Suzanne Wilson. Photo courtesy of Communications and Brand Strategy.

America’s K-12 teachers are not fully prepared to meet a new set of science standards, a Michigan State University education scholar argues in Science.

Writing in the April 19 issue, University Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Teacher Education Suzanne Wilson said the professional training landscape for teachers is woefully inadequate to handle the Next Generation Science Standards. The voluntary guidelines, unveiled this month by the advocacy group Achieve in collaboration with 26 states, call for more hands-on learning and analysis and cover fewer science topics but in greater depth.

Science in U.S. classrooms already has been de-emphasized in favor of math and reading, Wilson noted, and suddenly the new standards turn up the proverbial Bunsen burner on science teachers.

“Science has been marginalized by the No Child Left Behind Act, so less science has been taught in schools, not more,” said Wilson. “And now these standards are coming out that not only call for a renewed focus on science teaching, but the kind of science that many teachers haven’t taught and many teachers haven’t experienced.”

While there is a wealth of teacher training options in the United States, Wilson said, the programs do not accommodate the depth of the new standards.

“When it comes to professional development for science teachers, we simply don’t have the knowledge base,” Wilson said.

Effective professional development should bolster teachers’ content knowledge and their ability to teach students the subject matter and develop the students’ critical thinking skills. It should also help teachers reach all students, including English language learners, Wilson said.

Getting to that point will require a major investment to develop the right instructional materials and the tools to support teachers and students in using those materials, she said. That includes harnessing new technologies and social media to make high-quality training available to all teachers.

“We must realign the considerable resources spent on professional development with the demands teachers will face with the new standards,” Wilson said.

The process could take years.

“Though some might hope for a silver bullet, education reform that leads to fundamental change, such as that envisioned with the new standards, requires time,” Wilson said.

The standards are designed to fuel students’ interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and prepare them for college and careers. The states that helped write the new standards range from Michigan to California and Maine to Georgia.

The 2012 College of Education Annual Report.

Dubbed the “Oscars of advertising,” the ADDY Awards is the industry’s largest and most well-known competition, recognizing professionals and students across the nation who have created innovative, creative solutions for web, print, video and digital mediums.

The Michigan State University College of Education won both a Gold ADDY Award – and a highly sought-after Best in Show Award – for its 2012 Annual Report during the Mid-Michigan ADDY Awards ceremony on Feb. 21 at the MSU Union. The report was produced by Communications Director Nicole Geary and Graphic Designer Anthony Cepak, who were in attendance to receive both awards.

“The Annual Report helps communicate the accomplishments of the MSU College of Education, and what makes the students, faculty and staff stand out,” says Geary. “It’s great to know that our peers in advertising and design believe the project itself stands out as well.”

Cepak and Geary spent three months preparing the annual report, which also included a video and micro-website.

Released in late September 2012, the report features a tri-fold, die-cut skyline presentation of the college’s various missions, and stresses its position within the local, statewide and global communities.

“We wanted to represent and reinforce – both visually and through a narrative – the idea of this college as a community,” says Cepak. “I think the unfolding skyline accomplished that message in a fresh and innovative way.”

The report has received praise from MSU students, alumni and faculty for its highly creative approach, and can be seen displayed throughout Erickson Hall.

Best Online Universities promotes online education by providing  information to potential students through its site, BestOnlineUniversities.com.

“We believe deeply in the educational power of technology,” said Scott Hawksworth, CEO of Best Online Universities. “We want to show our readers some of the amazing ways that educators are using the web and communications tech to provide more value to their students.”

In November, Greenhow released “Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literary Practice.” The study found that college students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades.

Last year, Greenhow landed the #4 spot of Online Colleges’ Most Social Media Savvy professors in America (2011) list.

Photo by G. L. Kohuth.

Fit kids aren’t only first picked for kickball. New research from Michigan State University shows middle school students in the best physical shape outscore their classmates on standardized tests and take home better report cards.

Published in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, it’s the first study linking children’s fitness to both improved scores on objective tests and better grades, which rely on subjective decisions by teachers.

The study also is among the first to examine how academic performance relates to all aspects of physical fitness – including body fat, muscular strength, flexibility and endurance – according to lead researcher Dawn Coe.

“We looked at the full range of what’s called health-related fitness,” said Coe, who conducted the research as a doctoral student in MSU’s kinesiology department and is now an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Kids aren’t really fit if they’re doing well in just one of those categories.”

Coe and colleagues gathered their data from 312 students in sixth through eighth grade at a West Michigan school. They gauged the kids’ fitness with an established program of push-ups, shuttle runs and other exercises.

Then they compared those scores to students’ letter grades throughout the school year in four core classes and their performance on a standardized test.

The results showed the fittest children got the highest test scores and the best grades, regardless of gender or whether they’d yet gone through puberty.

The findings suggest schools that cut physical education and recess to focus on core subjects may undermine students’ success on the standardized tests that affect school funding and prestige, said co-author James Pivarnik, who advised Coe on the project.

“Look, your fitter kids are the ones who will do better on tests, so that would argue against cutting physical activity from the school day,” said Pivarnik, an MSU professor of kinesiology. “That’s the exciting thing, is if we can get people to listen and have some impact on public policy.”

Making fitness a bigger part of children’s lives also sets them up for future success, Pivarnik added.

“Fit kids are more likely to be fit adults,” he said. “And now we see that fitness is tied to academic achievement. So hopefully the fitness and the success will both continue together.”

Christine Greenhow

Twitter, best known as the 140-character social-networking site where Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga chit-chat with fans, has become a new literary format that is improving student learning, a new study argues.

Christine Greenhow, assistant professor in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education (CEPSE) in the MSU College of Education, found that college students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades.

“Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice,” said Greenhow, who also studies the growing use of social media among high-schoolers. “It’s changing the way we experience what we read and what we write.”

In “Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literary Practice,” Greenhow notes that Twitter use among U.S. teens has doubled in less than two years. There are now more than 500 million users posting more than 340 million tweets a day, according to the study, which appears in the research journal Educational Forum.

Greenhow analyzed existing research and found that Twitter’s real-time design allowed students and instructors to engage in sharing, collaboration, brainstorming and creation of a project. Other student benefits included learning to write concisely, conducting up-to-date research and even communicating directly with authors and researchers

In teaching a college class that focuses on Twitter, Greenhow said her students participate more through the site than they do in a face-to-face class setting.

“The students get more engaged because they feel it is connected to something real, that it’s not just learning for the sake of learning,” Greenhow said. “It feels authentic to them.”

Twitter, created in 2006, comes with its own set of rules, such as using hash tags, URL shorteners and leaving enough characters blank to allow retweets. Magazines, newspapers and TV shows run Twitter content, encouraging readers and viewers to engage in the conversation online.

“One of the ways we judge whether something is a new literary form or a new form of communication is whether it makes new social acts possible that weren’t possible before,” Greenhow said. “Has Twitter changed social practices and the way we communicate? I would say it has.”

Greenhow’s research comes on the heels of another MSU study about changing communication practices among college students. That study, led by Jeff Grabill, found that first-year college students value texting more than any other writing style.

The study challenges the claim that private schools are superior – a hot issue in India and other developing countries that are expanding K-12 educational offerings. During the past decade, some 40 million children have entered India’s education system, giving rise to a growth in privately run schools

“Our study finds no systematic benefit of attending a private school,” said Chudgar, assistant professor of Educational Administration. “The main implication is to recognize that the debate is not settled regarding public and private schools.”

Chudgar analyzed the reading, writing and math performance of 10,000 Indian students aged 8 to 11. Because private-school students generally come from families with higher income and education levels, she narrowed the research sample to private and public school students with similar backgrounds.

The study, which appears in Economics of Education Review, found that private school attendance is not associated with any systematic and specific benefit in terms of increased student achievement. Chudgar said the results hold for rural and urban areas of India, and for both expensive private schools and low-fee private schools.

Unlike in the United States – where a raft of research has produced mixed results in the public vs. private school debate – only a handful of such studies have been conducted on the burgeoning Indian educational system, and those studies have favored private schools.

But it’s important to keep researching and discussing the issue, Chudgar said, as the public and private schools attempt to deal with the massive influx of new students.

“There’s a perception among some that a child will enjoy better educational outcomes simply because she or he attends a private school, even a low-fee private school,” Chudgar said. “But we hope for a more robust conversation on the benefits and limitations of privatization in the developing world.”

Elizabeth Quin, a doctoral student of economics at MSU, co-authored the study. The study was supported in part by the Institute for Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

Of the 212 liberal arts colleges identified in a landmark 1990 study, only 130 remain in their traditional form – a 39 percent reduction, according to the new research.

While some liberal arts schools have closed or become part of larger universities due to financial problems, Baldwin, MSU professor of higher, adult and lifelong education (HALE), said many others have changed their focus so dramatically they no longer retain a liberal arts identity.

“The diversity of U.S. higher education is widely regarded as one of its strengths,” Baldwin said. “But American higher education will be diminished if the number of liberal arts colleges continues to decline.”

An American institution since the late 1700s, the liberal arts college is known for a curriculum based primarily in the arts and science fields (such as English, history and chemistry); small classes; and a strong emphasis on teaching and student development. Common goals of a liberal arts graduate include developing a meaningful philosophy of life or helping promote tolerance or understanding among diverse groups.

But many liberal arts colleges are evolving into career-oriented “professional colleges” where a large number of students major in professional fields such as business and nursing. The trend was highlighted in a 1990 study by David Breneman – a University of Virginia professor and former president of Kalamazoo College, a liberal arts college in Michigan – and replicated this year by Baldwin and colleagues.

“The trend Breneman first pointed out more than 20 years ago is continuing,” the new study finds. “An increasingly smaller number of liberal arts colleges have been able to maintain a dominant arts and science emphasis.”

The researchers urge U.S. academic leaders, policymakers and others to work toward saving liberal arts colleges.

“We should renew and reinvigorate these valuable institutions,” the authors argue, “before liberal arts colleges disappear from the higher education landscape or shrink to the status of a minor educational enclave that serves only the elite.”

The study is co-authored by Vicki Baker of Albion College and Sumedha Makker, a certified public accountant, and appears in Liberal Education, a journal of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Photo by G.L. Kohuth.

The policy hitch: Often those who benefit most from nature-based tourism endeavors are people who already have resources. The truly impoverished have a harder time breaking into the tourism business.

The study, published in the current edition of PLoS One, looks at nearly a decade of burgeoning tourism in the Wolong Nature Reserve in southwestern China. China, like many areas in the world, is banking on tourism over farming to preserve fragile animal habitat while allowing people to thrive. But until now, no one has taken a close look at the long-term economic implications for people.

Wei Liu, lead author and doctoral student at MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, and his colleagues took advantage of the center’s 15-year history of work in Wolong to study the complex interactions of humans and nature.

“This study shows the power of having comprehensive long-term data to understand how everything works together,” Liu said. “This is the first time we’ve been able to put it together to understand how changes are being made.”

Frank, one of six co-authors, has a joint appointment in measurement and quantitative methods and fisheries and wildlife. He has used his expertise on social network analysis to study the affects of relationships within a wide array of social contexts, especially school organizations.

Read the full release from MSU News.

Frank recently spoke with Alex Galarza and Andrea Zellner on MSU’s GradHacker podcast about his support of the breakthough pedagological method. (Cued in at the 19-minute mark.) Zellner is a Ph.D. student in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology.

“The most frustrating part is teaching labs,” Frank told the hosts. “People pick up different elements at very different paces.” As a remedy, Frank began recording his lectures and telling students to watch them before coming to class and/or to use them in class to walk them through their processes. Class time is then spent answering specific questions about the material and improving student understanding.

Flipped classrooms have shown results already across the country. According to an article in the Detroit Free Press, Clintondale High School, which has been known to have some of the lowest levels of performance in the state, had shocking levels of improvement during the 2010-11 school year, when they implemented the flip. In the nine month span, freshmen failing rates dropped from 52 to 19 percent in English and from 44 to 13 percent in mathematics.

The con of this strategy is that advanced students often quit coming to class in the college setting. If they feel confident they can do the labs on their own, they may choose not to leave the comfort of home.

“I struggled with it, and I’ve come to accept that,” Frank commented, saying his colleagues still support him. “[As for those attending,] I really think they can learn better. They can stop it [the video], pause it – they can work in groups.”

Frank currently uses this method in his CEP 933 course, and plans to implement it in his seminar specialty classes in the future.

On Tuesday, April 10, at 12:00 p.m., in Erickson Hall room 133F, Dr. Ma Wanhua will present on Higher Education and U.S.-Sino Relations as part of the Center for Higher and Adult Education’s Spring Visiting Scholars Brown Bag Series. Dr. Ma is a Full Professor and Director of the Center for International Higher Education, Graduate School of Education, at Peking University. She received her Masters and PhD from Cornell. She has been a Fulbright New Century Scholar, an Erasmus Mundus professor for the EU Commission, and received the DAAD Fellowship from German government. She has also participated in many international cooperative research projects sponsored by Ford Foundation, UNESCO, UNDP among others. Dr. Ma will be available for consultation April 9 – April 12. To make an appointment, contact Karla Bellingar at bellinga@msu.edu.

Meredith Whitley, MSU sport psychology student

Austin Thornton, senior and co-captain of the MSU Spartan Basketball Team, doesn’t solely rely on skill to make points when he steps up to the free-throw line; he also has to master control of his own thoughts and concentrate on the task at hand over the anticipatory whispers wafting from the Izzone. It’s these crucial moments of performance that put sport psychologists in business.

Driven by her fascination with the concept, Meredith Whitley will be graduating with her Ph.D. this spring, concentrating on Psychosocial Aspects of Sport and Physical Activity, from Michigan State University’s Department of Kinesiology. She also volunteers at Lansing’s Refugee Development Center, teaching life lessons and soccer to children there.

When she was recently interviewed about sports psychology in an article for Medill Reports- Chicago, she said, “It’s really exciting to think about working with athletes, coaches, people who are in the sports world and trying to help them find their path and have a positive experience that will stay with them for the rest of their life.”

Professional golfer Drew Weaver was advised by Whitley about overcoming his mental hurdles. “One of the main things we talked about is maintaining an even keel and not getting too excited about a good shot and not getting too down on yourself when you hit a bad shot because you’re not going to hit all perfect shots,” he said. “Just take the result and live with it and move on to the next shot.”

According to Whitley, golf and tennis players were among the first to take interest in and invest in the advantages of sports psychology, and only recently have more mainstream sports such as football, basketball and baseball begun catching on and respecting the profession.

“In the past, you wouldn’t hear about that and it wouldn’t be so accepted in those sports,” she said. “It seems like every month I’m hearing of another instance of a sport psychologist being hired or another team using a sport psychologist.”

This is good news for the over 5,000 professionals that entered the field from 2006 to 2010, a statistic from the Education News Career Index, a database that serves in aiding higher educators through making career decisions. The site lists median salary increasing 12 percent during this same period of time, measuring up at about $67,000.

To learn more about Whitley and her work with refugees, view her Spartan Saga.

Research from ISYS states that under-served youth athletes gain more life-skill and character development when their coaches place greater emphasis on creating caring climates instead of focusing on competition. The two most important elements of coaching, Lauer said, are a combined effort to demonstrate that they care about the kids, and then help them improve individually on their own level.

“Meet the kids where they’re at,” Lauer advised. “Give them some sense of control over their situation, help them make good decisions, talk to them about things that are happening on the field and try to transfer it into their lives, whether it’s in school, family or social situations.”

Regarding youth athletes in under-served communities, Lauer believes that the population has not been studied enough, and therefore cannot obtain the proper resources needed.

“At Michigan State, we really feel a responsibility to reach out to those groups and really try find ways to help them,” he said.

Although Lauer acknowledged that coaches only get to spend an average of four to six hours with young athletes, he said they still have the potential to make a difference. Focusing on self-improvement, he said, is the key to life skill development.

Listen to the podcast.

Harold Johnson, deaf/hard of hearing special education professor at MSU

Expressing oneself as a deaf person is a challenge in itself, but when not given any special accommodations in public school, understanding teachers’ lessons can be practically impossible. That’s the unfortunate reality for many immigrant children in America, and why The Boston Globe chose to cover a story about a program at Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Boston, Mass.

Harold Johnson, special education professor in Michigan State University’s College of Education, feels that deaf education is an area that can be greatly improved in our education system. He said that educators are aware that deaf immigrant students have special needs, but are not sure the best methods of educating them. The LEAP program, however is trying to make a difference.

Language Enrichment and Academic Pursuit, or LEAP, is a two-year program for teenagers coming from public schools in developing countries that lack special classes for the deaf. For many, being involved with LEAP brings about the opportunity to be understood in a classroom setting for the first time. Initially, the language difference between signing nationalities may act as a barrier, but students are quickly overcoming that.

When asked about the program, LEAP student Alzate-Medina, 15, signed that, “[At first,] I didn’t know what any of the signs meant, but the teachers showed me pictures that went along with the signs and then I learned the vocabulary, and then started to string things together.”

Founded in 1869, Horace Mann is the nation’s oldest public school for the deaf and hard of hearing. While the school teaches both English and American Sign Language at the same time, which helps students’ communicate in a new culture, it does not ease the  disconnect of communication between the students and their family members.

“This is an area we are not addressing with teacher preparation programs,” Johnson said in the Boston Globe article. “It’s not in any of the national standards to train teachers how to reach out to parents of deaf children for whom English is not their first language.”

Johnson’s research at MSU focuses on how web-based technology can help free deaf students of the feelings of isolation that so many of them deal with on a daily basis.

Read the full article.

Read the article.