Philippine Basic Education

Years ago, John Tierney wrote an article in the Atlantic   that criticized our obsession with national rankings of school districts. After all, as Tierney pointed out, very few could really afford to move from one state to another just for a "better school". This point becomes even more evident with international rankings. Rankings, however, putting aside vanity, could be somewhat useful if schools that did well were able to provide us with some information of what actually worked. EducationWeek  tried to do this in its most recent Quality Counts 2018 report . Five traits were found to be common among the high-performing states: Good economy High academic learning outcomes High spending per pupil High college participation Good early childhood education Above copied from The Atlantic Like a family that is in a good financial situation, a state that is doing well economically has much more time and energy to worry about things beyond the basic needs. High gradu...

I often teach General Chemistry in the Spring. While teaching a General Chemistry course this Fall semester, I am now asking myself how much of an impression do I really leave on my students. Some students do come with a very strong background in the subject because of advanced courses taken in high school while some do not. Since General Chemistry is required for admission to medical schools, there are even students enrolled in the class who have not seen Chemistry for so many years. These are students who already have finished a degree but have to return to college to take the required science courses. The Fall course on General Chemistry, guided by popular textbooks, often spends the first couple of months with a quick survey, a smorgasbord of chemical concepts and phenomena. With this breadth, students, including me, actually wonder if Chemistry has a story to tell. Surely, the topics discussed seem totally incohesive. Exams are, of course, taken after a number of lectures have bee...

We can easily proclaim our newly found commitment to diversity. After all, diversity is indeed necessary for realizing the full potential of a society. Yet, this commitment gets washed away as we continue to cling on exercises that only highlight inequity and our inclinations and prejudices. For instance, higher education still considers standardized exam scores for admission even with the knowledge that these exams favor those who are privileged in society. Worse, we browse through a research paper and conclude something that is so far from what the data really suggest. One example is when CNN reported on a study that correlates social behavior in kindergarten with success later as an adult. Above copied from CNN The study was authored by researchers from Pennsylvania State University and was published in the American Journal of Public Health . It examined 13- to -19-year longitudinal data that included kindergarten social assessments and later outcomes such as higher educat...

A study that run for two years involving more than eight hundred preschool children across more than twenty classrooms yielded a set of areas that correlates with improved academic and social outcomes. These areas, called the "Magic 8", are reducing transition time, increasing the quality of instruction, creating a more positive emotional climate, teachers listening more to children, providing more sequential activities, fostering social learning (associative and cooperative) interactions, fostering higher levels of child involvement, and creating more math opportunities. Above copied from Free Childcare Clipart These areas are not listed according to any order, but it is still worth noting that the first is about logistics. The time between activities is not only a waste of time, but also a potential gap during which children can become easily distracted which can often lead to either bad or unproductive behavior. Quality of instruction goes beyond a child simply reg...

Nongovernment organizations as well as the Department of Education in the Philippines are actively pursuing programs aimed at addressing severe malnutrition in young children . Data show that such programs are well managed although metrics such as child weights need to be accurately measured to assess the actual impact of these programs. Addressing malnutrition of school-aged children is obviously a good first step to alleviate the harmful effects of poverty on education. Unfortunately, before a child enters a school, proper nutrition is already crucial for infants, toddlers and preschoolers. Poverty during these early years are now well known to correlate with both behavioral and academic gaps as early as when a child enrolls in kindergarten. Schools also try to inform children and parents of healthy nutrition through these posters. Above copied from The Rappler Johnson and Markowitz have recently published a paper in the journal Child Development : Of course, one should ...

A post in this blog more than three years ago bears the same title, " Are the Poor Left Behind Or Are the Rich Simply Pulling Ahead? " It shows a correlation between income and achievement gaps. Children from poor families struggle academically. A recent study by Kalil and coworkers suggests that this is so much more than just a simple correlation. It is very likely a "cause and effect" relationship. Affluent families are simply providing more engaging and enriching activities to their young children. Consequently, these children enter kindergarten much more prepared than those coming from poor families. The previous post talks about Reardon's " The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence and possible explanations ". Figures from this paper that tell the story are as follows: Above figure copied from  Reardon, S.F.  (2011).  The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence a...

With the realization of the importance of the early years in education, changes have occurred in the kindergarten curriculum in the United States. To gauge whether these changes are for better or worse, it is necessary to identify the changes first. Daphna Bassok, Scott Latham, and Anna Rorem from the University of Virginia have recently provided a systematic comparison between the state of kindergarten during the years 1998 and 2011, considering the following dimensions: (1) what teachers consider as important for school, (2) time spent on each subject, (3) how teachers manage their classroom, (4) teaching practices, and (5) how teachers measure learning outcomes. Their findings are published in the journal  AERA Open . By examining data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K:1998 and ECLS-K:2011), which includes thousands of kindergarten students and teachers, major changes in Kindergarten have been found across all dimensions. Especially worth noting is the d...

Failing in the early years of basic education can not be mitigated by adding years at the end of high school. In contrast, adding years at the beginning just might. There is, however, no guarantee. The idea behind providing formal schooling to young learners comes with the hope of preparing children for basic education. In the United States, children are introduced to a school setting before they reach five years old to equip them with skills necessary for kindergarten. In the Philippines, DepEd's K to 12 introduces the mandatory kindergarten year as a dry run for the elementary years. On the surface, preparatory school is sound. And there is evidence that early child education helps. However, as with other education reforms, success is not guaranteed. Simply adding years to basic education, even in the early years, does not necessarily mean better learning outcomes. A research report recently released last month by researchers from Vanderbilt University is certainly an eye-open...

Science instruction can be really expensive but not so in the early years of basic education. Furthermore, at an early age, one can work from a child's interest and curiosity. Most young children tend to ask questions and share ideas with each other. Science activities can build on a dialogue with these young minds, starting with their raw observations and early explanations of natural phenomenon. It is therefore a waste of an excellent opportunity not to have a formal subject of science in the early years of basic education as in the current Philippine basic education curriculum. My five year old daughter, for example, is quite fascinated with rainbows. When I picked her up from school the other night, she gave me the following drawing: When she draws a rainbow, I guess from the many times she has seen these in nature as well as in books, she makes sure that the colors are in the right order, red on top then orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Fidelity to observations ...

The Philippines added a compulsory kindergarten year in its basic education. This is a step in the right direction as studies have clearly shown that schooling before the elementary years are beneficial not just for acquiring social skills but also academically. Unfortunately, simply adding a year before grade school is not enough. Quality matters. Perhaps, this is now obvious. But even with quality in preschool and kindergarten, all of these efforts can still go to waste. We can certainly teach kids how to read and recite the alphabet or count from one to ten in kindergarten. But if first grade tries to do the same, then there is really no progress. A forthcoming article in the American Educational Research Journal  shows that repeating basic content coverage in the early years of schooling provides no benefit: Amy Claessens ,  Mimi Engel ,  and  F. Chris Curran Academic Content, Student Learning, and the Persistence of Preschool Effects American Educationa...

This is a sequel to "Kindergarten is not daycare". Jill Walston of the American Institutes for Research (AIR) has prepared an excellent set of slides showing data regarding how kindergarten education in the United States has changed over one decade. The changes are dramatic and these are captured in the following figures (copied without permission from Walston presentation ). The first figure shows how much kindergarten teachers' perception has changed. A greater majority now expects kindergarten children to learn how to read. Kindergarten in the US is now mostly full day programs. With this increase in hours, however, subjects like music and art have not gained additional slots in a kindergarten child's schedule. Worse, times when children are offered art and music have decreased. Consequently, preschool is now viewed differently by teachers. The focus on math and reading is disconcerting. It clearly shows the emphasis on these subjects becau...

Something is not necessarily better than nothing. This applies to early childhood education. Quality matters. A school environment and culture that fail to stimulate learning leads to a lack of engagement. Lack of engagement leads to an ineffective education. Absences even in preschool and the kindergarten years matter. Attendance in school is the first measure of a student's engagement. Missing even just one out of every ten school sessions can seriously deter learning. This applies not only to high school or the later years of formal schooling. The importance of attendance likewise applies to the early years. The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) has recently published a report illustrating the negative impact of absenteeism in preschool: To view this report, please visit Preschool Attendance in Chicago Public Schools One of the main findings of the report is summarized in the figure below: Above figure copied from Preschool Attendance...

Do you want to know the current status of animals in the National Zoo? Make me a friend on Facebook and you will get almost a weekly update by way of photos of animals taken in the zoo by me or my son. My son and I regularly visit the National Zoo and if we happen to be in a different state and that place has its own zoo, you may find us touring that zoo as well. My son really likes wild animals especially the big cats. My son enjoys seeing animals and going to the zoo feeds that interest. He likewise reads books and watches documentary videos about animals in the wild. What is really amazing is the amount of material I have learned myself. There is a lot to learn from how early childhood education really works. Children learn while playing. Of course, this is no different from a chemist who pretends to be working in a laboratory, but is actually enjoying the quest for a greater understanding of how protein and peptide structures define their function. It is no different from trying ...

Adding colors and drawings to a slide presentation has always been deemed important. No one wants a black and white figure for example. It is boring. People even add some animation to slides. For a show, these may be helpful. It captivates the audience and makes the material perhaps more interesting. For pedagogical purposes, these additional gravy may not only be unnecessary, but also harmful. in addition, these "enhancements" cost more time and money. This hypothesis has been demonstrated to be true by a recent paper published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, " Extraneous Perceptual Information Interferes With Children's Acquisition of Mathematical Knowledge ": Extraneous perceptual information interferes with children's acquisition of mathematical knowledge. By Kaminski, Jennifer A.; Sloutsky, Vladimir M. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 105(2), May 2013, 351-363. The above paper basically examines the effects of adding extraneous...

When policies and reforms are being drawn by people who do not have as much as a stake as a parent who actually has a child enrolled in the school, reasonable doubts spring. Dana Goldstein writes in  " Does It Matter When Education Reformers and Activists Send Their Own Kids to Private School? ":

A country may be providing universal kindergarten to its young children, but something is not necessarily better than nothing. Without quality, basic education does not really help children. If children are still unable to read by the time they reach the age of 10 years old, education has not really done its job. Learning to read comes before reading to learn. Thus, failure in the early years of basic education spells failure in the later years. The 2015 Development Agenda of the United Nations prescribed "education for all", but missed the fact that poor education disguised as "education for all", does no good and perhaps even does harm to the school system. Failing schools not only waste time and effort. Such predicament can even lead to the impression that since schools are useless, why should one even bother sending children to schools. It is very easy to set goals. Goals such as "education for all" or "Every child, a reader by Grade 1", ar...