What increases the performance of the school?

We all know that smaller classes, uniforms and primary homework ways of stimulating schools performance. Or are they? Not according to a recent report from the Sutton Trust. In fact, include reduction of classes, homework during elementary school, and the introduction of school uniforms to the least effective ways to improve school results.

Look at class sizes they found that the benefits, "are not particularly large or clear, until class size is reduced to under 20 or even under 15".

Another myth seems to be that more classroom assistants rental is effective. This is contrary to what most teachers think like 44% said that hiring more assistants one of their three top priorities. The report says that hiring more assistants associated with being "very little or no impact on the achievement".

Significant gains in achievement meanwhile come from proven classroom approaches-efficient feedback on student performance, to think about their own strategies for students to encourage learning, and getting students to learn from each other. Properly implemented, these approaches students performance by an additional eight or nine months in a year of school for a very low cost, according to the Guide.

Key findings include:

On effective feedback-"even a study estimates that the consequences of the rapid feedback on learning is 124 times more cost effective that reducing class sizes."

On peer tutoring – "benefits are obvious for both tutor and tutee, although the approach should be used for filling or normal education improve, rather than replaced."

On meta cognitive approaches – "Studies report significant gains equal to a class of 50th place in a ranking of 100 schools to around 25."

On homework-is "worth more on the high school level and much less effective for children in the primary school age."

On assistants-"most studies have consistently found very little or no impact on the achievement."

On school uniforms-will "no robust evidence that the introduction of a school uniform improve academic performance."

On the reduction of class sizes-"on the whole, the benefits are not particularly large or clear, until class size reduced to under 20 or even among 15."

On one-to-one tuition – "pupils can improve by about 4 or 5 months during the program, but costs are high, because the support intensive."

About ability grouping "there may be some benefits to higher achieving students, but these are largely offset by the negative effects on attitudes of Middle and lower performing students."

The full report can be found at:

The Sutton Trust

Cycles of time

Today's Wall Street Journal has a review I wrote of Sir Roger Penrose of new book cycles of time. The revision focuses on a much wider audience than this blog, and is the product of substantial edit to edit the length to get started and make it as readable as possible for as many people possible, so here are a few additional comments.

I must make it clear that I'm not convinced by what Penrose proposes. He must be the distant future of the universe to be conformally invariant, and all particles are massless. As far as we the electron is completely stable, with unchanging mass, and this will always ruin Conformal invariance. Penrose itself takes note of the problem. For this to be overcome, what is our ultimate understanding of how particles get mass change so that these masses to zero in the future. It is also seems to me that the Conformal anomaly of QCD will always be a problem, with quantization and renormalization group always Conformal invariance break and give a mass scale, indefinitely far in the future.

The other main problem is shared by most of the "pre-big-bang" ideas: how you ever test them? Penrose and a co-worker last year created a stir by claiming to see in the CMB patterns of the species he argues can be expected from black hole lapses late in an era before the Big Bang, but it's not clear there is a real prediction here, and others who have redone this analysis say they see nothing.

Attempts to create a Big Bang in our past and our future in General seems to me to be motivated by a very human desire to see in the global structure of the universe the same cyclical pattern of death and rebirth which human existence. For me, however, deeper understanding of the universe unexpected structures, fascinating precisely because of how strange to human concerns and experience. Just because we may have a cold, empty universe means an unattractive future not that that is not where things are headed.

The book is in many ways an unusual document. It includes a comprehensive annex from some of the details of the mathematics of his proposal to work. He has managed to make a trade publisher to get out of a highly technical discussion of a speculative idea within the covers of a popular book, instead of the usual route of publishing this in a refereed journal, in a sense. The only references I can find to other places where he some of this up are chapters in this book and this, if this contribution to a Conference procedure has written. The technical idea behind this, that the hypothesis of the disappearance of the Weyl curvature in the early universe which leads to possible cosmological models can be extended along the big bang singularity that he this paper of K.P. Tod attributes. There is a nice recent exposition of this by Tod here.

So, I'm not convinced by the speculation about the distant future, and for an evaluation of the ideas about extending back through the big bang singularity you need someone more expert on Cosmology than I do. These topics are very clearly marked in the book as speculative, without the support of other physicists or experimental evidence. The largest part of the book is all other material to provide a background and context the speculation, and that's what I think makes the most valuable as a popular book. Penrose is a beautiful, elegant and clear writer, and he handles a lot of ground about physics beautifully here. Most notable are the illustrations, by far the best visual representations of a series of important ideas that I know of. Physicists and mathematicians working with many internal pictures in their minds that important aspects of the concepts that they investigate, but very rarely do they have the technical skill to understand some of the essence of these photos and them down on paper. Even more rarely they make it in wide distribution in print, so I'm glad to see you here.

This entry was posted on Friday, may 27, 2011 at 11: 52 am and is filed under book reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Source of the Week: 6 year mathematics challenge

Here is a bit tricky puzzle that is 6 years or upper juniors (9/11). Ideal for wet breaks!

Use only the digits 1 through 9 complete correct the number of sentences, both horizontally and vertically, so they all are.

A good knowledge of tables is needed, along with the ability to add and subtract mentally.

The hardest part of this puzzle is getting started and the best approach is to use process and improvement by picking one row or column that can have only a limited number of opportunities. This wouldn't be the first row or column down.

This particular puzzle to look at the first row is a x b – c = 34. Start by watching combinations of numbers that when multiplied, more than 34 (but no more than 43 if the maximum subtraction is 9) and then see what number can be subtracted to leave 34.

An important note about this: all calculations are done in the following order: Bodmas is not applicable.

1-9 (1A)

Read, write, and ordering numbers on level 1

Mathematics level 1 to reach children must be able to recognize the number up to 20 names, they say clear and they write. They will be counting forward and backward to 20, beginning with an integer.

To make this happen that the figures should be clearly displayed on a wall which they can often be referenced. Every opportunity must be given to the count on and back in practical situations, around the House, in the kitchen, in the supermarket, in the car, etc. There are many games where counting and dice. Number of lines and number of tracks are really useful; pointing at each number before it is said while counting up and down. Eventually the song track can be visualized in a the main child, help with quick mental arithmetic.

Herlp with all this I have a good selection of worksheets for counting:

Front Desk

Year 1

and year 2, who will help with this process.