The Johns Hopkins Universtiy Center for Talented Youth is accepting registration for this year’s CTY Talent Search. The search identifies, assesses, and recognizes students with exceptional mathematical and/or verbal reasoning abilities.

Based on test results, students may qualify for participation in CTY s summer or online courses, the CTY language immersion program, or the CTY Civic Leadership Institute.

Applicants must be in grades two through eight (or grade equivalents for home-schooled students). Last year, approximately 63,000 students enrolled in the CTY Talent Search. Information about the appllication process, fees, and deadines is available in the organization’s FAQ.

Help end world hunger while you build your vocabulary, practice multiplication, review chemistry symbols, and more. FreeRice.com has the questions. For every right answer you provide, a featured sponsor will donate 10 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program. I donated over 1,000 grains of rice, and learned a few new words (aphonia, prevarication, jocose, coccoid) before I knew it!

“WARNING: This game may make you smarter.
It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance…”

The non-profit FreeRice website is run by the United Nations World Food Program in partnership with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Subject areas include english vocabulary and grammar, math, science, geography, famous paintings, and world languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish).

All parents can relate to the difficulty of tutoring ones own kids. A couple of reasons for the challenge together with some ideas of how to improve make it worth checking out Why Parents Don’t Make Great Tutors for Their Kids in the Wall Street Journal.

Most times when I try to teach my children something – how to mow the lawn, do a budget or clean a toilet – I feel as if I have a positive or at least a neutral effect – with one big exception.

When I have tried to tutor my children in school, or simply help with homework, I often feel like Typhoid Mary. In most cases I have managed only to confuse them.

“Students do much better when they believe that doing well is a function of hard work as opposed to innate talent.”

Why do some kids put forth little effort in school while others are motivated to achieve their personal best?

Over the past two decades, the main goal of Brainology, co-founded by Carols S. Dweck, Ph.D. and Lisa Sorich Blackwell, Ph.D., has been to discover what helps students achieve highly, and to apply the lessons learned toward improving motivation and achievement. Their research shows that developing a growth mindset — the core belief that abilities are malleable and not fixed — is critical to the adoption of learning-oriented behavior.

It turns out that beliefs and attitudes held by students have a strong influence on their achievement. In particular, students who believe that intelligence is something they can develop, engage in more effort-based strategies by working harder and spending more time on a subject as opposed to giving up.

Brainology research shows that students who embrace a growth mindset:

• believe their ability can be increased and value learning as a goal, even when it involves hard work or initial errors.
• feel that they have the ability, through their own efforts, to learn and master new material.
• identify difficulties as being due to lack of effort or inadequate strategy; not intelligence.

When students with a growth mindset have difficulty in a subject, they draw constructive, mastery-oriented conclusions and respond with positive, effort-based strategies. In one study, math students who believed their intelligence to be malleable performed better than equally able students who viewed their intelligence as fixed.

But how do students develop a growth mindset in the first place? The answer, at least in big part, is PRAISE. To determine the magnitude praise has on a child’s mindset, a group of researchers pulled fifth-graders out of class to take some simple puzzle tests. Following the test, each child received his or her score and was randomly given one line of praise for either intelligence (“You must be smart at this”) or effort (“You must have worked really hard”).

The students were then asked to choose a second test — another easy test similar to the first or a more challenging test where they would learn a lot. Of the children who were praised for effort, ninety percent chose the harder test while the majority who were praised for intelligence opted for the easy test.

The researchers continued the experiment by administering a third test far above the children’s grade level. As expected, the students performed poorly. However, those praised for effort on the original test tried various strategies to solve the puzzles and said they enjoyed the process. The students initially praised for intelligence were unhappy and assumed they just weren’t smart enough.

Following the artificial failure, the fifth graders were given an easy round of testing. On this final test, the students praised for effort improved their score by about 30 percent, whereas the “smart” group did worse by about 20 percent.

According to Dweck, “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

New York Magazine’s article, How to Talk to Your Kids, delves further into this fascinating study and relates the results to additional research in the field. It also talks about the positive achievement which occurred when a group of students were taught that, with learning, the cells of their brain develop new connections and existing connections become stronger. Details on this intervention can also be found on The Science page at Brainology.

For further reading on how to develop a growth mindset in your personal or professional life, visit Carol Dweck’s Mindset website.

If Robin Hood were around today, would he steal from Google and give to schools? Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Over the last two years, TeamUP! Tutors has spent over $100,000 on Google Adwords advertising. Now, rather than pay Google for web surfers’ clicks, we want to make that money available to schools.

Whenever a newly referred client completes their initial tutoring package, TeamUP! Tutors will give 10% of the package price back to the student’s school. Referrals come from clients, teachers, and PTAs. To make it even easier to get the word out, we’ve created a fundraising kit.

A school can make $1,000s of dollars on tutoring: a purchase parents are already making. Start spreading the news!

“Everyone knows the ultimate purpose of public education is to ensure that all children learn how to use their minds well.”

Seems the Rethink Learning Now campaign, launched September 8, 2009, would have been hard pressed to come up with a less original or more obvious idea. But, if it’s so obvious, why isn’t every school doing it?

Today, too many schools still reflect an Industrial-age philosophy about the proper management of human beings. In fact, although schools have changed some in the last one hundred years, most are still organized to impart a largely fact-based, rote-oriented curriculum through structures that do not allow long-term teacher-student relationships or in-depth study.

We can end the nationwide culture of testing, and create a national culture of learning instead. And we can start to do so by reflecting on what we already know to be true about powerful learning, seeing which elements are most essential to those experiences, and then holding ourselves and our elected officials accountable for supporting policies that empower educators to create those sorts of learning environments for all children.

Supported by leading education advocates, civil rights groups, professional networks and philanthropic organizations, the Rethink Learning Now campaign invites parents, educators, elected officials, and young people to share learning experiences and identify the attributes that made those experiences successful.

The campaign is currently working to establish clarity around its core objectives: powerful learning, highly-effective teaching, and a system that is committed to ensuring fairness. The next step is to use qualitative data to create specific proposals that help build healthy, productive learning environments.

According to Sam Chaltain, national director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, “As the number of stories grows over time, we’ll see which attributes appear most often across people’s experiences. The purpose is to focus the country’s attention on powerful learning, and on the core conditions that best support it, so that all of us can be more prepared to ask our lawmakers, our President, and our local communities to institute reforms based more clearly on what young people need in order to thrive and stay in school.”

Yesterday, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell released California’s 2008-09 Accountability Progress Report (APR), stating “For the seventh year in a row schools at every level have made real progress toward the statewide API target of 800, and almost half of our elementary schools have met or exceeded this goal. The API results also show a slight narrowing of the achievement gap that historically has left Hispanic or Latino and African American students trailing behind their peers who are white or Asian.”

The report shows that more than half of California’s schools have yet to reach the state’s benchmark for english and math proficiency while forty-two percent are now at or above the overall statewide target API of 800, up six percentage points from the year before. This includes 48 percent of elementary schools, 36 percent of middle schools, and 21 percent of high schools.

The APR provides results for state’s the Academic Performance Index (API), a numeric index that measures year-to-year improvement and provides incentives to educators to support students at all performance levels; the federal Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), which focuses solely on whether or not students are scoring at the proficient level or above on state assessments; and the federal Program Improvement (PI). Both the API and AYP are based upon results from the state’s Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) Program and from the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE).

Schools, school districts, and county offices of education that receive federal Title I funds and do not make AYP criteria for two consecutive years are subject to Program Improvement (PI). For the 2009-10 school year, 675 schools were newly identified for PI two and one-half times the number newly identified in 2008-09. Fifty-four schools exited from PI after making AYP for two consecutive years. Schools in PI must provide interventions, such as tutoring and other supplemental education services, to eligible students.

“America’s middle and high schools are stuck in the 20th century, using outmoded approaches to prepare students for a world that no longer exists.”

As children move into middle school, reading logs become a thing of the past. Teachers no longer demand students read 20-30 minutes a day; instead they give a vague reminders to “keep a book with you at all times.”

Somewhere along the lines, an assumption was made that tweens have been taught to read and have established a habit of reading that will grow with ability. A job well done. But not every child finds reading easy or pleasurable and many put down their books as the distractions of adolescence take over.

Today’s report from Carnegie Corporation of New York pinpoints adolescent literacy as a cornerstone of the current education reform movement. Time To Act [pdf] emphasizes that “good early literacy instruction is only a foundation, not the whole structure.” The report provides concrete recommendations that educators can implement to re-engineer literacy instruction across the curriculum in order to drive student achievement in all subjects.

The study shows achievement in reading for fourth-graders at the highest point in thirty-three years, while over the same period, a marked stagnation in the literacy achievement of adolescents. On a brighter note, the researchers claim middle school literacy deterioration is not inevitable, and present initiatives to promote student improvement even as word, sentence, and conceptual complexity increase.

Concrete examples are offered on how to redesign schools and promote excellence in all content areas through a renewed focus on literacy. Specifically, Time To Act recommends the nation:

1. give teachers literacy-focused instructional tools and formative assessments
2. encourage schools and districts to collect and use information about student literacy performance more efficiently
3. call upon state-level leaders to maximize the use of limited resources for literacy efforts in a strategic way.

“Addressing the literacy gap that emerges in middle school is a key element in driving forward national education reform efforts,” stated Andres Henriquez, program officer of CCNY’s Advancing Literacy Initiative. “This requires schools to provide improved literacy instruction in all content areas, particularly to those who struggle, as well as continual assessments of needs and progress.”

The authors are emphatic that literacy goals can be met, and remind educators about the many at-risk schools and students that have already beaten the odds. Time to Act is released with five corresponding reports which delve deeper into how to advance literacy and learning for all students, including such topics as the cost of implementing adolescent literacy programs and reading in the disciplines.

“As schools consider how to re-engineer to meet the demands of the 21st century, they must also establish a culture of literacy,” stated Vartan Gregorian, president of CCNY. “Integrating literacy instruction across the curriculum is critical for students to master the skills required for college and careers.”

Whether you have a child in kindergarten or well into the high school year, The New York Times’ online College Cost Calculator allows parents to estimate future college costs. With higher education prices increasing faster than the rate of inflation, this is one calculation you won’t want to ignore. Just be sure you’re sitting down for the total!

When State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell released results for the 2008-09 high school exit exam on September 2, he was “pleased to see that these results show that California’s high school students are continuing to meet the challenge of higher expectations.” This despite the fact that nearly 1 in 10 of California’s class of 2009 did not receive a passing score.

Approximately 90.6 percent, or 432,900 students, in the Class of 2009 successfully passed both the English-language arts and mathematics portions of the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE) by the end of their senior year. The remaining 45,015 students, who did not meet the requirement due to failing one or both parts of the CAHSEE, are eligible to continue to take the test and earn a high school diploma.

O’Connell stated, “It is vitally important that young people know and understand the subject matter tested on the high school exit exam whether they are heading to college or directly into the workforce. The CAHSEE helps us ensure that each student is prepared with the critical basic skills needed for future success.”

An increasing percentage of students are passing the exit exam on their first opportunity in the tenth grade: 79.2 percent of the Class of 2011 has already passed the English-language arts portion, compared to 77.1 percent of tenth graders in the Class of 2008. In mathematics, the passage rate for first-time test taker has increased to 79.8 percent, an increase of 4.3 percent over the Class of 2008.

The achievement gap, however, makes clear that the pubic education system is continuing to fail large numbers of primarily black and Latino students. By the end of their senior year, the cumulative passing rate for African American students was 81.4 percent; Hispanic or Latino students, 86.6 percent; Asian students, 95.3 percent; and white students, 95.9 percent.

For complete results by subgroup, please refer to the tables provided by the California Department of Education.