Comments on Richard Sprague: Why Yong Zhao is wrong

A better summary of the findings can be found here...

2008-06-12T23:20:00.000-07:00

A better summary of the findings can be found here:
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12224

You can read the original report here:
www.nap.edu/catalog/12224.html

Pay careful attention to page 233 where the authors wrote, "As a group, these studies show that the students of board-certified teachers performed better than students taught by nonboard-certified teachers (the magnitude of the differences is on the order of 0.02 to 0.08 of a standard deviation)."

Also, the studies were only conducted with students from two states (Florida and North Carolina) and one district (Los Angeles) and the studies focused primarily on achievement in reading and math for third through fifth graders.

Wow. This is a very, very small effect. (If it is indeed an "effect." We have to be careful not to confuse correlation with causality.) In the field of educational research, an effect size of 0.2 is considered "small." The magnitude of differences in student outcomes here are 10-40% of that. What's 10% of small? Very, very small.

There are lots of educational interventions teachers can use in their classroom that produce large effects sizes. Easily *an order of magnitude greater* than those described in this study..

And recall that the studies were conducted with 3rd through 5th graders in two subject areas...and in only a couple of States. That's not great either. I wouldn't be confident, at all, in generalizing these results to other grades, subject areas, or children in other States.

This is just another case of educational research results that are not interpreted/reported well. (Silver lining: At least I can use this as a case study in my research methods course...)

Click here for the link.

2008-06-12T15:38:00.000-07:00

Click here for the link.

Interesting story about all this: http://www.bosto...

2008-06-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

Interesting story about all this: http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2008/06/12/nationally_certified_teachers_raise_scores/

I think it is important to note that my comments a...

2008-06-08T23:11:00.000-07:00

I think it is important to note that my comments are in response to this post:

http://blog.richardsprague.com/2008/04/yong-zhao-on-how-to-use-technology-in.html

I watched the video of Yong Zhao's 2005 presentation in Singapore and I believe that Richard reasonably/fairly summarized Yong Zhao's statements.

What are you basing your statement, "It doesn't sound like Yong Zhao believes any of this?" on?

This post is too sloppy for me to understand. It ...

2008-06-08T11:37:00.000-07:00

This post is too sloppy for me to understand. It doesn't sound like Yong Zhao believes any of this.