Education Week - April 16, 2014 - 9

Researchers Shed Some Light on Common-Core Progress
By Holly Yettick
Philadelphia
In 2013 alone, state legislators introduced
nearly 300 bills related to
the Common Core State Standards.
This year, they are on track to do
the same, according to the National
Conference of State Legislatures.
Yet in a series of meetings convened
last year by the Center on
Education Policy at George Washington
University, lawmakers, advocates,
and educational leaders said
they were starved for research that
might help them make evidencebased
decisions about the standards.
At the annual meeting of the
American Educational Research
Association here this month, legislators
and leaders got a bit of an appetizer:
Although firm, final research
results were rare, as is often the
case at academic conferences, the
common standards were the subject
of more than 100 papers or sessions
and the subtext of countless others.
According to the Washingtonbased
Center on Education Policy,
which issued a follow-up paper this
month to its meeting series last year,
one of the things that policymakers
are especially hungry for research
on is "strategies for mounting outreach
campaigns around the CCSS,
especially in light of how politically
charged the standards have become."
Several studies presented at the
conference provided information on
the subject. One came from the multiuniversity
Consortium for Policy
Research in Education, which has
been studying common-core implementation
in the New York City
public schools since 2010.
Consortium researchers shared
results of a study that tested New
York City educators on what they
knew about the common core and
asked how they found out about it.
The study, based on a spring 2013
survey of 456 educators from a diverse
set of eight elementary and
middle schools with higher and
lower levels of common-core implementation,
found that educators
knew more about the English/language
arts standards than they did
about the mathematics standards.
Educators who received help on the
common core from colleagues had
higher levels of knowledge on that
topic. Those who sought information
from outside sources such as
commoncore.org, a nonprofit website
begun by some of the standards'
developers, knew significantly more
about the English/language arts
standards than colleagues who did
not consult these sources. This was
not the case for math.
Information Pipeline
The top sources of information
tapped by teachers were their districts'
library of common-core resources,
commoncore.org, other
district teachers, and the teachers'
union-all of which points to the
value of external resources in disseminating
information to teachers.
The more-preliminary findings of
another study are also relevant to
outreach campaigns in that researchers
explored which factors shaped
teachers' perceptions of the common
core. The study, led by Jason Endacott,
an assistant education professor
at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville,
surveyed a representative
sample of 951 teachers from 44 of the
45 common-core-adopting states and
the District of Columbia. For a similar
study, the Arkansas researchers
surveyed 1,300 teachers in that state
in January 2013 and interviewed 28.
They found that teachers' perceptions
of the standards were much more
positive when administrators had an
"open" leadership style, meaning they
were flexible and receptive to teacher
input.
Effective leaders also were found
to share information.
"Many teachers referenced the
way that 'CCSS expects' the standards
to be implemented, as though
the standards themselves held sway
over the process, though more often
the complaints were aimed at state-,
district-, and building-level adminis-
"
views. He said that some district and
school leaders' narrow interpretation
and autocratic implementation styles
had contributed to deprofessionalizing
teaching by imposing scripted curriculum
and limiting teachers' ability
to make their own decisions.
"In situations where implementa-
Many teachers
referenced the way
that 'CCSS expects'
the standards to be
implemented, as
though the standards
themselves held
sway. ... "
JASON ENDACOTT
University of Arkansas
trators who sent mixed signals and
left it to the teachers to decipher
them," Mr. Endacott said. Like some
other researchers who presented at
the conference, Mr. Endacott was critical
of the standards and their implementation.
In a presentation based on
the Arkansas study, he described the
creation and adoption of the common
core as a "corporate-led process" that
did not account for teachers' needs or
tion was handled more democratically,
teachers reported far more
autonomy, ability to differentiate instruction,
and feelings of professionalism,"
Mr. Endacott said.
In another presentation, researchers
shared insights from Common
Core Meets Education, a volume
of nine articles pulled together by
Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q.
McShane of the American Enterprise
Institute, a think tank in Washington.
Navigating Score Drops
In his piece from the book, assistant
education professor Morgan
Polikoff of the University of Southern
California, in Los Angeles, suggests
that states postpone using commoncore
assessment data to evaluate
teachers until they have fully transitioned
from old to new exams and
ridden out the declines in studentproficiency
rates that usually occur
when states switch tests. (Kentucky's
proficiency rates, for instance, dropped
30 percent when it adopted commoncore-aligned
assessments.) If lawmakers
do not wait, Mr. Polikoff said,
teacher pushback against unfair evaluations
could torpedo the evaluation
changes and the new assessments.
At another session, Mr. Polikoff presented
his well-publicized research
on the failure of textbook publishers
to align their materials to the
standards. That work found that the
majority of the content in supposedly
common-core-aligned textbooks was
identical to earlier, pre-core versions.
Associate education professor
Mindy Kornhaber and other researchers
from Pennsylvania State University,
in University Park, are surveying
school districts about common-core
implementation. They are also following
up with proponents of the original
push to implement the standards.
These state and national "policy entrepreneurs,"
first interviewed in
2011, are now being asked how their
expectations played out in practice.
In research presented at the confer-
ence, the scholars aimed to identify
who was benefiting financially-
and how-from implementation, by
identifying four main pathways for
federal and philanthropic funding
related to the standards. In three of
the four pathways, the money was donated
by philanthropies that ended
up in the hands of nonprofit organizations
that provided common-corerelated
resources or services either
directly or indirectly to districts. The
fourth path, exemplified by the federal
Race to the Top program that
offered incentives for states to adopt
the standards, ended up in the hands
of for-profit vendors whose services
were purchased by districts.
"I'd like to draw a comparison between
the common-core funding
pathways and the 1849 gold rush,"
researchers stated. "When the gold
rush began, prospectors sought their
fortune in the West. But the journey
required equipment and supplies to
even get started. Whether or not the
prospectors found gold, purveyors of
pickaxes, maps, assay equipment,
and salt pork stood to profit by selling
their wares. In this analogy, schools
are the prospectors."
Scan this tag with your
smartphone for a link to the
studies described in this article.
www.edweek.org/links
Studies Suggest Ways to Instill a 'Growth Mindset' in Students
By Holly Yettick
Philadelphia
For the past decade, researchers have accumulated
a growing pile of evidence on the effectiveness
of "growth mindset" interventions
that teach students that intelligence is like a
muscle that strengthens with effort, rather
than an eye color that is inherited at birth.
During a packed session at the annual meeting
of the American Educational Research Association
here April 3-7, a Stanford University
researcher presented her audience with new
research on a method of scaling mindset findings
in a way that seems to be both effective at
increasing student achievement and practical
for schools in put in place.
"Most of the published mindset work poses
a significant challenge to scaling," said Carissa
Romero, who is the associate director
of Stanford's Project for Education Research
That Scales, which grew out of a graduate
school project she started with her classmate
Dave Paunesku, who is now the center's executive
director.
For example, in the past, researchers often
delivered or helped deliver mindset interventions,
then provided heavy support for teachers
along the way.
But the Stanford program delivers the entire
intervention to high school students online.
To prepare for the lesson, teachers spend
about 15 minutes on the telephone learning
about the intervention ahead of time. Students
then attend two 45-minute sessions in
the computer lab.
During the lab time, students who receive the
intervention are asked, among other things, to
write about how "you can grow your intelligence
with practice and better strategies."
A random-assignment study of 1,584 students
at 13 high schools found that course
failure occurred 8 percent less often for members
of the treatment group that received the
growth-mindset intervention than for their
control-group peers. (The control-group students
were asked to write about something
unrelated to the growth-mindset idea.)
In total, treatment-group students passed
94 more courses than students in the control
group.
With the assistance of such funders as the
Seattle-based Raikes Foundation and the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, of
Menlo Park, Calif., both of which help support
some topic-specific coverage in Education
Week, the Stanford project is now running
multiple studies that permit schools to
receive the interventions for free. Like the
intervention, the study recruitment also
takes place online, permitting the researchers
to study far-flung schools.
The Stanford project's study was one of
three presented in a session on increasing
students' academic motivation using socialpsychological
interventions.
Lessons From Biographies
Xiaodong Lin, an associate professor of
technology and education at Teachers College,
Columbia University, presented the results of
a random-assignment study of 204 New York
City students.
The study found that reading and reflecting
upon stories of famous scientists facing
intellectual or life struggles helped students
increase their growth mindset and also to perform
better academically.
MacArthur Foundation fellow Angela L.
Duckworth, an associate professor of neurobiology
at the University of Pennsylvania, in
Philadelphia, summed up the results of the
studies for those who attended the session. She
quipped that she had written a note to herself
to show her university students her last three
rejection letters from academic journals to help
motivate them by sharing her own struggles.
The final study, presented by Gregory M.
Walton, a Stanford assistant psychology
professor, entailed multiple random-assignment
studies of a total of more than 2,000
students. The studies examined the effects
of interventions designed to motivate students
to complete the tedious practice that
is sometimes necessary when learning math
or science.
The conclusions suggested that students
were more likely to persist at such tasks, and
even to end up with better learning outcomes,
if they first reflected on ways in which fulfilling
educational goals could help them help others.
The effects were significantly bigger for lowperforming
students.
Ms. Duckworth noted that all three studies
had a common theme.
"They ... get at pluralistic ignorance," she
said. "Everyone thinks that everyone feels like
they belong. Everyone thinks that you can't
change your intelligence."
She added that unless an external interven-
tion shows them differently, "they are beliefs
that self-reinforce."
The INSIDE SCHOOL RESEARCH blog tracks news and trends
on this issue. www.edweek.org/go/insideschoolresearch
EDUCATION WEEK | April 16, 2014 | www.edweek.org | 9
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Education Week - April 16, 2014

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