High School » Carol J. Carter

Are Non-cognitive Skills the Key to Academic, Professional & Personal Success?

What are the top skills employers demand? Communication skills, judgement and decision making, active listening to name a few. These skills are referred to as soft skills, or non-cognitive skills that are not measured by a cognitive or academic test, like IQ, for example.

In an age when our economy demands more college grads in order to fill the jobs of the future and to be globally competitive, the answer has been to make our classes harder and rank students, schools, and teachers by the scores students earn on their standardized test. Put more effort behind increasing IQ and get a better prepared workforce, right?

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Developing Thinking & Behavioral Skills to Reduce Youth Crime Rates

Could developing a kids’ thinking and behavioral skills cut crime among youth?

It’s a very good possibility, found a new study from the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab. In the study, about 1400 kids in 7th through 10th grade from high-crime neighborhoods in Chicago were chosen to participate in the 30-week program Becoming A Man. A similar group was tracked who did not go through the course. Researchers found students who had been through the Becoming A Man program were 44% less likely to have been arrested by the end of the year.

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How to Save Billions and Better Prepare Students to Make Billions

This article was originally posted on The Huffington Post on May 8, 2013.

Last February, The National Center for Education reported that 50 percent of theÂ 3 million studentsÂ who begin college annually require some level of remediation. This trend costs students, parents, institutions, and taxpayers nearlyÂ $7 billion a year, while remedial students fail to earn a single college credit.

The high volume and costs of remediation have policymakers and education leaders scrambling to stop this financial hemorrhage. While reform in remedial education is inevitable, the unintended consequences of swooping changes can be harmful to students, institutions, and the economy at a time when the U.S. is struggling to fill the 21st century workforce with high-skilled workers.

Who are remediated students?

A report released today by theÂ National Center on Education and the EconomyÂ states that many community college career programs demand little or no use of math, and high school students are taking math courses they will likely never use. In reading and writing, the group noted incoming college freshmen had simplistic and academically unchallenging skills. Finally, NCEE discovered that very little writing is required of community college freshmen, and when it is, there are low expectations for making a cogent argument and employing basic rules for writing, punctuation, and grammar. The report calls for the bar to be raised if students are to succeed in college, career, and life. Some of these same patterns exist for freshmen admitted to open admission four-year colleges.

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Coaching the Developmental Student to Success in Math

As many as 1.7 million first-year students will take a remedial course to learn the math, reading, or writing skills they need to enroll in a credit-earning college-level course. Of all remedial courses most students are remediated in math skills. Due to a variety of factors — class dynamics, curricula, instruction, Â skill-level, academic support, financial standing, life — retaining and passing students in a remedial course is a major concern.

Colorado Community College System conducted a longitudinal remedial math study that tracked remedial math students for 4 years. They found that though the majority of students required remedial math, math had the lowest pass rate of all remedial classes.
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The Changing Face of Developmental Education: So Goes Colorado, So Goes the Nation

This week, Denver will be hosting the National Association for Developmental Education Conference.Â This organization is made up of thousands of members who are dedicated to helping students who come to collegeÂ withoutÂ the skills required to enroll in a college-level course in math, reading or writing.Â As many as 1.7 million first-year students entering both two-year and four-year colleges will take a remedial course to learn the skills they need to enroll in a college-level course. Less than one-quarter of students attending a two-year college who take a remedial course will complete a college-level English or math class.¹

For many students who need to take remedial courses, they will be required to take up to three remedial courses per discipline before qualifying to enroll in a credit-earning class.² In some states, like Colorado, change is afoot.Â Instead of offering three classes in math and three in English and reading, these classes will be collapsed into one classÂ for each discipline.Â Â Much of the learning will be self-paced at community colleges where the student to advisor ratio is 1500 to 1.³Â Students will need to take initiative for their own learning, work with staff when they have questions they need answered and be accountable for their own personal improvement plans. These steps will provide a successful on ramp to other classes that are more challenging and require more rigor, self-discipline and collaboration with classmates once these basic requirements are met.

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Math Affects Investments in College and Leads to Graduation

A discouraging fact is that many low-income U.S. students today lack the opportunity to study higher level mathematics in high school. According to the U.S. Department of Educationâ€™s Office for Civil Rights Data, there are close to 3,000 high schools serving nearly 500,000 students that fail to offer Algebra II or higher level math.Â For these students, performance on college entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT that include higher level algebra questions is negatively affected.

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Looking Back: How Have Students’ Reading Competencies Changed Over Time

When you visualize the 21^st century classroom, what do you see? A smartboard on the front wall, iPads in every studentâ€™s hands, individualized learning programs on the computer, setting the pace of a lesson while a teacher stands by for questionsâ€¦

Some classrooms have moved into the digital age, however, the 21^st century classroom is more commonly described as overcrowded and underfunded. The student demographic is diverse with disabled, gifted, English language, impoverished, and enriched learners. Teachers are faced with having to teach to all levels of the classroom, and due to lack of time, resources, and bandwidth, they teach to the students in the middle; often leaving those who are falling behind behind and those who are gifted unchallenged.

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released the report â€œA Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reformâ€ inspired by â€œa rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.â€[i] This report, though controversial, did bring to light educational issues we are still fighting today.

The following are some noteworthy statistics from the 1983 report:

Â· Functional illiteracy among minority youth may run as high as 40 percent.
Â· The number and proportion of students demonstrating superior achievement on the SATs have dramatically declined.
Â· Many 17-year-olds do not possess the â€œhigher orderâ€ intellectual skills we should expect from them.
Â· There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of the U.S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments of science in 1969, 1973, and 1977.
Â· Between 1975 and 1980, remedial mathematics courses in public 4-year colleges increased by 72 percent.
Â· Too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.

Sound familiar? Three decades later, minorities are trending toward becoming the majority, while the achievement gap continues to grow; college students are graduating with weak critical thinking skills; studentsâ€™ competency in STEM subjects arenâ€™t keeping up with the amount of job openings in STEM fields; and teachers are now said to come from the bottom one-third of their class.[ii]

[i] â€œA Nation at Riskâ€ By The National Commission on Excellence in Education

[ii] â€œAchievement Gapâ€ http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/achievement-gap/

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The Education Gender Gap: From Grade School to Grad School

Since the 1980s, more women than men have been attending college. Since 1996, more women have been attending and graduating from college.¹ A study in 2008 found the male to female ratio for attending college was 43.6 and 56.4, respectively. The gender gap in education continues to widen in favor of women, but why?

The 2011 PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) found a consistent difference between girls’ and boys’ academic achievement in most countries. Â Fourth grade girls have a much higher average reading achievement than boys, and their 2011 results continue to show this pattern. In the United States, recent research found that girls had an advantage in reading at all grades, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Â Another study conducted by PISA in 2009 showed that 15-year-old girls performed consistently better in reading than boys.³

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21st Century Writing: More Does Not Always Mean Better

The ability to write well is meant to evolve naturally from a few simple sentences on a first-graderâ€™s notebook to the polished draft of a senior paper, and when it does the entire school experience tends to proceed naturally as well. In the workforce, good writing is the hallmark of a professional that can express himself clearly and display oneâ€™s company/product in an attractive way. This has only become more true in todayâ€™s world, where email, text messaging, and social media have taken over many of the communications that used to be performed by phone or in person.

In fact, the changing role of writing in the world today has many teachers wondering how they should adapt their teaching to make it more relevant to todayâ€™s writing needs, personally and professionally. Susan Lucille Davis, a writing teacher with over 30 years of experience, expresses this question in her blog, â€œTeaching Authentic Writing in a Socially Mediated World,â€ but admits that she herself doesnâ€™t have the whole answer. She and many of her colleagues agree, however, that the answer would need to address and prove relevant towards improving writing in the following categories:
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Study: More U.S. Students Graduating from High School and College

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/11/05/record-shares-of-young-adults-have-finished-both-high-school-and-college/4/#section-3-high-school-completion-among-young-adults

More U.S. students are graduating from high school and college than ever before, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. The increase in grads can be attributed in large to our changed economy. Since the 2007 recession, students have been drilled on the importance of having an education in order to land a job in a highly competitive job market. Adults have also returned to school to gain higher pay, change careers, or increase their level of education after a layoff.

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