A longer (21-hour) school day


Sent to the Telegraph (UK), Jan. 7

It is inspiring to read about Education Minister Truss' desire to lengthen the school day ("Schools should adopt Chinese-style lessons, says minister," Jan. 3). Her proposal to add an extra 30 minutes for "enrichment" and an extra hour for homework, however, fall far short of what is needed.
Let's push ahead and consider an even longer day.
A study published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results in 1991 concluded that a 21-hour school day is optimal, with continuous classes and no breaks, except for two breaks for meals and one lavatory visit.
Among the many advantages would be fewer discipline problems and quieter classrooms because of sleep deprivation, which "lessened the students' rebellious impulses."
The researchers also intend to do studies to determine whether food is really necessary for school children.

Stephen Krashen

original article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10549462/Schools-should-adopt-Chinese-style-lessons-says-minister.html

Source: THE 21-HOUR SCHOOL DAY
Robert O. Neal, Ed.D. and Louis deJour Hicks, Ed.D.
The Magnun University Graduate School of Education
Magnun, Tennessee
Published in The Journal of Irreproducible Results, 36 (6): 17 (1991)
available at:
http://susanohanian.org/show_nclb_news.php?id=781

The Spectacular Role of Libraries in Protecting Students from the Effects of Poverty

Stephen Krashen

Published in: iLeader: Journal of School Library Association of New South Wales 1(4): 3-6 (2012)

Poverty is by far the most powerful predictor we have of school performance. This has been established in study after study over several decades.  One of the best studies showing the impact of poverty comes from Australia: Perry and McConnery (2010) reported that both individual levels of poverty (socio-economic status, or SES) and the poverty level of the school have strong effects on performance, and the combination of the two is overwhelming.  Table one presents the impact of both of these factors on performance on the PISA 2003 test of reading comprehension given to 15 year olds (math and science tests show a similar pattern).  Note that students living in the worst poverty score 70 to 90 points lower than the most privileged students, and students attending low SES schools score about 50 to 60 points lower than those in wealthier schools.  But low SES students in low SES schools score nearly 150 points lower than high SES students in high SES schools.

Table One: Influence of individual levels of socio-economic status and the socio-economic status of the school

	SCHOOL SES
INDIVIDUAL SES	1st (lowest)	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
1st (lowest)	459 (n=984)	466 (n=690)	472 (n=490)	503 (n=231)	516 (n=88)
2nd	486 (n=591)	496 (n=681)	503 (n=596)	531 (n=425)	544 (n=195)
3rd	498 (n=416)	504 (n=492)	515 (n=639)	542 (n=568)	561(n=348)
4th	520 (n=213)	525(n=377)	530 (n=516)	557 (n=682)	577 (n=693)
5th	548 (n=99)	543 (n=199)	549 (n=362)	576 (n=602)	602 (n=1212)

SES = social economic status, based on parental occupational status, parental education, economic and cultural resources in the home.

The average PISA score is 500, standard deviation = 100.

From: Perry and McConnery (2010)

SES includes a number of factors that influence school performance. On the individual level, students living in poverty have inferior diets and health care (Coles, 2008/2009; Berliner, 2009; Rothstein, 2010) and low SES schools lack the facilities high SES schools do, and tend to have fewer qualified teachers.  Both individual students and schools from low SES backgrounds, however, suffer from a lack of access to books.  Students from low SES families have fewer books in the home and live in neighborhoods with inferior public libraries and fewer bookstores, and SES schools have inferior classroom and school libraries (Krashen, 2004).

The one source of books that can be easily improved is the school library. In recent years two studies have confirmed that investing in the school library can not only make a difference, it can actually offset the impact of poverty on reading achievement.

The California Study

Achterman’s analysis (Achterman 2008) is based on scores on the California Standards Tests given in 2006-2007 provided by the State of California, the California Department of Education Library Survey, and other data provided by California schools.  Achterman used three predictors of academic achievement: (1) “library quality,” a combination of hours the school library is open, collection size, budget, total staff hours, total services, and total technology, (2) a “community factor,” a combination of parent education, the percentage of students eligible free and reduced lunch, student ethnicity, and the percentage of English learners, and (3) a “school factor,” the average teacher salary, which correlated with the percentage of teachers who hold teaching credentials.

Table two presents the results of a multiple regression analysis, a very useful statistical procedure that allows researchers to examine the impact of individual predictors holding other predictors constant. For example, it is likely that community factors and library factors are related: Schools in wealthier communities might spend more on libraries, especially in the US where local taxes are used to pay for schools. Multiple regression allows us to pretend that this isn’t so, that each factor is independent of the others.  

The numbers in table two are “betas.” A larger beta means a greater impact, and betas from different predictors can be compared with each other.  Table two tells us that for high school students in California, the impact of “community” was strong on tests of both language arts and history (beta = -.51 for language arts), consistent with the results of studies that show the impact of poverty on school achievement. The impact of school was positive but weak. Of great interest to us is the finding that the effect of school library quality was strong on both tests and nearly as strong as the effect of community, or poverty. This suggests that a strong school library can make up for the effect of poverty in several aspects of school achievement.

Table 2: Multiple regression analysis: Impact of community, school, and library quality on achievement, grade 11

	Language Arts	US History
Community	-0.51	-0.47
School	0.14	0.16
Library	0.46	0.48

r2 = .57 (Language Arts), r2 = .58 (US History)

From: Achterman (2008)

Table two indicates that r2 = .57 for Language Arts and .46 for History. This means that if we know the poverty level of a school (the community factor), the quality of the teaching staff (as reflected by salaries or credentialing), and the quality of the school library, we have 57% of the information we need to predict Language Arts test scores for 11^th graders at that school.

Confirming the effect of the library, Achterman reported clearly positive correlations between the size of the collection and test scores (for English language arts, r = .44) and between the number of hours the library was open and test scores (for English language arts, r = .52).

It must be noted that Achterman did not find similar results for grades 4 and 8: The effect of the library was much weaker than in grade 11. The weaker correlations found for younger students could be due to the lack of library services in lower grades in California, which results is limited variability and therefore lower correlations. Achterman noted that only 1.2% of California elementary schools have a full-time clerk and full-time librarian. This improves to 8.5% at the middle school and 30.3% at the high school level.

The PIRLS Study

The PIRLS organization (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) administers a reading test to fourth graders in many countries every few years. Students are tested in the language of the country, and all tests are of equal difficulty. We (Krashen, Lee and McQuillan, 2012) analyzed the 2006 PIRLS results for 40 countries.

Our analysis included countries for which complete data was available for all factors. Most countries tested about 4000 students from about 150 schools.

Table 3 presents one of our analyses, which examined the impact of factors considered to be related to reading achievement. As in Achterman’s study, we used multiple regression, which allowed us to determine the impact of each predictor uninfluenced by the other predictors.

Table 3: Multiple Regression Analysis: predictors of achievement on the PIRLS reading test

	Reading
SES	-.42
Independent Reading	.19
Library	.34
Instruction	-.19

r2 = .63

From: Krashen, Lee and McQuillan, 2012

According to table 3, the strongest predictor of reading achievement among ten-year olds is SES, socio-economic class, defined here as a combination of education, life expectancy and wealth in each country. In agreement with many other studies, we found that lower SES meant lower performance.

“Independent reading” in table 3 stands for the percentage of students in each country who participated in independent reading programs in school: Students in countries that provided time for independent reading in school every day or almost every day tended to do better in reading (beta = .19). This result fell just short of the usual standard for statistical significance, but the positive relationship between independent reading and reading proficiency is consistent with the results of in-school self- selected reading programs (Krashen, 2004).

“Library,” in table 3, means the percentage of school libraries in each country with over 500 books. This was a strong predictor of reading achievement. As was the case in Achterman’s study, the library predictor was nearly as strong as social class (similar to Achterman’s community factor).

The final predictor in table 5, instruction, means the average hours per week devoted to reading instruction in each country. According to our analysis, the effect of instruction was modest and negative, that is, more instruction tended to be related to lower performance on the reading test (beta = -.19). This predictor fell just short of statistical significance. It may be the case that a little reading instruction is beneficial, but after a point it is ineffective and counterproductive.

Table 5 indicates that r2 = .63: The four variables considered here account for 63% of the variability in reading test scores. In other words, if we know the SES level of a country, the percentage of children who do independent reading in school, the percentage of children who have access to a library of 500 books or more, and the amount of instruction, this is 63% of the information we need to predict their reading score. This r2 is quite high, and is similar to the r2 reported by Achterman.

Both Achterman’s and our results are consistent with the results of other studies showing that access to books from other sources can make up for the effect of poverty (Evans, Kelley, Sikora, and Treiman, 2010; Schubert and Becker, 2010).

Conclusion

A plausible explanation for the results of these studies and others is:

Access > FVR  > Literacy

There is very strong evidence supporting this formula: More access to books has been shown to lead to more self-selected reading and more self-selected reading leads to higher levels of literacy (Krashen, 2004). There is also substantial research connecting the ends of the formula: Better libraries are related to higher levels of literacy (Krashen, 2004; see especially studies by Keith Curry Lance and others at http://www.lrs.org/impact.php).

Those living in poverty have little access to books, which explains their low levels of literacy development. I suspect that this relationship will continue until ereaders and ebooks are far less expensive and far more available than they are now.  The library can supply this access immediately.

References

Achterman, D. 2008. Haves, Halves, and Have-Nots: School Libraries and Student Achievement in California. PhD dissertation, University of North Texas. http:// digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-9800:1

Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential:  Out-of-School Factors and School Success.  Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential

Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23 (2). http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_02/hung232.shtml;

Evans, M, Kelley, J. Sikora, J. and Treiman, D. (2010). Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 28 (2): 171-197.

Krashen, S., Lee, SY., and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is the library important? Multivariate studies at the national and international level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 8(1)? 26-36.

Perry, L. B. & McConney, A. (2010). Does the SES of the school matter? An examination of socioeconomic status and student achievement using PISA 2003. Teachers College Record, 112 (4).1137-1162.

Rothstein, R. (2010). How to fix our schools. Economic Policy Institute, Issue Brief #286. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ib286.

Schubert, F. and Becker, R. (2010). Social inequality of reading literacy: A longitudinal analysis with cross-sectional data of PIRLS 2001and PISA 2000 utilizing the pair wise matching procedure. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 29, 109-133.

Academic Jibberish

Stephen Krashen, RELC Journal. 43 (2): 283-285, 2012.

“Some scholars have slipped so far into the stylized talk – excuse me, discourse – of academia that important ideas are rendered virtually incomprehensible to most people. Because it sometimes seems that scholarship is valued by other academics in direct proportion to its inaccessibility, some individuals may have an instinctive aversion to writing in simple sentences even if they could remember how to do so.”(Aflie Kohn, 2003; Professors who profess. http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/professing.htm)


"It is better for one’s (academic) career to stay away from politics and wallow in the arcane world of departmental intrigue and academic jibberish." (Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class, p.126).

I think the situation is worse than what Alfie Kohn describes: A great deal of academic writing is incomprehensible even to others in the same area of scholarship. Academic Jibberish may score points for the writer but does not help research or practice. (I focus here on prose jibberish, but it occurs in statistical analyses as well, the use of statistical tests that go far beyond what is necessary and that often neglect what is necessary, e.g. means and standard deviations.)

Jibberish as a career strategy: it impresses those with little self-confidence

Some people think that if they don’t understand a lecture or text, it must be very profound, trusting the appearance rather than their own reaction.

A famous demonstration of this is the “Dr. Fox” study. Ware, Naftulin and Donnelly (1973) hypothesized that “given a sufficiently impressive lecture paradigm, even experienced educators participating in a new learning experience can be seduced into feeling satisfied that they have learned despite irrelevant, conflicting, and meaningless content conveyed by the lecturer.”

They hired a professional actor (“Dr. Myron Fox”), “who looked distinguished and sounded authoritative ... to teach charismatically and non-substantively on a topic about which he knew nothing” (Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education). His lecture contained “an excessive use of double talk, neologisms, non-sequiturs, and contradictory statements.”

In other words, he was trained to give a bogus lecture.

Three groups of health professionals involved in education heard the lecture, either live or on video-tape. The bogus lecture was very well-received: Questionnaires revealed that for all groups, there were significantly more favorable than unfavorable reactions. Subjective responses included: Excellent presentation. Enjoyed listening. Lively examples. His relaxed manner of presentation was a large factor in holding my interest. Extremely articulate.

The authors concluded that satisfaction with a lecturer does not necessarily reflect learning. My conjecture is that the audiences were not only impressed with the actor’s style, but also felt that he must be good because they didn’t understand what he was talking about.

Evidence supporting my interpretation comes from Nell (1988). Nell asked undergraduates, librarians and university lecturers in English literature to rate passages for their literary merit (e.g. from “trashiest trash” to “highest merit”) and reported positive correlations between merit ratings and readability (measured by the “Fog Index,” based on word and sentence length) for all groups. In other words, harder was associated with better.

Jibberish as a career strategy: It deflects criticism

My first inkling of the power of jibberish to deflect criticism occurred when I was a graduate student in 1971. At a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, one of my professors, Peter Ladefoged, was scheduled to give a 12-minute paper on an issue in phonetics. Before giving his presentation, Prof. Ladefoged announced that he would not take the full 12 minutes, but would instead summarize his points in seven minutes, in agreement with a resolution that had been passed by the society the day before. To do this, he said, he would not be able read his paper (this was the usual style of presentation) but would simply present his findings in ordinary talk.

Even though I was not a specialist in the area, Ladefoged’s talk was very clear; it was jibberish-free. He simply told us what he had done, illustrated his findings with slides, and discussed what the results meant for several important hypotheses. Ladefoged’s presentation was followed by far more discussion and more criticism (!!!) than any of the many talks I heard. His presentation was one of the few that his colleagues understood. I realized then that scholars take a big risk in making clear and comprehensible presentations (and in writing clearly).

Hedges (2010) accuses academics engaged in “radical analysis” of deliberately writing dense, long papers and publishing them in obscure journals and books, with “no attempt to to reach wider audience or enrich public life” (p. 125) in order to gain academic prestige and avoid risk: “As long as academics write in the tortured vocabulary of specialization for seminars and conferences, where they are unable to influence public debate, they are free to espouse any bizarre or ‘radical’ theory” (p.125).

The negative consequences of jibberish

An obvious negative consequence of papers filled with unnecessary prose and analyses is that they are a huge waste of time. But there are less obvious dangers.

There is the danger that readers will simply skip most of the dense prose and unnecessary statistical analyses and simply accept the conclusions, assuming that the conclusions must be right because the intimidating presentation. Thus, bad ideas have a better chance of surviving when protected by a mass of jibberish.

There is also the danger, as Alfie Kohn noted (see above), that some good ideas and important results will be lost when expressed as or buried in jibberish.

An observation

I close with this observation. Occasionally, a colleague will tell me that a presentation was brilliant and the speaker exceptional, when in the past, I have found the speaker to be nearly completely incomprehensible. When this happens, I ask my colleague to tell me what the speaker said. Invariably, my colleague can’t.

REFERENCES 

Hedges, C.
2010. Death of the Liberal Class.(New York: Nation Books).

Naftulin, D. H., Ware, J. E., & Donnelly, F. A.
1973. ‘The Doctor Fox Lecture: a paradigm of educational seduction’, Journal of Medical Education 48(7): 630-635.

http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r30034/PSY4180/Pages/Naftulin.html

Nell, V.
1988 The psychology of reading for pleasure: Needs and gratifications’. Reading Research Quarterly 33 (1): 6-50.

A Short Paper Proposing That We Need to Write Shorter Papers

Stephen Krashen, Language and Language Teaching 1,2: 38-39. 2012

When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are constructed.   Georg Christoph Lichtenberg  (1742-1799)

Our current journals in language education are full of long papers.  A typical journal might have, at most, five major papers. Sometimes we have to write long papers, but much of the time, it's unnecessary: the papers often contain long introductions more suitable for doctoral dissertations or review ("state of the art") papers, apparently designed to provide evidence that the author is well-read, and long conclusions, with a repetition of the findings and the author's detailed and lengthy speculations about what the results might mean for theory and application.

Readers of professional journals don’t need this. Introductions should only give enough to alert the reader to what the article is above, and provide a few citations in case the reader needs more information. If the articles cited in the introduction are readily available, readers are free to consult them, and a brief indication of implications is generally more than enough for experienced readers.  Also, if the results section is clear, no repetition of the findings is necessary in the conclusion.

Watson and Crick's Nobel Prize winning paper on the double helix was only one page. Their conclusion: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material" (p. 737).

Long papers drain intellectual energy from both readers and writers and waste their time.

They take longer to write, and much of the energy in writing them is dedicated to sections that don't engage the writer: Writing is a powerful tool to solve problems, and can result in substantial cognitive development (it can make you smarter), but to do this, the writing must be directed at a difficult problem (Langer and Applebee, 1987).  

Long papers take longer to read.  Even readers who try to skim long papers have to devote time and energy to find the essential parts, and run the danger of missing the details.

A Disservice to the Profession and to the Scholar

Too-long papers hurt the spread of knowledge in two ways: They waste our time in both reading and writing, and they promote sloppy reading.  Many readers are content just to read the abstract and perhaps the summary of technical papers, with a glance at a table. This means, of course, that significant details on methodology and the analysis, buried in the paper, are missed, and crucial points and often errors are perpetuated.

Too-long papers also take up space. A journal with five too-long papers could easily include 20 short papers. This space limitation hurts the dissemination of knowledge, because less genuine information is available, and makes it much harder for junior scholars to publish and to get tenure and promotion, especially when universities require publication in certain journals. This problem will be alleviated as more journals are done on the internet, of course.

Conclusion

Again, sometimes papers have to be long. But often they don't, and the problem is usually long introductions and conclusions that go far beyond the needs of the paper. 

Language education has clearly taken its tradition from the humanities, which favors dissertation-style prose, rather than the sciences, where papers are usually much shorter.

It is probably no coincidence that citation rates in the sciences are much higher: Hamilton (1991) reported that about 91% of papers published in atomic, molecular and chemical physics, and 86% in virology had been cited at least once. In language and linguistics, only 20% had been cited and in American literature, less than 1%.

References

Watson, J. and Crick, F. 1953. A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, Nature 171, 737-738.

Hamilton, D. 1991. Research papers: Who's united now? Science 251: 25.

Langer, J. and Applebee, A. 1987. How Writing Shapes Thinking. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

STEM Fever

Maybe We Should Stem the Panic and Consider Needs
Published in the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 9, 2014

Ms. Stotksy thinks that all high school  students should be required to take trigonometry and precalculus to be ready for the brave new world of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.

Even if the STEM crisis were real, this is not a good idea. Of course, advanced math classes should be offered, but there is no reason to require them of everybody: Michael Handel of Northeastern University has concluded that only about 10% of the work force uses math beyond algebra II. 

Also, it is not clear that the crisis is real. It is not clear that there is a compelling need for more STEM workers. Some studies conclude that there are too many qualified candidates. Rutgers University professor Hal Salzman has reported that there are approximately three qualified graduates annually for each science or technology opening, and recent studies have also shown the United States is producing more Ph.D.s in science than the market can absorb.

Stephen Krashen

original article: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304020704579278060483138096


Some sources:
Math in work force: Handel, M. 2010. What do people do at work? OECD, forthcoming. Available at www.northeastern.edu/socant/wp-content/.../STAMP_OECD2a_edit2.doc‎
Three graduates for each opening:
Salzman, H. & Lowell, B. L. 2007. Into the Eye of the Storm: Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1034801
Salzman, H. and Lowell, L. 2008. Making the grade. Nature 453 (1): 28-30.
Salzman, H. 2012. No Shortage of Qualified American STEM Grads (5/25/12) http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-foreign-stem-graduates-get-green-cards/no-shortage-of-qualified-american-stem-grads.
See also:
Teitelbaum, M. 2007. Testimony before the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation. Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC, November 6, 2007
More Ph.D's than the market can absorb: Weissman, Jordan. The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists—in 7 Charts. The Atlantic, Feb 20, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-bust-americas-awful-market-for-young-scientists-in-7-charts/273339/



The common core ignores the evidence

Sent to the Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2013

Al Austin, in his letter to the Times (Jan 2) notes that the common core calls for "a sharp reduction" in literature in schools in favor of increased exposure to informational text.

This policy was created without any empirical evidence. The common core designers ignored  (or were not aware of) not only studies showing that reading literature contributes to an "enhanced theory of mind," described in the Times by Robert Sapolsky ("Another use for literature," Dec. 29) but also the massive amount of published research showing that self-selected "lighter" reading (largely fiction) contributes powerfully to literacy development (reading ability, vocabulary, grammar, spelling) and supplies the foundation for the reading of challenging texts.

Stephen Krashen

original articles:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-le-0102-thursday-literature-mind-20140102,0,6884773.story#axzz2pH5o2Ugw
 http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-sapolsky-theory-of-mind-20131229,0,2431766.story#axzz2pH5o2Ugw

Japan's 2020 push to English: A suggestion to the "panel of experts"

Sent to the Japan Times, Dec. 31, 2013.

Experts have criticized Japan's reform plan for English for not including enough hours of English instruction to accomplish its goals and have also noted the lack of resources and staffing ("English to get 2020 push but teachers not on the same page," Dec. 31, 2013).

There is an easy way to help solve both of these problems and ensure that growth in English will continue after students finish school: Invest in libraries and promote recreational reading. 
Study after study shows that self-selected pleasure reading results in profound gains in vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and writing style in first and second languages.  Also, reading can be so pleasant that students are often eager to do it on their own. Many of these studies have been done with those acquiring English as a second language in Japan, and they have been published in scholarly journals all over the world. 

I hope that the panel of experts about to be created by the Ministry will study the work of some of the prominent scholars in Japan who have done quality research in this area, including Beniko Mason, David Beglar, and Atsuko Takase.  Prof. Mason has reported that older English acquirers who develop a reading habit in English make impressive gains on the TOEIC, even without any extra English classes.  (One of her subjects was in his 70's!)

Stephen Krashen

Original article:  http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/12/31/national/english-to-get-2020-push-but-teachers-not-on-same-page/#.UsODxfaxPhM

Sources:
Mason, B. (2011). Impressive gains on the TOEIC after one year of comprehensible input, with no output or grammar study. The International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 7(1). Available at IJFLT.com.
Mason, B. (2013). Substantial gains in listening and reading ability in English as a second language from voluntary listening and reading in a 75 year old student. International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 8(1). Available at IJFLT.com