Education Week - September 14, 2016 - 5

REPORT ROUNDUP

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CURRICULUM
"High Schoolers Lack Access to Statistics
Courses"
Three-quarters of 12th graders attend
schools that offer statistics courses, but
less than a quarter of students actually
take them, according to a recent analysis
of national data.
And just 8 percent of high school seniors have taken an Advanced Placement statistics course.
Change the Equation, a nonprofit
group that works with the business
community to improve science and math
learning, looked at data from the 2015
National Assessment of Educational
Progress.
The statistics show that low-income
students are less likely than their higherincome peers to attend schools that offer
statistics courses and to take them when
offered. Suburban students are the most
likely to attend a high school offering statistics, at 86 percent. About 62 percent
of 12th grade students in rural areas
and towns attend schools with statistics
courses, as do 67 percent of those in cities.
-LIANA HEITIN

TESTING
"Final Report on Online Interruptions on
the Spring 2015 Smarter Balanced
Assessment Administration in Montana,
Nevada, and North Dakota"
The disruptions in online assessments
that roiled Montana, Nevada, and North
Dakota in spring 2015 appear to have
had both negative and positive effects on
individual students' test scores, ﬁnds an
analysis.
While some students' scores appeared
to have been hurt by "logout" interruptions, evidence suggests others may
have actually beneﬁted from temporarily getting booted out of the system, a
conclusion the authors base on statistical modeling. The effects varied greatly:
Most districts in Montana and North
Dakota had no students forced to cope
with a logout interruption, but in some
school systems in those states, all students ran into problems.
The independent analysis was conducted by the National Center for the
Improvement of Educational Assessment,
a research and consulting nonproﬁt hired
by the Smarter Balanced Assessment
Consortium, the group that sponsored the
exams. The review was limited: Vendors'

testing systems only collected data on
one type of interruption-students getting kicked out because of server failure.
-SEAN CAVANAGH

TEACHING
"Effects of Instructor Attractiveness on
Learning"
A teacher's good looks may play a "previously overlooked" part in student learning, say researchers at the University of
Nevada.
For the study, published last month in
the Journal of General Psychology, 131
university students listened to an audio
lecture, half with a male voice and the
other half with a female voice, while looking at a photo of the purported lecturer.
The photo varied for each student-69
participants looked at a "highly attractive"
person and 62 at an "unattractive" person.
(The photos had previously been rated for
attractiveness by other students.)
Students who had an attractive educator
scored higher than those with a less-attractive educator on a multiple-choice quiz on
the lecture. Students also gave higher ratings in teaching ability and presentation to
more attractive educators-though student
perception of teaching ability did not necessarily predict a better score. -KATE STOLTZFUS

Summer Programs Found to Yield Learning Gains
"Learning From Summer: Effects of Voluntary Summer Learning Programs on
Low-Income Urban Youth"
What does it take for a voluntary, school-district-led summer learning program
to be successful?
As it turns out, a large part of it is getting students to show up, according to a
study released last week by the Wallace Foundation.
RAND Corp. researchers found that students classiﬁed as "high attenders," those
who attended at least 20 days of a ﬁve- to six-week program, saw beneﬁts in reading
and math that persisted into the following spring.
"It's really interesting that a ﬁve-week program could confer those beneﬁts that
would last throughout the school year and could, in theory, then be built upon in
the next summer ... and could help get at closing the achievement gap between lowincome kids and their higher-income peers," said Catherine Augustine, the study's
primary investigator.
Augustine and her colleagues tracked students who participated in the ﬁve voluntary, district-led programs that make up Wallace's National Summer Learning
Project-Boston; Dallas; Duval County, Fla.; Pittsburgh; and Rochester, N.Y. That
initiative began in 2011 to expand learning opportunities for low-income and lowachieving elementary school students. (The Wallace Foundation also helps support
coverage of leadership, arts education, and extended learning in Education Week.)
The researchers analyzed data for 3,192 students who initially signed up for
the programs the summer after 3rd grade. Compared with a control group of nonparticipating students, the high attenders acquired an academic advantage that
translated to 20 percent to 25 percent of students' typical annual gains in reading
and math.
Researchers said that time spent actually working on academics was also key.
"If they're offering math, they should be offering an hour and a half a day of math
and really protecting that time and not replacing it with a ﬁeld trip or an assem-MARVA HINTON
bly," said Augustine.

EARLY CHILDHOOD
"Language Delays and Child Depressive
Symptoms: The Role of Early Stimulation
in the Home"
Stimulating young children's earlylanguage skills can not only boost their
readiness for kindergarten, but potentially protect them from later depression,
ﬁnds a new study in Prevention Science.
Researchers at the University of
Missouri-Columbia, and John Hopkins
University tracked nearly 600 children
at high-risk of academic failure in Hawaii from age 3 to 3rd grade. They found
3-year-olds with low exposure to language-be it through preschool, adult
conversations, or reading and using
media with family-were signiﬁcantly
more likely to show language delays in
1st grade and three times as likely to
show depressive symptoms in 3rd grade,
than those with more language exposure.
Researchers suggested a less-enriching
home environment, coupled with more
academic challenges in school, could contribute to the students' risk of depression.

SUMMER ATTENDANCE VS. BENEFITS
Gains (Numbers shown only for statistically signiﬁcant effect sizes.)
High Attendance (20 or more days)

Fall 2013

Spring 2014

.13

Math assessments
Language arts assessments

Fall 2014

.07

Spring 2015

.11
.08

.14
.09

.12

Social and emotional assessments
Low (1-19 days)
Math assessments

.07

Language arts assessments
Social and emotional assessments
No show
Math assessments
Language arts assessments
Social and emotional assessments
SOURCE: The Wallace Foundation

-SARAH D. SPARKS

| OBITUARIES |

| TRANSITIONS |

Phyllis Schlaﬂy, an inﬂuential conservative activist, author, and lawyer,
died Sept. 5 at age 92.
She organized a successful grassroots campaign in the 1970s to block
passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She took interest in education
issues as well, championing prayer in schools and opposing sex education.
Schlaﬂy, who founded the conservative group the Eagle Forum, believed
parents had the primary responsibility to educate their children and
opposed federally subsidized day care, saying mothers should stay home
with their children.

David Hespe, New Jersey's education commissioner, has
resigned after slightly more than two years on the job.
He led the state through its rewriting of the Common Core
State Standards, new teacher and principal evaluations,
and the return of some decisionmaking to state-run urban
districts. He also expanded the charter sector and oversaw the
implementation of online common-core-aligned testing. New
Jersey has had ﬁve education commissioners in seven years.

Anna Dewdney, the author and illustrator of the popular Llama Llama children's books, died
Sept. 3. She was 50.
In lieu of a funeral, she requested that people read to a child, according to Penguin
Random House. Prior to becoming a full-time children's author, Dewdney worked as a day-care
provider and boarding school teacher. Llama Llama Red Pajama, the ﬁrst book in the series,
was published in 2005. The books have sold more than 10 million copies.

Jessica Lindl has been named vice president and general
manager of Common Sense Education. Common Sense
guides families and educators on education and technology.
She has worked for such organizations as GlassLab,
Scientiﬁc Learning, and Houghton Mifﬂin Harcourt.
She also served on the board of Education for Change, a
charter-management organization.

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Education Week - September 14, 2016

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