Additionally, the governor is proposing legislation that would cap enrollment of low-performing cyber charters until performance improves, impose a moratorium on new cyber charter schools, subject charter management companies to the state’s Right to Know Law, and establish a new funding formula for charters.

“Pennsylvania’s charter school law is the worst in the nation and is failing students, teachers, school districts and taxpayers,” Wolf said in a news release. “There are high-quality charter schools, but some of them, especially some cyber charter schools, are underperforming.

This means that for over a decade and a half, the most vulnerable and struggling districts lost proportionally the most students along with their per-pupil funding.

companies providing the service

Over the three growth periods in this study, the typical charter school student in Pennsylvania hadsimilar academic growth in reading and weaker math growth compared to their TPS counterparts. Inmath, the learning difference is about the equivalent to losing 30 days of learning compared to theirTPS peers. In the first two growth periods of the study, students in Pennsylvania charter schoolsexperience growth similar to their TPS peers in reading, while experiencing weaker growth in math. Bythe third growth period, students in Pennsylvania charter schools exhibit similar growth to their TPScounterparts in both reading and math.

The third set of analysis illustrates the impact of online charter schools in Pennsylvania, also referredto as cyber charter schools.

The 2011 findings also showed wide variation in student andschool performance, with a quarter of charter schools outperforming their local school options inreading and over half outpacing their local TPS in math.

"I'd tell my teacher, 'I don't get this,' and she'd say, 'You have to figure it out for yourself,' and I'd say, 'But I don't get it,'"

"I was told that in the student-centered model, my role as a teacher was primarily to supervise students to make sure they were using Buzz."

The companies needed the EAA's students to do well in order to prove the effectiveness of their products when making sales pitches to other schools and districts;

met students where they were academically rather than forcing them to march lock-step through the traditional, age-based grade system.

"Usually these teams are built around the more experienced teachers. It is problematic when novice or non-teachers are in charge of creating school-based curriculum and course content."

"We're building this plane as we fly it," is a phrase numerous sources we've interviewed have attributed to Mary Esselman, who was in the thick of the technological planning.

"We do have too many failing schools in our state," he said. "If you look at us statewide, only 16 percent of our kids are college-ready. That's absolutely unacceptable.

So, once again, we have proof that, instead of investing the resources necessary to accomplish the goal of turning around our worst-performing schools as quickly as possible, the EAA operated on the cheap, using an untested, unproven, beta stage software platform with the teachers and students the beta testing guinea pigs.

Instead of being a model for implementing a computer-based teaching model, BUZZ crashed regularly, had major content deficiencies, and was so hard to use that its benefits were all but overwhelmed by its flaws.

help you identify your high opportunity students

If you are a Canvas-user, enable the Notes column in your gradebook and record brief notes about what each student has shared with you.

The activity theory for organisations relates to how two different organisational contexts that interact with each other develop and eventually share a common language, culture and environment, in order to reach common goals.

students observe scientific processes they normally do not experience at school, and then report on what they have observed; in doing so, they develop skills such as asking questions, scientific reading, organising information and planning a presentation

Studies have also shown that learning is a unified concept; any distinction between formal and informal science learning is artificial

However, students who are not interested in school science often choose to participate in science activities outside school.

In addition, many practitioners in the field of informal science learning recognise the need to create productive collaborations between informal science education organisations and schools

leaving students with little room to develop their own approaches to answering the question

They require a question or problem that serves to organize and drive activities; and these activities result in a series of artifacts, or products, that culminate in a final product that addresses the driving question.

Drawing analogies from everyday learning, researchers argue that knowledge is contextualized; that is, learners construct knowledge by solving complex problems in situations in which they use cognitive tools, multiple sources of information, and other individuals as resources

Schooled people do better, although they rarely use the supposedly general algorithms taught in school. Instead, they invent new methods specific to the situation at hand.

Yet to be tru-ly skillful outside school, people must develop situation-specific forms of competence.

utside school, actions are intimately connected with objects and events; people often use the objects and events directly in their reasoning, without necessarily using symbols to represent them. School learning, by contrast, is mostly symbol-based; indeed, con-nections to the events and objects symbolized are often lost.

school is an institution that values thought that proceeds independently, without aid of physi­cal and cognitive tools.

No individual in the system can pilot the ship alone. The knowledge necessary for successful piloting is distributed throughout the whole system.

Practice testing and distributed practice received high utility assessments because they benefit learners of different ages and abilities and have been shown to boost students’ performance across many criterion tasks and even in educational contexts

who believed that parents, caregivers, peers, and the culture at large are responsible for developing higher-order functions.

this is different than simply copying someone else's behavior.

it is time to actually perform the behavior you observed.

Retention can be affected by a number of factors, but the ability to pull up information later and act on it

The goal of assimilation is to maintain the status quo. By assimilating information, you are keeping your existing knowledge and schemas intact and simply finding a place to store this new information.

Assimilation and accommodation both work in tandem as part of the learning process.2 Some information is incorporated into our existing schemas through the process of assimilation, while other information leads to the development of new schemas or total transformations of existing ideas through the process of accommodation.

The process is somewhat subjective, because we tend to modify experience or information to fit in with our pre-existing beliefs

Raising children free from these stereotypes and limitations, she believed, would lead to greater freedom and fewer restrictions of free will

When subjected to societal disapproval, people will often feel pressured to alter their behavior or face rejection by those who disapprove of them.

All of these influences add up to how gender schema is formed.

Gender schema theory was introduced by psychologist Sandra Bem in 1981 and asserted that children learn about male and female roles from the culture in which they live.

People are more likely to pay attention to things that fit in with their current schemas.

Event schemas are focused on patterns of behavior that should be followed for certain events.

Punishment does not teach a person how to behave appropriately.

Skinner’s learning theories have been discredited by more current ones that consider higher order and more complex forms of learning.

Skinner found that when and how often behaviors were reinforced played a role in the speed and strength of acquisition.

negatively reinforcing your behavior (not your child's).

Respondent behaviors

Skinner was more interested in how the consequences of people's actions influenced their behavior.

the transmission of information from teacher to learner is essentially the transmission of the response appropriate to a certain stimulus.

Radical behaviorists such as Skinner also made the ontological claim that facts about mental states are reducible to facts about behavioral dispositions.

they focused on objectively observable, quantifiable events and behavior. They argued that since it is not possible to observe objectively or to quantify what occurs in the mind, scientific theories should take into account only observable indicators such as stimulus-response sequences.

Their methodology was primarily introspective, relying heavily on first-person reports of sensations and the constituents of immediate experiences.

This means that it does not allow for any degree of free will in the individual.

It is more likely that behavior is due to an interaction between nature (biology) and nurture (environment).

The stimuli that have become associated with nicotine were neutral stimuli (NS) before “learning” took place but they became conditioned stimuli (CS), with repeated pairings. They can produce the conditioned response (CR).

and these cues can trigger a feeling of craving

the conditioned stimulus acts as a type of signal or cue for the unconditioned stimulus

therefore is a natural response which has not been taught

learning method in which a specific behavior is associated with either a positive or negative consequence.

Instead of feeling anxious and tense in these situations, the child will learn to stay relaxed and calm.

However, if the smell of food were no longer paired with the whistle, eventually the conditioned response (hunger) would disappear.

the whistle sound would eventually trigger the conditioned response.

The conditioned stimulus is a previously neutral stimulus that, after becoming associated with the unconditioned stimulus, eventually comes to trigger a conditioned response.

Behaviorism assumes that all learning occurs through interactions with the environment and that environment shapes behavior.

This learning process creates a conditioned response through associations between an unconditioned stimulus and a neutral stimulus.

a teacher constructs an instructional program

Teachers must come to teaching with the experience of in-depth study of the subject area themselves.

For the scientific understanding to replace the naïve understanding, students must reveal the latter and have the opportunity to see where it falls short.

A logical extension of the view that new knowledge must be constructed from existing knowledge is that teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings, the false beliefs, and the naive renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to a given subject.

rather, the goal of education is better conceived as helping students develop the intellectual tools and learning strategies needed to acquire the knowledge that allows people to think productively about history, science and technology, social phenomena, mathematics, and the arts.

Developmental researchers have shown that young children understand a great deal about basic principles of biology and physical causality, about number, narrative, and personal intent, and that these capabilities make it possible to create innovative curricula that introduce important concepts for advanced reasoning at early ages.

Engage adult new writers with online communities of writers, as contributors, readers, and peers, to foster their self-directed learning, self-study, and persistence.

discuss, but do not debate

Know your students

Because adults learn by doing, effective instruction focuses on tasksthat adults can perform, rather than on memorization of content. Be-cause adults are problem-solvers and learn best when the subject is of immediate use, effective instruction involves the learner in solving real-life problems.

Because adults need to know whythey are learning something, effective teachers explain their reasons for teaching specific skills

Is motivated to learn byinternal, rather than ex-ternal, factors

There are many appealing strengths to the idea that learning should be organized around authentic problems and projects that are frequently encountered in nonschool settings: in John Dewey’s vision, “School should be less about preparation for life and more like life itself.”

there is an infinite number of numbers between any two rational numbers

Gradually, students come to ask self-regulatory questions themselves as the teacher fades out. At the end of each of the problem-solving sessions, students and teacher alternate in characterizing major themes by analyzing what they did and why. The recapitulations highlight the generalizable features of the critical decisions and actions and focus on strategic levels rather than on the specific solutions

Tests of transfer that use graduated prompting provide more fine-grained analysis of learning and its effects on transfer than simple one-shot assessments of whether or not transfer occurs

For example, a group of Orange County homemakers did very well at making supermarket best-buy calculations despite doing poorly on equivalent school-like paper-and-pencil mathematics problems (Lave, 1988). Similarly, some Brazilian street children could perform mathematics when making sales in the street but were unable to answer similar problems presented in a school contex

e.g., a person may be performance oriented in mathematics but learning oriented in science and social studies or vice versa).

A number of studies converge on the conclusion that transfer is enhanced by helping students see potential transfer implications of what they are learning

Understanding when, where, and why to use new knowledge can be enhanced through the use of “contrasting cases,” a concept from the field of perceptual learning (see, e.g., Gagné and Gibson, 1947; Garner, 1974; Gibson and Gibson, 1955). Appropriately arranged contrasts can help people notice new features that previously escaped their attention and learn which features are relevant or irrelevant to a particular concept

In the rote method, students were taught to drop a perpendicular and then apply the memorized solution formula.Transfer Both groups performed well on typical problems asking for the area of parallelograms; however, only the understanding group could transfer to novel problems, such as finding the area of the figures below.or distinguishing between solvable and unsolvable problems such asThe response of the “rote” group to novel problems was, “We haven’t had that yet.”

The concept of adaptive expertise (Hatano and Inagaki, 1986) provides an important model of successful learning. Adaptive experts are able to approach new situations flexibly and to learn throughout their lifetimes. They not only use what they have learned, they are metacognitive and continually question their current levels of expertise and attempt to move beyond them. They don’t simply attempt to do the same things more efficiently; they attempt to do things better. A major challenge for theories of learning is to understand how particular kinds of learning experiences develop adaptive expertise or “virtuosos.”

Sometimes, however, students can solve sets of practice problems but fail to conditionalize their knowledge because they know which chapter the problems came from and so automatically use this information to decide which concepts and formulas are relevant. Practice problems that are organized into very structured worksheets can also cause this proble

Experts usually mentioned the major principle(s) or law(s) that were applicable to the problem, together with a rationale for why those laws applied to the problem and how one could apply them (Chi et al., 1981). In contrast, competent beginners rarely referred to major principles and laws in physics; instead, they typically described which equations they would use and how those equations would be manipulated

Research shows that students who think that intelligence is a fixed entity are more likely to be performance oriented than learning oriented—they want to look good rather than risk making mistakes while learning. These students are especially likely to bail out when tasks become difficult

There is no universal best teaching practice.

This will require active coordination of the curriculum across school years.

Experts are also able to fluently access relevant knowledge because their understanding of subject matter allows them to quickly identify what is relevant. Hence, their attention is not overtaxed by complex events.

A common misconception regarding “constructivist” theories of knowing (that existing knowledge is used to build new knowledge) is that teachers should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves.

In the most general sense, the contemporary view of learning is that people construct new knowledge and understandings based on what they already know and believe (e.g., Cobb, 1994; Piaget, 1952, 1973a,b, 1977, 1978; Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). A classic children’s book illustrates this point; see Box 1.2. A logical extension of the view that new knowledge must be constructed from existing knowledge is that teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings, the false beliefs, and the naive renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to a given subject.

At the same time, students often have limited opportunities to understand or make sense of topics because many curricula have emphasized memory rather than under- Page 9 Share Cite Suggested Citation: "1 Learning: From Speculation to Science." National Research Council. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2000. doi:10.17226/9853. × Save Cancel standing.

Fundamental understanding about subjects, including how to frame and ask meaningful questions about various subject areas, contributes to individuals’ more basic understanding of principles of learning that can assist them in becoming self-sustaining, lifelong learners.