficiency in another important way. Whereas in the Basic Proficiency plan, a score of 65 is 65, in General Global History a score of 100 has the actual relative value of 55 but it appears in the student’s grade as a 100. This is one of the main reasons why it must appear as a separate course in the transcript and report card.
It will be interesting to see what this program would do to Basic Proficiency. Perhaps that package would disappear. It happens at present that some students, capable of passing the standard curriculum with a little effort, choose the basic plan for lack of willingness to try. It will also be interesting to see whether, as a teacher, I can maintain three tiers of instruction.
Middle School Level General History
It may be desirable sometimes to create such a class as this for students in grades seven and eight. Students whose academic limitations would make passing the class at the regular difficulty impossible and who would certainly be destined for summer school could be eligible for “General United States History I and II”.
In middle school, the general history concept presented here would meet the definition of a “reduced unit of study” (Part 100 Regulations, §100.4(c)(5)(i)) and the definition of an “alternate performance level” (Part 100 Regulations §100.1(t)(2)(iv)).
New York State Commissioner of Education’s regulations, part 100.4, support the general history concept. Students are eligible for a reduced unit of study in middle school if they are eligible for academic intervention services (Part 100 Regulations, §100.4(c)(5)(i)). Regulations state that “A principal shall consider a student’s abilities, skills and interests in determining the subjects for which the unit of study requirements may be reduced” and that “a student’s parent or guardian shall be notified in writing, by the principal, of a school’s intention to [enroll the student in a reduced unit of study].”
General history is not necessary for all special education students. General history is for those whose disabilities related to this subject met the level of “severe disabilities” pursuant to §100.1(t)(2)(iv) such that alternative performance levels are needed.
With respect to the recipe of assignments in the middle school course, this would conceivably be the same as for high school. Reading materials may be provided at a third or fourth grade reading level. The IEP may inform decisions about course materials, with the caveat that the general history concept is a standard protocol approach, not and individualized plan.
Author’s Commentary
The difficulty level of a secondary high school class is not a completely arbitrary configuration set to the whim of textbook companies or the teacher. A measurable set of standards exists, in this case the New York State Social Studies Framework and the Common Core State Standards, which even allowing for variation in more subjective measures still provides obvious definition of what constitutes a high school history class.
Many will recall a time several decades ago when schools offered at least two difficulty levels of each class: Regents and non-Regents. The effort to remove the non-Regents local diploma in the late 1990s was an effort at social engineering the State Education Department thought would bring students all to the academic level. In 2000, NYSED mandated “academic intervention services” for students who struggled with the new higher standards. By the mid-2000’s, NYSED was forced to backpedal as the number of students meeting the traditional academic standards did not much change. Diploma requirements are now a very convoluted set of regulations allowing people a diploma who cannot reach the standards. Those of us in the profession for twenty-five years can see the change in the difficulty of the examinations to admit more passing, such as the change in the Regents examination in Global History and Geography scheduled for 2018-19. A review by NYSED of around 200,000 students taking this exam over 2006-2010 showed that on average only 62% of students across the state could pass it each year (P-12 Education Committee College and Career Readiness Working Group 3). The number of students failing this exam are those who would not have sat for it in the days of non-Regents, local world history classes.
A variety of examples of rationalized “compassionate fraud” are evident in the system which does not seem to be willing to admit to the cognitive limitations of a segment of the population with regard to traditional academic style work. One strategy involves having parents or special education teachers do work with the student to such an extent that the work is no longer the student’s own. They pass because someone else did a large portion of the work for them. Other strategies include modifying content for the individual to such a degree that the student is no longer taking the same class but gets credit for it as if s/he did. The summer school example has already been presented. Starting in June 2016, superintendents may grant local diplomas by “superintendent’s determination” to students with an IEP who did not pass the necessary assessments but who have good attendance and who completed the assignments with right effort.
These and other examples are “compassionately fraudulent”. It is dishonest to say that people meet a qualification that they do not. It is dishonest to refuse to see the fact before our eyes that some people are not born with the ability to succeed at a high level in this particular academic work. This dishonesty is an act of compassion, since we see and sympathize with the students placed in the unenviable and frustrating position of never seeing success. It is better to accept this dishonesty than to watch our students suffer the impact of policies we know to be wrong. Districts should only ever place students in classes they have a chance to pass. This compassionate fraud, however, does more harm than good. Firstly, it causes us to place students in impractical courses way above their ability instead of in useful education like completing job applications or managing a bank account. Secondly, such self-deceptions often distract us from addressing a student’s real needs. Thirdly, this deception affects the school’s credibility after graduation. Those acquainted with educators at the community college level will attest to the fact that they cannot rely on much data from public schools about student performance because of the kinds of complex political forces that distort this data. Fourthly and not insignificantly, many teachers like myself find the cognitive dissonance of the situation professionally and ethically unsupportable despite that we side with the student and regret the unreasonable demands of state policy.
The class-within-a-class proposed here is an attempt to be honest. In a way, it turns back the clock to a time when schools offered non-Regents courses. Students will be able to earn local credit working at a course within their proximal zone of development such that their effort can be rewarded and the data on their achievement be truthful. This is, after all, what everyone wants. These students will remain rightfully in the society of their peers in the regular classroom instead of being segregated and I can collect evidence and report on student performance with a clear conscience.
Clark, Ruth C and Richard E. Mayer. “E-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning”. 3rd ed. Pfeiffer, 2011. Kindle ebook file.
