I saw this tweet the other day, and it quoted a failure rate that is both alarming and familiar:
There seems to be this persistent “30%” of students who never seem to do well in math, despite a lot of attention (and dollars) sunk into increasing “teacher best practices” and “higher level thinking skills”. I don’t think there is a grand mystery behind it. You can be a rock star math teacher and it simply doesn’t matter. If they weren’t at school, they missed the learning.
We see hundreds of students in our at risk program and 90% of them are at least one or two grade levels behind in math. All of them came from regular programs, where they demonstrated school avoidance, anxiety, and peer relationship issues.
I’m very curious about the correlation between chronic non-attendance and the familiar patterns of below average standardized test scores, particularly in math. These scores are reported globally, without any correlation to the attendance rates of the students tested. This skews the data, and makes all the “strategies for improvement” often more an academic exercise than a real and significant support for improvement. Improving the teaching to the students who are there every day is missing the root of the problem. Attendance rates are the invisible, unreported factor in low achievement scores.
“Attendance” isn’t Sexy.
Students who miss 20 days of school a year (or just two days a month) have just a one in five chance of graduating from high school. (UCLA/IDEA and UC/ACCORD, 2008)
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
In building-dependent learning, attendance is absolutely critical to success. No where is this more apparent than in math. “..research has suggested that attendance is eight times more predictive of failure than prior test scores.” (Allensworth, 2011).
Ambient Learning and “Faking it”
If there is one thing I have learned from the hundreds of chronically absent kids I’ve worked with, it’s that they are really good at faking it. And by “it” I mean their understanding of the material. They are masters at picking up learning fragments from other students, classroom posters, and what they see on tv and online. Ambient learning is often how they piece together the learning they missed. As with any shortcut, it’s haphazard and doesn’t provide connections to higher level learning. It did, however, help them survive.
So why doesn’t this work as well in math? A few reasons.
- First, math is very difficult to pick up “ambiently” because it isn’t something students are exposed to outside of class. They aren’t going to stumble across how to add fractions playing Minecraft, watching tv, or hanging out on Facebook.
- They miss the “narrative” of math learning. The introduction of a simple idea, then the next more complex step … then the next. There is a “progression” to it that makes sense when it appears in its natural order. Chronically absent kids are often “reverse engineering” their math learning because they are showing up at the end of the story. They have to take something very complex and dissemble it back into its components … then try to understand the components, often out of context. They typically show a lot of math aversion because it “doesn’t make sense”.
- Finally, a big part of math success is the time to absorb new learning. Trying to catch up chronically absent students is about time. Time for them to learn at their own pace, and time for practicing new learning. Cognitive Load Theory tells us, “The more information that is delivered at once, the more likely that the students will not actually learn what is being taught nor will they be able to call upon that information for later use.”
Improving the Numbers
So how do we improve the numbers on standardized test scores? Supporting chronically absent students in their learning takes some innovation. The numbers just don’t add up for building-dependent learning and at risk students, especially in math. Some form of blended online learning is the answer because it gives them the three things they need most; access to the learning from home (delivered in the same engaging way their classmates received, not an abbreviated “catch up”), scaffolded concepts and skills, and opportunities for low threat practice. As Einstein said, insanity is continuing the same practice over and over and expecting a different result.
Isn’t it time we tried a different approach?
These are some interesting ideas. I see a glaring challenge in preparing online resources for students in need. And the idea dates back to Ausubel (learning needs to begin with a didactic outline, then small simple ideas, then complex ones) and Bruner (learning needs to begin with a contextual problem and provide details as needed). Online learning seems to lend itself to the former (which is boring) while current research supports the latter (which can be frustrating if not supported by a skilled teacher).
Five years ago, in my classroom (building-dependent) practice, students who missed class during units of study taught with an emphasis on exploring and constructing the mathematics were often perplexed and frustrated. Whereas, if I had been working out of a workbook, they would have had less trouble filling the gap. The conflict however is that the learning that results from a workbook does not compare to the learning that results from well-moderated constructivist practice.
Over the years, I have come to think that we need to teach “confusion tolerance and navigation”. This is the skill that people who learn languages have. They can tolerate only catching parts of sentences and expressing themselves in broken language. This muddled communication gradually sorts itself out in context. The 21st Century learner needs this skill. “What is my confusion? Can I overlook it for now and focus on what I understand? Should I look up a word or ask a question? Should I look at an example? Perhaps I need to make a note of this to ask about later. When I focus on what I DO know, does my learning continue to grow?”
Thanks for your thoughts, Shannon. Math has always been a challenge for our program because kids are often both behind academically AND lacking resiliency or “confusion tolerance” as you brilliantly put it. They tend to gravitate to the safety of virtual workbook-style learning, which offers them a sense of predictability. A really great discussion, thank you.