 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Solid curriculum called a smart move Study gives it equal weight with family background Friday, February 08, 2002 By Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Education Writer
Conventional wisdom -- backed by numerous studies -- usually points to family as the leading predictor of academic success.
But the preliminary results of a new study of international math and science test results -- including southwestern Pennsylvania schools -- show that curriculum has a similarly strong effect on achievement.
William Schmidt, distinguished professor of applied statistics at Michigan State University, yesterday said that school districts that want to improve can have the biggest impact if they add rigor and coherence to their curricula.
Schmidt is executive director of the U.S. National Research Center for the Third International Math and Science Study, a test known as TIMSS. The most recent version was given randomly to eighth-graders in 1999 in 38 countries.
Schmidt presented his initial findings yesterday at the Carnegie Science Center at a conference for educators sponsored by the Math & Science Collaborative of Southwest Pennsylvania. The collaborative also released a 184-page regional benchmarking report detailing how the region compares with others who took the TIMSS tests.
Schmidt found the highest levels of achievement took place where parental education was the highest. Southwestern Pennsylvania fell roughly in the middle.
He also found that student achievement was highest where teachers emphasized algebra the most in math. Again, southwestern Pennsylvania fell roughly in the middle.
Schmidt said that low-income students are not always exposed to a rigorous curriculum whereas well-to-do parents demand it. He believes a set of national standards -- describing what students in all schools should learn -- would lead to a better curriculum and a better performance.
He estimated that strong curricula could cut in half the differences in academic performance caused by social class.
While poverty often is linked to low academic performance in the United States, the TIMSS results found that some relatively poor countries had high performance. Schmidt said that the major differences between countries are the curricula.
Schmidt said two major problems with curricula are a lack of coherence and rigor. Coherence means that a curriculum follows logically, year after year. Rigor means offering tough courses.
A coherent curriculum has students learning concepts that build one another and form the structure of a discipline. He said some students are taught science and math as an "arbitrary collection of topics" and never learn the structures of the disciplines.
A review of science topics covered in southwestern Pennsylvania showed that there was no one topic that most schools covered in the same grade. "Science seems to be in need of some kind of vision," he said.
In math, southwestern Pennsylvania came closer to the structure in top-performing countries, but Schmidt said some of the more advanced topics were missing. "You're not taking them far enough," he said.
A rigorous curriculum has students taking algebra in the eighth grade. While some countries provide algebra to all students in eighth grade, many students in southwestern Pennsylvania don't get it even by the end of high school.
If the region wants to become a top performer in science, Schmidt said, the curriculum must move to the "heart and core of physics and chemistry and not what people call physical science, but real physics and real chemistry."
Schmidt thinks that much education reform tinkers with the edges rather than going to the heart of the curriculum.
Schmidt is not publishing his results until they are final, but the full regional benchmarking report is available at www.msc.collaboratives.org by clicking on "research."
|
||||||||
