School Psychologist

"What is a school psychologist?" people often ask me  - this great piece is a nice succinct description of what school psychologists do!  Check it out!

Puerto Rico's students not reading or performing math at grade level

A press release from the Dept. of Education indicates that students in Puerto Rico are not at grade level.

This is an interesting press release as it is not simply patting the Dept.'s back, but giving itself a good self- analysis and self-criticism.

http://www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2007/03/03292007a.html

Sexism in education

I think that this is an interesting article found on the BBC education website which touches on the issue of how British society has focused on behavior bordering on discrimination when looking at males in education.

I've experienced a lot of that from subtle suggestions that I probably should not work with young children (by administrators) to overt suggestions that I need to keep the door to my office open when I administer routine assessments of intelligence and achievement to female students.

Criticism of Piaget

I've often been surprised at how much people in education(and laypersons as well) take for granted that Jean Piaget's work may be false. Although we question many aspects of our lives, such as religion, politics, even the decision to vaccinate children against viruses and cancers, we often do not question "big names" in psychology.

Well, we should.

I'm not going to go into the intricacies of Piaget's theory. If you are interested, you should reference the Wikipedia article on his life and work. However, in general, Piaget's theory indicates that children progress intellectually through four stages of development: Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operations and Formal Operations. At each one of these levels, Piaget posited, there were different challenges that the child needed to deal with. He also indicated that unless the child mastered the tasks in the one stage, he or she could not master the tasks in other stages.

There are problems that are inherent in all theories which posit "stages" of development. Development does not occur in discrete stages - it occurs whenever the environment places increased demands and/or provides less support to the individual. In our society, it simply appears that we all tend to place these demands on children at around the same time - this makes it appear that we are witnessing "stages" of development.

Zimmerman conducted a series of various studies beginning around the 1960's and up until today demonstrating that if the environment placed certain demands, then children would surpass what was expected of them.

Here are some other studies:

Baillargeon et al. (1985). Infants could identify, to a reasonable degree, events which violated the laws of physics, even though, Piaget noted that infants at the "sensorimotor" stage could not do so.

Das Gupta & Bryant (1988). Children were able to follow simple transformations, even though, Piaget noted that children at the "pre-operational" stage could not do so.

Hughes (1978). Children were able to take the perspective of multiple people even though, Piaget noted that children at the "pre-operational" stage could not do so.

Light, Buckingham & Robbins (1979). When children were taught to pay attention to the concrete properties of an event (e.g., pouring liquids into different sized beakers), then they were able to do so, even though, Piaget noted that children at the "pre-operational" stage could not do so.

McCarrigle (1978). When given discrete instruction about the super-ordinate and sub-ordinate categories, children were able to classify information effectively.

Piaget was instrumental in getting people to think about children as individuals who are developing. However, children develop in radically different ways. Assessments of intelligence (WISC-IV) appreciate this as these children tend to go through items as much as possible. There is no cap on how much a child can or cannot do on a particular set of items.

Review of "Strange Son" by Portia Iverson

Mr. and Mrs. Iverson have set up a foundation to deal with autism in their and many other individuals' chidlren. Mrs. Iverson wrote this book about her experiences with Soma Mukhopadhyay from Bangalore, India. Soma had managed to teach her severely autistic son, Tito to communicate, write poetry on a laptop, and articulate his thoughts and feelings.

Mrs. Iverson persuaded her foundation to bring Soma and 14-year-old Tito to Southern California for what proved to be an exhausting and exhaustive monthslong effort by a network of neuroscientists and well-wishers to anatomize the miracle that was Tito. But few miracles withstand minute dissection, and this one was no exception.

For one thing, the young poet was still an immensely dysfunctional adolescent who could not remain still for most neurological testing, who was besieged by erratic impulses (like trying to jump out of a minivan speeding down a California freeway) and who became unhinged whenever he was separated from his mother.

His mother was a loner and a bit of an oddball, whose method of cajoling intelligent communication from Tito depended on an alphabet board and a frenetic combination of shouts, gestures and taps on the knee.

But, when Soma finally sat down with Mrs. Iversen’s Dov and begins to prod and cajole him just as she does Tito, their frighteningly inaccessible and uncontrollable child began to use an alphabet board to tap out logical human thoughts.

He wanted a Barbie doll and a blue blazer. He identified that he had known how to read English for three years. His favorite color is red. He thinks his little brother is spoiled rotten. After a few weeks he drops Barbie like a shot when he learns that dolls are for girls.

We learn that Soma’s method works better for some autistic children than others, and is nowhere near being a panacea.

I havent read the book, but it may be interesting. Those of you who have, please drop me a line

Math anxiety saps working memory

Worrying about how you’ll perform on a math test may actually contribute to a lower test score This worry can often sap the brain’s limited amount of working memory, a resource needed to compute difficult math problems.

This research was conducted by Mark Ashcroft, a psychologist at the University of Nevada Los Vegas. He speculated that math anxiety occupies a person’s working memory.

Ashcroft speculated while easy math tasks such as addition require only a small fraction of a person’s working memory, harder computations require much more.

Worrying about math takes up a large chunk of a person’s working memory stores as well, spelling disaster for the anxious student who is taking a high-stakes test.

Stress about how one does on tests like college entrance exams can make even good math students choke.

Although test preparation classes can help students overcome this anxiety, they are limited to students whose families can afford them.