It made big news when several high school and middle school students in Montgomery County, Md., near Washington, failed a final exam in their math classes. Now a work group has determined that multiple strategies are needed to ensure more students pass the final exam, the Gazette reports.
Anyone who makes a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either one. —attributed to Marshall McLuhan
The work group surveyed teachers and students, finding students say they would do better if they could spend more time with their teachers reviewing. Teachers in the survey thought students didn’t take the final exams seriously and therefore didn’t put in the studying work required to achieve a higher score.
The thing is, when so many students fail, there can’t be just one problem that needs fixing. “It is clear that there is no single factor responsible for the high rate of failure on math exams,” the paper quoted Superintendent Joshua P Starr as saying in a June 17 memo to county school board members. Some of the possible changes that have been identified include:
- Focus on interventions for students who are struggling, including game-based visual learning tools
- Exempt students from the final exam and use other standardized test scores instead
- Allow teachers whose students have performed well to provide mentoring to teachers whose students are struggling
- Develop strategies that would support students in their learning and improve their motivation
I would vote for #1, which has a definite possibility of incorporating #4 and putting #2 to rest once and for all. Children, or “learners” in today’s school terminology, have changed dramatically since most current standardized tests were developed or most lesson plans were first used. The electronic device, or smartphone, has changed everything. I used to think Facebook had changed everything, but I was wrong: the smartphone has changed everything about the way kids learn.
It has changed how they pay attention, what motivates them, and why they might study mathematics. The subject must be relevant to their world, and game-based visual learning brings in entertainment and wraps it up in a neat puzzle. Then kids interact with it on their own terms and learn from it.
Some work by Marc Prensky, here, explored digital game-based learning more than a decade ago. “Growing up with digital technology,” a scenario that even today’s youngest teachers don’t understand at all, “has dramatically and—more importantly, discontinuously—changed the way people raised in this time think and process information,” writes Mr Prensky. “These changes have been so enormous that today’s younger people have, in their intellectual style and preferences, very different minds from their parents and, in fact, all preceding generations.”
Kids have become increasingly disengaged with instruction in our schools, simply because they prefer inductive reasoning, which game-playing promotes, and more frequent and rapid interactions with content, as provided on their smartphones that can run several apps at once and have several tabs open on the browser. Less time is spent on each one, and there’s more switching, but in the end, more time is spent learning, and if the content is about algebra, kids are going to absorb algebra.
Of course, content delivery systems haven’t developed enough content. We reported about SumDog, and the review we wrote has been one of this site’s most popular pages for some time now. The reason, I believe, is that it works with kids. But we need much, much more of this.
I used to call this style of learning “broadcast learning” and I envisioned it like a kid sitting on the couch with a remote control surfing channels on the TV. That was so 20th-century, wasn’t it? It’s a completely different world today: same style of surfing around to pick up quick info but not quite the same scale. Kids today have taken my understanding of broadcast learning to a new level.
And unless educators adapt to those kids, rather than trying to shoehorn a learning style into their young brains, we’re going to keep writing stories about math tests that kids fail at unexpected rates.
Resources
- Clark Aldrich. Simulations and the Future of Learning: An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to e-Learning
- James Paul Gee. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy
- David Gibson, Clark Aldrich, and Marc Prensky, eds. Games and Simulations in Online Learning: Research and Development Frameworks
- Steven Johnson. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
- Marc Prensky. “Don’t Bother Me, Mom, I’m Learning!”: How Computer and Video Games Are Preparing Your Kids for 21st Century Success and How You Can Help!
