Latest News and Comment from Education

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

We’re boring our kids in school: This easy reform will actually help them learn - Salon.com

We’re boring our kids in school: This easy reform will actually help them learn - Salon.com:

We’re boring our kids in school: This easy reform will actually help them learn




 Excerpted from "The Game Believes in You"

In 1967, media critic Marshall McLuhan predicted that within two decades, technology would make school unrecognizable. “As it is now, the teacher has a ready-made audience,” he wrote. “He is assured of a full house and a long run. Those students who don’t like the show get flunking grades.” But if students were given the choice to get their information elsewhere, he predicted, “the quality of the experience called education will change drastically. The educator then will naturally have a high stake in generating interest and involvement for his students.”
McLuhan was right about one thing: students can now get much of their information elsewhere. Many young people “are now deeply and permanently technologically enhanced,” said business and education consultant Marc Prensky—his observation will hit home to anyone who has watched teenagers sit in a Starbucks, wait in line at a Walgreens checkout stand, or attend a family function. But in school, those who don’t like the show still get flunking grades. However, these students have a vision of something different. They now have the experience, outside of school, of diving into worlds that are richer and more relevant than anything they get in school. There’s a technical term for this phenomenon, in which someone sees the possibilities that lie just out of reach but must spend time doing lesser things. It’s called boredom, or as theologian Paul Tillich once described it, “rage spread thin.”
In spite of our teachers’ heroic efforts, our schools are fighting a losing battle with boredom. Indiana University’s High School Survey of Student Engagement finds that 65 percent of students report being bored “at least every day in class.” Sixteen percent—nearly one in six students—are bored in every class.
Perhaps school, for all its efforts, simply isn’t challenging enough. In a 2006 study of high school dropouts, eight in ten said they did less than an hour of homework per night. Two-thirds said they would have worked harder if more had been demanded of them. When American journalist Amanda Ripley in 2013 surveyed hundreds of exchange students from around the world, she found that nine out of ten international students who spent time in the United States said classes were easier here; of the American teenagers who had studied abroad, seven out of ten agreed. “School in America was many things, but it was not, generally speaking, all that challenging,” she wrote. “The evidence suggests that we’ve been systematically underestimating what our kids can handle, especially in math and science.”
This is all happening at what is probably the worst time for our fortunes as a nation. Recent high-profile international comparisons show that our kids are falling behind others in places like Finland and Singapore in skills and knowledge. But in the long run, our kids care less about competing with Finland than about having schools that challenge them and engage their interest. While games haven’t yet improved schools in any kind of systematic way, that could soon change. A generation of teachers who learned division with Math Blaster, history with The Oregon Trail, and the principles of urban planning with SimCity now see games as just another tool, like a calculator. Each spring, Baby Boomer teachers are retiring by the thousands. Their young replacements, born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, well after the dawn of the home video-game console, have never known a world without video games. Among students, only 3 percent don’t play games.
The shift has happened quietly, but it has been complete. When she went to college in the fall of 1990, journalist Megan McArdle believed that any freshman who brought his game system with him “would have been essentially announcing that he did not plan to have sex for the next four years. Now the consoles proudly sit in the living rooms of thirtysomething homeowners.”
How different is the present moment? In 2012, the Educational Testing Service, the folks who bring you the SAT, formed a partnership with, among others, the video game giant Electronic Arts, the folks who bring you Madden NFL, Mass Effect, and Battlefield 3. The result is an experimental nonprofit dubbed the Games, Learning and Assessment Lab, or GlassLab, which is creating educational versions of commercial video-game titles with deep learning analytics under the hood. Based at Electronic Arts’ Silicon Valley We’re boring our kids in school: This easy reform will actually help them learn - Salon.com: