Merit Software Dispatch
views and opinions regarding education and technology
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A new study finds that those students’ who text regularly improve their literacy skills. The researchers say text language uses word play and requires an awareness of how sounds relate to written English.
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The American Council of Education, publishers of the GED exam, announced that it is planning a new test called GED 20/20.
The Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy (CAAL) last month released a new report, The Power of Technology to Transform Adult Learning.
The U.S. Department of Education has issued additional guidance for its upcoming $650 million Investing in Innovation (i3) grants.
Students learn more effectively when they make mistakes while trying to figure out the correct answers to questions, according to researchers profiled in the latest issue of Scientific American.
Reorganizing priorities to strengthen adolescent literacy skills is critical for the U.S. education system to succeed, according to a new, comprehensive report from the Carnegie Corporation.
Preventing the “summer slide,” where students lose skills and knowledge during the vacation break — and which, research shows, can severely affect the academic progress of disadvantaged students is very important.
During the summer break students can maintain their skills, and even improve them, with Merit interactive programs.
At the Merit web site educators will find products that will help keep students fresh so they will be ready to learn when school resumes.
When students working with educational software get stymied, they often try to find fault with the computer or the software.
The Center for Educational Policy (CEP) just announced a new report about the impact of the NCLB on the classroom.
The study found that in schools in need of improvement teachers are more likely than those in higher-achieving schools to ask students questions with one or a few right answers.
Conversely, teachers in high-achieving schools are more likely to take an almost 180-degree, opposite, approach.
They use more open-ended teaching strategies such as leading class discussions, hands-on activities, reading aloud and learning centers.
Is it just us, or is this strange? Sadly, it appears that when faced with the reality of harsh penalties, administrators had their teachers “teach to the test.”
Before switching away from time-tested, open-ended teaching strategies to try to boost test scores, we believe struggling schools should give their teachers the tools they need to make their classrooms more effective and engaging.
Teachers in low-achieving schools need tools to help provide personalized instruction, promote a deeper understanding of the curriculum, and help manage classroom behavior.
These tools should also be intuitive and easy to learn to use. Tools like Merit Software.
Merit helps teachers scaffold instruction while implementing open-ended, in-class, teaching strategies. It also frees up teachers’ time to provide extra individual instruction or work in small groups.
These benefits happen to align to another finding in the study — that teachers in low-achieving schools want to spend class time modeling instruction and working in small groups.
In particular, Merit’s Punch writing programs, including Paragraph Punch and Book Punch, provide step-by-step instruction to help students learn how to answer open-ended questions.
Because the Punch writing programs support a wide range of skills and expressions, more students can participate in class.
Randomized control group research conducted on Merit shows that this approach improves student achievement and test scores — without teaching to the test.
The sample size in the CEP study was very small. It was not possible to try to determine statistical differences between high and low achieving schools.
However, the findings do suggest that instructional practices do vary among schools with different levels of achievement.
Should low-achieving schools continue teaching to the test? What’s your opinion?
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