Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[ Silence ]
>>Whenever you ask school people,
what are the most pressing issues in K12 education today,
that's the answer that you get, achievement gaps.
They're very concerned that there are differences
between the achievement of particular groups,
especially children who come from poverty verses children
who come from more advantaged backgrounds.
At Purdue we have a number of projects that are focused
on this issue because we think it's very important too.
For example, our science learning project is going
into high poverty schools and working with the parents
and the teachers to help the children, young children
who come from poverty, to really understand what science is
all about.
[silence]
Standardized testing is the gold standard
for how we assess achievement in this country.
And the advantage of standardized testing is
that it allows you to compare students,
no matter where they are and no matter what kind
of schools they're in and no matter who they are,
you get a similar metric or a similar measuring stick.
However, standardized testing works better
for some subjects than for others.
For example, it works pretty well for mathematics
because mathematics is a well structured discipline,
you either know how to multiply or you don't.
You either know how to divide or you don't.
You can work fraction problems or you can't.
But there are other areas that are much more difficult
to measure with standardized tests.
For example, in the area
of science you can measure content knowledge
with a standardized test but you really can't measure whether a
student is able to find an interesting problem
and conduct the proper experiment to test his
or her hypothesis about that problem.
So standardized tests have pretty serious limitations
for assessing some of the higher order things
that are really important for students
of the 21st century to learn.
[silence]
We have children who are diverse on a number of dimensions.
They're diverse with respect to their economic background
and indeed we're finding that poverty is one
of the big divides in education.
They're also diverse with respect
to their cultural backgrounds.
We have many international students in our schools.
We have many Latino and Hispanic students
who do not often speak English as their first language
and we have different environments in our schools.
So we have urban schools, suburban schools
and rural schools and they are all different with respect
to the kinds of cultures they have for learning and education.
At Purdue University, a major theme
of our teacher education programs is preparing teachers
to work with diverse learners.
[silence]
This act has certainly had a tremendous impact
on the nation's schools and I would say
that the results are somewhat mixed.
The positive side of No Child Left Behind is
that it is really encouraged a national focus
on struggling learners.
Sometimes those learners were ignored in the past
or they weren't appropriately educated.
Because No Child Left Behind builds in serious consequences
for schools that do not bring all students
up to a minimum level of competency in key areas
like reading and mathematics, it has really focused the attention
of schools on students like English language learners
who have great difficulty,
not because they can't do the subjects
but because they don't know the language .
And there's been a big increase in the attention paid
to such learners in schools because of No Child Left Behind.
I think No Child Left Behind has also created a positive
atmosphere of accountability, that schools are responsible,
not just for what they're doing but for the outcomes
of what they're doing, for what their students learn.
However, No Child Left Behind has had unintended consequences
too, which is what often happens when you provide a kind
of one size fits all solution to problems
that are really very complex.
And some of those unintended consequences are not quite
as positive.
For example, there has been a decrease in the amount of time
and attention the schools are able to provide to things
like teaching students to be creative or to work in groups
and in teams, which are very important outcomes as far
as business and industry is concerned.
But which take more time
than drilling students on basic material.
[silence]
At Purdue University we have a new project.
We're working in partnership
with the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation
to provide fellowships to highly qualified individuals in STEM,
who have graduated in the STEM disciplines
or are interested in career changing.
We're gonna bring those individuals to Purdue University
and we're gonna train them to teach in rural high schools
in the STEM disciplines, that's science, technology,
engineering and mathematics.
We believe through this project
that we can help the rural schools
of America begin really exciting students about STEM education.
[ Silence ]