Socrato Learning Analytics Blog » Intelligence

The Socratic Method in Tutoring

Scott Cronenweth — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:35:02 +0000

One of the oldest and most powerful teaching techniques is simply to guide the learner by asking directed questions. This basic tutoring approach is sometimes referred to as the Socratic Method or the “inquiry method.”

The idea behind this approach is that providing answers upfront puts the learner in a passive role of receiving information. Whereas an interrogative approach inherently fosters a self-directed thought process, through which learners can arrive at their own conclusions and build knowledge, versus simply receiving information.

Of course, many times students – especially adults in my experience — would prefer that you simply give them the information. And certainly that’s appropriate at times. The benefit of the inquiry method is that it helps learners “train their brains” to develop the capacity and confidence to reason out solutions and make neural and cognitive connections that will help keep them moving forward.

The ability to connect what we know to what we are trying to figure out is especially helpful with math and writing problems, such as on standardized tests. Beyond the realm of solving specific problems, the inquiry method helps learners engage with, and develop genuine interest in, the bigger picture that surrounds the specifics. I really like this professional tutor’s explanation of how and why the inquiry method works.

I often lead trips and walks for kids and adults who are new to birdwatching. In that context I enjoy taking the role of a “mentor” asking questions versus “the expert” dispensing facts. For example, when we’re observing herons and egrets in the local salt marsh, I love to ask, “Why do you think Snowy Egrets have yellow feet?” Kids get right into this but it usually drives adults crazy! But as they guess and ponder, with the help of a few additional questions everyone quickly realizes the amazing answer: the birds use their feet as fishing lures. We can even observe them doing this! What does that say about avian intelligence, or about evolution? The difference between an answer and a question is the difference between “uh-huh” and the natural world opening up…

Now here’s a question: is the inquiry method and the Socratic Method really the same thing? Or are there many different styles of inquiry oriented tutoring that end up being called the “Socratic Method” by default? Max Maxwell offers an historically grounded, in-depth explication of what defines the Socratic Method as Socrates, Plato and their lineage of students applied it. Wikipedia also offers a broad and engaging discourse on the topic. This author refers to the generic approach of the “inquiry method” as “Socratic questioning.”

And then there’s the “dreaded Socratic Method” as an instructional style in law school classrooms. Also called the “case method” or “Socratic instruction,” it entails direct questioning and limited lecturing. The idea is that students must prepare in advance not to regurgitate the facts of a case, but to reason beyond the presenting issues to the broader implications. Again, the goal is to build critical reasoning skills and the confidence to apply them under pressure – whether in a courtroom or on a standardized test.

In researching this topic I also appreciated the viewpoint of this Air Force officer, who applies a highly goal-oriented Socratic approach to improve performance and leadership skills among military personnel. While this context may not constitute tutoring per se, the article offers experiential insights of value to educators who want to take their own inquiry methods to a higher level.

For many tutors, it probably isn’t essential or optimal to adhere to a strict application of an “inquiry method.” Rather, the mode of asking questions in response to questions might ideally be viewed as a way to keep learning light and fun, and learners engaged and open. Where you want to take it in your tutoring practice is up to you.

Are you using a Socratic approach in your tutoring practice? How did you learn it and how do you advise others to build these useful interrogative skills? Please comment and share your experiences and advice.

Featured image courtesy of Brújulo.

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Awareness of Learning Disabilities in Students

Scott Cronenweth — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:31:04 +0000

With the new school year comes new student-tutor relationships and new challenges for tutors and learners. Now is a good time for tutors to raise their awareness of learning disabilities and how to spot them. The support and encouragement of a caring tutor can make a big difference in a child’s success.

As you probably know, learning disabilities (sometimes called learning disorders) are not problems with intelligence per se. Often they’re related to how the learner’s brain receives, processes and/or communicates information.

Children with learning disabilities may have trouble processing information in the typical way because they perceive and understand the world differently. According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, approximately 15 million children, teens and adults in the US are learning-disabled.

If you’re sensing what seems like a lack of motivation or focus in a student, he or she may have learning challenges. Adults frequently report that learning-disabled students “don’t try hard enough,” “choose not to pay attention,” or lack motivation.

As a tutor, it’s most important to provide emotional and educational support to the best of your ability. The key for tutors is to recognize that learning-disabled kids need your help to learn how to be focused and motivated. How you respond to a child can have a big impact on their learning success.

Among the best ways you can support a struggling student is to show them step-by-step how to deal with learning obstacles. A positive attitude instills confidence, fosters self-esteem and builds hope in a positive outcome. Many famously successful people, such as Walt Disney and Tommy Hilfiger, have coped successfully with learning issues.

Tutors can further support struggling learners through advocacy. Talk with parents and teachers about what you’re seeing. Your observations could be important in getting special help for a child in need.

Teachers, tutors, tutoring companies and schools can also make use of learning analytics in combination with achievement tests or other standardized tests. Learning analytics can help educators gain insight into the learning strengths and weaknesses of students, as well as to develop personalized learning strategies for those with learning challenges.

Of course, it takes considerable knowledge and experience to diagnosing a specific type of learning disability. Kids can have a range of problems with language, math and/or writing, as well as auditory and/or visual information processing.

While many learning disabilities are noticed in elementary school, others (such as some nonverbal learning disabilities or NVLD) might not be spotted until the middle school years. As maturing children are called on to do things like comprehending abstractions and deeper meanings in literature, or navigating larger buildings and campuses on their own, problems they’ve been compensating for can manifest. Middle-school students with NVLD can also have difficulties with their increasingly complex social scene.

Here are some of the more helpful sources I found on the subject of supporting a student who might potentially have a learning disability:

HelpGuide.org – a non-profit, ad-free information resource regarding physical and emotional health challenges
The National Center for Learning Disabilities’ LD Insights blog
Girlshealth.gov has an easy-to-digest list of common types of learning disabilities.
Scholastic.com offered a useful article on NVLD

Do you have insights to offer from your work with learning-disabled children? Please comment and share your experiences.

Featured image courtesy of Be Inspire.

SAT vs ACT: Choosing the Right Test [NEW EBOOK]

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How School of One is Changing the Way Math is Taught

Shannon Sweetser — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:04:22 +0000

Every day in a normal classroom, a math teacher stands up at the front of the room and lectures to students. The students who struggle sit in silent vigil while teachers continue foward, past the point where they got hung up. If the teacher is sick, tired or exhausted, they bring that up to the board with them to teach.

But what if you could change the way math learning is done?

What if a teacher was no longer responsible for teaching the lesson, but for monitoring that each student understands the lesson as it’s being taught?

A New Look on an Old Idea

In many ways the School of One is simply trying to combine resources and focus efforts to help students learn math more in a more strategic way.

Instead of having 4 math classes running during the same period of time, New York’s School of One combines teacher’s forces in a style that is reminiscent of some of the new classroom designs that gained popularity in the 1960’s and 1970’s but died out due to organizational issues. Still, School of One is optimistic that their program (which currently reaches 2,000 students in grades 6-8) will be able to change the way that students learn.

For one thing, in the 60′s and 70′s teachers didn’t have access to computers to make their experiments with one large learning environment seamless, measurable and consistent across the classroom. Perhaps the lack of technology is why those experiments failed and also why the School of One plan is succeeding.

Learning “Playlists”, Not Lectures

Inside a project one classroom you’ll find students are able to access over 5,000 online lessons from over 50 content providers. Students are able to access their lessons via a “playlist” loaded onto their Netbook. This playlist also includes metrics on where the student is at with the material so that teachers are easily able to intercede when a student becomes lost or confused with the material. Instead of teachers being responsible for managing every student’s learning and pace as a group, they act more like a mediator for students when they are in need of learning assistance.

Research and Results

Thus far the program appears to have been successful in helping students achieve higher scores. When you compare Project One students scores with the scores of unenrolled students, Project One students averaged a testing gain in math that is nearly approximate to having 1 extra year of study in the subject. Researches also found that when they controlled for the programs’ after school study program, Project One still showed significant gains of a quarter or half year’s amount of learning.

What’s exciting about these findings is that it indicates that students are thriving in a collaborative school environment. It also demonstrates that this type of collaborative and group learning environment only grows more effective when an after-school program is implemented. This is great news for tutors and learning centers that specialize in giving students customized learning experiences outside of the classroom day.

featured photo by school of one

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12 Most Influential Colleges and Universities on Twitter

Shannon Sweetser — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:28:38 +0000

For many generations, colleges and universities have led the charge in bringing about change within our society. Young and passionate minds would lean on the advice of old sages and professors, who didn’t need to “Tweet” to get heard. However, in the past decade, much has changed. Many students don’t even need to have direct interaction with their professors or leave their dorm room to get a passing grade. In addition, the internet has made information something of a publicly held resource. No longer are professors and librarians the gatekeepers to the knowledge realm — they must be more open than they ever have before.

While many colleges struggle to remain relevant enough to attract the future leaders of the world, some higher education institutions are successfully using social tools such as Twitter to drive people to influence and lead the charge for action-based learning.

How Twitter Influence is Measured

According to Megan Berry, Marketing Manager for Klout, a data company which measures influence across the social web, a university’s influence can be measured across the web using a few basic criteria. Using data from Twitter, Klout uses retweets, @mentions, Twitter lists and Twitter relationships to determine social influence. They then rank the universities on a scale of 1 to 100, with higher scores being assigned to Twitter accounts that engage with by some of the most influential people on Twitter and set the precedent for social action. (Note: according to Matt Cutts of Google’s webspam team, Twitter influence is often determined the number of Twitter followers follow an account. More Twitter followers doesn’t equal more social influence, it’s more important that their be less, higher quality followers who influence others, too!)

Klout’s 12 Most Influential Colleges and Universities

According to social data company,Klout, the 12 most influential universities are on Twitter are (in order of influence):

Stanford University/ Klout Rating: 70
Syracuse University/ Klout Rating: 64
Harvard University/ Klout Rating: 64
University of Wisconsin-Madison/ Klout Rating: 64
University of California- Berkeley/ Klout Rating: 56
Butler University/ Klout Rating: 56
Tufts University/ Klout Rating: 55
Temple University/ Klout Rating: 53
University of Minnesota/ Klout Rating: 52
University of Texas –Austin / Klout Rating: 52
Marquette University / Klout Rating: 52
Indiana University / Klout Rating: 51

featured photo is from Brian Glanz

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Why Tutors Should Heed Google Expert’s Social Media Advice

Shannon Sweetser — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:45:59 +0000

Can a tweet or Facebook status affect a website’s overall ranking? What about the quality of your followers? According to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s WebSpam team, they sure can!

In a recent Google Webmaster Help Video, Matt Cutts answers a question (derived from this Danny Sullivan post “What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?”) about how Google uses data from social websites to determine page ranking.

He first confirms that Facebook status updates and Twitter updates (when publicly available) are taken into account when determining a page’s rank. He also explains that while Google is still in the experimental phase of trying to determine how certain bits of information should be ranked, it is important (as it always has been important with Google) to make sure that your tweets, followers, and people you follow are at a high quality.

In the video posted above, Matt Cutts goes on to explain that the way they determine the value of social media content is similar to the way Google ranks webpages. As you may know, Google assigns page rank based on a very complex algorithm. A webpage’s rank for organic keywords is dependent not just on the number of links it receives, but the quality of those links (Google also considers the age of the link and the ranking of the website/page that link appears on).

Therefore we can infer from the video that while some small businesses may be think “more followers will make my Twitter presence more valuable,” Google’s algorithm is a little more intelligent than that. Using data that is publicly available they are getting closer to determining the quality of a person’s Twitter and Facebook page based on the quality of their followers and their follower’s followers.

Warning: Learning Expectations Can Vary Dramatically by State

Shannon Sweetser — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:00:24 +0000

Imagine 2 people have learned to make a birdhouse in two different states from a different instructor.

After they take the birdhouse-builder’s standardized test, we line up the birdhouses and take a look. According to the birdhouse building manual for Massachusetts, which is where the builder is from, one birdhouses is missing a few key items which make a birdhouse well-rounded. Thusly, we must declare the builder to be insufficiently prepared for the next phase of birdhouse making. Oddly enough, the birdhouse by the second individual is almost exactly identical to the birdhouse made from the builder in Massachusetts, except for one thing. A person in Tennessee built it.

Though one would argue that both parties are insufficiently prepared to move onto the next phase of birdhouse making, you’re forgetting one crucial fact. The builder of the second birdhouse is from the state of Tennessee which means that according to the state benchmarks for birdhouse making, the individual who build this birdhouse is a proficient bird house builder for his grade level.

Study Finds Testing Cut-offs Vary Dramatically State by State

The story above may seem like a farce from Catch-22, but there is nothing funny about a recent study from the American Institute of Research which shows that when you measure a state’s learning benchmarks for reading, science and math state by state, results can vary dramatically.

By comparing National Assessment of Education Progress benchmarks with benchmarks from the most recent international assessments (2007′s TIMSS and PIRLS), researchers were able to determine the percentage of students in each state who would meet minimum proficiency according to their state standards and the common international standards. The author of the report, AIR Vice President Gary Phillips, claims that the No Child Left Behind law is a source of these varying educational benchmarks as that “it permits states to report high levels of achievement by setting low standards.”

(To view in full size, download from the American Institute for Research in PDF form)

Admittedly, the differences between state benchmarks are even worse when you then compare them with the international standard, as that the learning gap between other countries and a US state can be up to four grade levels wide. That’s double the size of the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s 2007 findings on the achievement gap between black and white students.

Though shocking, the American Institute of Research hopes this information will help support their case for states to remain competitive world-wide by requiring all states to incorporate external benchmarks as a guide to defining the national standard (which the report calls the ‘Benchmark Standard’)

Building Better Benchmarks

In Spring 2010, three states took the first step toward setting better proficiency bars for students by slipping some questions from the PISA, an international standardized test which measures the proficiency of 15-year old students, into a high school level math assessment. Though the questions aren’t counted against the students scores, participating states can use this data to set reliable, competitive benchmarks for US students nationwide.

featured image by number657

What are you and your school doing to incorporate better learning benchmarks into your curriculum?

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Interesting articles on Educational data analysis, usage and access

Raju Gupta — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:11:23 +0000

How Data analysis is helping raise performance – story covers both good and the bad
Data-Driven Schools See Rising Scores – WSJ.com

Educational data is in abundance – but not in very useful state.
Education Week: Data, Data Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Use

Impact of providing detailed and real time access to student educational and learning data to parent.
Parents Will Get Access to Student-Tracking Site – NYTimes.com

How internet based solution are taking the education to next level. With easy assess to past exam and solutions, teachers and professors need to constantly iterate and improve their material.

Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7? Click Here. – NYTimes.com

Analysis of previous year MCAS Tests – how many Questions per standard area?

Socrato! — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:37:47 +0000

With the MCAS season underway and teachers trying to help students, we received a few requests to get insight into how the questions are distributed across the learning standards. Or, how many questions are allocated to each standard area in a given year or grade level? Or, Do you have the frequency analysis of questions that has ever been given in the past few years of the MCAS exam?

As we started working on one off requests, we decided to put the entire material in a simple to use spreadsheet so it can benefit as many teachers and tutors as possible. To use the spreadsheet and see this for yourself click on the MCAS Question and Content Analysis-v2.xls in your browser. In order for this to work, you will need Microsoft Excel (part of MS Office suite).

Save the spreadsheet on your local drive, open the spreadsheet and click on the “MCAS-TestAnalysis” Tab.

On this tab make the selection for various choices in the drop down boxes on the upper left:

Grade level (Row 3 )
Year published (Row 4)
Test Name (Row 5)

You can further refine the data on Row 8 by filtering

Subject name
Topics name
Standard name

By default the report shows data for grade 6 but you can change that in Row 3 by making other selection.

The question distribution report will show as you make selection changes. I hope you will find this useful. Few teachers are using this data to create a series of formative assessments that focus on the highest frequency questions for each strand.

If you have any feedback or comments please let us know. Also, feel free to pass this along to any other teachers who you think will find it useful.

In the future we will try to hook this report into Socrato as a feature so you will have access without Excel. For more interesting content and learning data analysis checkout www.socrato.com or contact us to setup a demo.

Best Regards,
-Raju

UPDATE – uploaded the new version of excel file – this has the full description of each standard.

Students learning data and business intelligence convergence

Raju Gupta — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:11:54 +0000

Many industries use business intelligence software tools to convert their data into information, and leverage that information to make business decisions. It’s only a matter of time before the same tools, technology and processes become main-stream in the educational space.

I came across this article in School CIO; it’s about the use of a business intelligence in education. It’s encouraging to see these examples as tools and technology like SAS and Cognos find their place in education. These are very powerful tools educators and school systems can benefit from. These tools still need to be simplified to increase the adoption. Education has lot to gain with this convergence. If you get chance, check out the article. Let me know what your opinion is, and how you are using the intelligence technology in your environment.

-Raju