“Tutoring program combines struggling students, community mentors (The Pulse-Journal)” plus 2 more |
- Tutoring program combines struggling students, community mentors (The Pulse-Journal)
- Parents, officials talk test scores, tutoring programs (Gazette.net)
- Frequency and cost of copying college homework revealed (Science Daily)
| Tutoring program combines struggling students, community mentors (The Pulse-Journal) Posted: 17 Mar 2010 12:56 PM PDT
By Richard Wilson,
Staff Writer
Updated 4:16 PM Wednesday, March 17, 2010
MORROW — Little Miami School District is partnering with a nonprofit group that provides free tutoring services to children struggling in the classroom. The program was launched Wednesday, March 17, at Park Church in Morrow, one of two tutoring sites — the other being Christ Fellowship in Hamilton Twp. Whiz Kids is a program started in 2005 by City-CURE, a non-profit agency serving Greater Cincinnati. Whiz Kids, which has tutoring sites in about 45 area communities, works through local churches to recruit and train volunteer tutors and provide those services for local school districts, said Area Director Carole Bower. Little Miami is one of the first Warren County schools to partner with Whiz Kids, Bower said, and comes at a time when the district is struggling financially to provide basic services. Initially 12 second-graders from Salem and Hamilton-Maineville elementary schools will be selected for the program, meeting with the same tutor at the churches on Wednesdays for one hour a week. "Whiz Kids has found that schools report attendance increases on Whiz Kid day, improved attitudes and relationships," Bower said. "We also have found the tutors walk away finding it to be very satisfying and a real positive experience for them." Patricia Stevenson, Little Miami resource coordinator, said the students are identified through referrals from teachers and parents, who must sign an agreement. She said she is very supportive of the program because it's organized well and it's "such a positive, upbeat project." "It will be helpful to connect the mentors in the community with students and families," Stevenson said. "I think it can work for all the children who are needing a little extra help." Volunteer tutors are screened and undergo a background check, then they are trained before they work with children. For more information, call (513) 621-2873 or e-mail whizkids@citycure.org. Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2122 or rwilson@coxohio.com. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Parents, officials talk test scores, tutoring programs (Gazette.net) Posted: 18 Mar 2010 02:07 AM PDT Academic performance and community outreach dominated much of the discussion at a March 9 meeting that included members of the Prince George's Board of Education, Superintendent William Hite Jr. and about 50 parents, teachers and other school personnel from the Laurel area. The meeting, held at Dwight D. Eisenhower Middle School in Laurel, was hosted by board member Rosalind A. Johnson (Dist. 1), whose district includes Laurel, Beltsville, Greenbelt and Hyattsville. Board member Amber P. Waller (At-Large), who also attended the meeting, said the board has hosted district-specific gatherings as a way to get input from parents and families without requiring them to attend board meetings in Upper Marlboro. Laurel resident Andre Jones, whose daughter is in the third grade at Montpelier Elementary, said he has noticed a downward trend in test scores at Montpelier and other county schools as the students progress. "The older the kids get, it seems as though there is a greater percentage of students who are not making a proficient or advanced mark on the MSA," Jones said. The Maryland School Assessment, or MSA, is an annual exam that measures math and reading skills in accordance with federal regulations. Montpelier's 2009 MSA scores indicated 86.4 percent of third-graders and 52.7 percent of sixth-graders were "proficient" or "advanced" in math. In reading, 80.2 percent of third-graders and 72 percent of sixth-graders met that threshold. Overall, about 71 percent of Montpelier students attained "proficient" or "advanced" scores on the math portion of the 2009 MSA, compared to 64.2 percent of students in Prince George's County and 77.9 percent of students in Maryland. About 78 percent of Montpelier students met that threshold in reading, compared to 74.3 percent of students in the county and 84.4 percent of students in the state. Johnson said research indicates a decline in test scores as students transition from elementary to middle school and from middle school to high school. "They don't just plateau," she said. "They literally [go] up and down." The school board has plans to incorporate a transitional program that would be imbedded into the curriculum to address the problem, Johnson said. The program, she said, would include more focus on time management and provide opportunities for students to regularly discuss their educational and career aspirations with guidance counselors or other school officials. "They will become much more focused on self-evaluation and planning for their own future," Johnson said, adding that the changes could be implemented by the beginning of the next school year. Board members also stressed the importance of community members stepping up to tutor or mentor youth. "Because we live in a very diverse and socioeconomic-challenged county ... we need our community to come out and support our various programs at the schools and let our students know we stand before you," Waller said. Barbara Weidman, president of the Laurel High School PTSA, said the message of community partnership is often easier said than done. Weidman said she knows of individuals who want to volunteer but have had trouble connecting with the individual schools and setting up programs or tutoring times — a problem she credits to a shortage of administrative personnel and resources in the school system. "I would like to see the community provide tutoring and have the schools take advantage of it," she said.
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Frequency and cost of copying college homework revealed (Science Daily) Posted: 18 Mar 2010 09:07 AM PDT ScienceDaily (Mar. 18, 2010) — The history of students who copy homework from classmates may be as old as school itself. But in today's age of lecture-hall laptops and online coursework, how prevalent and damaging to the education of students has such academic dishonesty become? According to research published online March 18 in Physical Review Special Topics: Physics Education Research, it turns out that unnoticed student cheating is a significant cause of course failure nationally. A researcher from the University of Kansas has teamed up with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to get a better handle on copying in college in the 21st century. Young-Jin Lee, assistant professor of educational technology at KU, and the Research in Learning, Assessing and Tutoring Effectively group at MIT spent four years seeing how many copied answers MIT students submitted to MasteringPhysics, an online homework tutoring system. "MIT freshmen are required to take physics," said Lee. "Homework was given through a Web-based tutor that our group had developed. We analyzed when they logged in, when they logged out, what kind of problems they solved and what kinds of hints they used." Lee said that it was easy to spot students who had obtained answers from classmates before completing the homework. "We ran into very interesting students who could solve the problems -- very hard problems -- in less than one minute, without making any mistakes," said Lee. Students also were asked to complete an anonymous survey about the frequency of their homework copying. (According to the survey, students nationally admit to engaging in more academic dishonesty than MIT students.) Among the researchers' most notable findings:
The students who copied frequently had about three times the chance of failing the course.
"People believe that students copy because of their poor academic skills," Lee said. "But we found that repetitive copiers -- students who copy over 30 percent of their homework problems -- had enough knowledge, at least at the beginning of the semester. But they didn't put enough effort in. They didn't start their homework long enough ahead of time, as compared to noncopiers." Because repetitive copiers don't adequately learn physics topics on which they copy the homework, Lee said, the research strongly implies that copying caused declining performance on analytic test problems later in the semester. "Even though everyone knows not doing homework is bad for learning, no one knows how bad it is," said Lee. "Now we have a quantitative measurement. It could make an A student get B or even C." At the beginning of a semester, the researchers found that copying was not as widespread as it was late in the semester. "Obviously, the amount of copying was not so prevalent because the academic load was not as much at the beginning of the semester," said Lee. "In order to copy solutions, the students need to build their networks. They need to get to know each other so that they can ask for the answers." But the KU researcher and his MIT colleagues also demonstrated that changes to college course formats -- such as breaking up large lecture classes into smaller "studio" classes, increasing interactions between teaching staff and students, changing the grading system -- could reduce student copying fourfold. Story Source: Adapted from materials provided by University of Kansas. Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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