[IAEP] Response to Intervention - Is this being used outside the US?

[Maria Droujkova]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 8:30 AM, Caroline Meeks
<caroline at solutiongrove.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Maria Droujkova <droujkova at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 1:48 AM, <forster at ozonline.com.au> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> The strongest argument against is that any easily administered testing is
>>> biased towards lower level skills (as defined in Bloom's taxonomy). That
>>> would be OK, depending on how the data is used. Any attempt to modify
>>> teaching in response, biases the teaching towards the lower level skills.
>>>
>>> In the Australian case, schools will be forced to confine their teaching
>>> to lower order skills to maintain their ranking, preserve enrolments and
>>> avoid criticism and funding cuts. In the case of RTI, it risks defining
>>> student progress by a narrow subset of education skills and overly
>>> concentrating teaching on this narrow subset.
>>>
>>> Tony
>>>
>>
>> Tony,
>>
>> This is my perennial response to the existing programs of this sort. When
>> I plan interventions, I start with meaning and significance of math in the
>> life of the person, their family and their social networks. Then some major
>> concepts areas that can support and advance these meanings become apparent.
>> From there, skills and tasks within concept areas can be mapped and
>> developed.
>>
>> What is highly problematic is that all the existing mainstream heavy
>> testing machinery is at the level of skills. And what I am doing on the
>> individual basis is not currently scalable. I can't even explain many parts
>> of this highly intuitive, expertise-based process.
>>
>> To address this problem, I just started to work on a crowdsourced rubric
>> that will probe personal meaning and significance of math, and later used
>> during interventions to help people track growth of math's significance in
>> their lives. I am now polling local parents who work with me, with some very
>> fruitful initial brainstorming happening among them. I am also meeting with
>> several people who have large QA sites or projects that can be used to
>> aggregate "sparse" info for crowdsourced projects. This may not happen fast,
>> because of my other tasks such as the math game design project, but we will
>> see what happens. I want this tool to measure the impact of my projects,
>> which we currently observe in a purely qualitative, case-study manner.
>>
>
> Maria,
>
> I am going to shift the conversation back to reading because there just
> isn't enough data on math yet to talk about it.  But I'm making the
> assumption that the neurology has an analog in math.
>
> Although I of course agree with the need for meaning and significance there
> is also a risk in your approach.
>
> As a dyslectic let me tell you how painful this type of approach can be.
> When you can't read or spell or remember things the way other people can and
> you really are motivated, want to, understand why you should etc.  Then
> people keep over and over again talking and working with you on motivation,
> understanding of meaning and significance etc. let me tell you first hand
> this is very hard on the child's self image.  You are sending the message
> that if only you wanted to you could do this just like everyone else.
>
> The science says that isn't true for all children.  The fMRIs show that
> dyslectic children are not using their brain in the same way and that these
> difference continue into adulthood and continue to have effects even after
> the child has learned to read using different pathways.
>
> So one approach has the risk of ignoring higher level thinking and
> reasoning.
>
> The other approach has the risk of ignoring actual malfunctions in low
> level brain based thinking.  And if caught at an early age, and the correct
> interventions are done, these issues can be mitigated significantly.
>
> To me its clear that we need to stop arguing about which approach is better
> and put on our engineer hats and figure out how to efficiently do both.
>

Caroline,

This is an excellent point and a great personal story to go with it. I am
going to refer to that image when talking about the issues.

Good BALANCE between three directions is crucial. The three directions for
math are meaning and significance; conceptual understanding; and procedural
fluency. I believe similar directions exist for other areas, as well, though
they may have different names.

For math, there are plenty of tools to measure procedural fluency AND
effects of interventions on procedural fluency. There are also some tools
for measuring conceptual understanding, though fewer, most significantly
problem solving tools, project-based rubrics, and essay-type tools ("explain
why..."). There are motivation tools and anxiety tools, as well, somewhat
reflecting on meaning and significance.

I am now working on this particular meaning and significance measure tool
not because I consider it more important than other tools, but because I'd
like it to exist so I can use it together with other tools.

Thank you for the engineering hat reminder. I will try my best to always
talk about the balance of the three directions, rather than how dangerous
one is without the others. It will be more productive.

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
http://www.naturalmath.com

Make math your own, to make your own math.
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