"Dale's Cone of Experience"

There is a concept in education called "Dale's Cone of Experience" that states that people generally remember:

10% of what they read
20% of what they hear
30% of what they see
50% of what they hear and see
70% of what they say or write
90% of what they do

Often displayed graphically as a cone -- see here -- Dale's Cone has had a profound impact on the way we teach both children and adults. And it is a complete and total fraud. No, really. Will Thalheimer at Work-Learning Research delved into Dale's Cone and discovered that:

1. While Edgar Dale indeed did indeed create a model of the concreteness of various audio-visual material back in 1946, the model contained no numbers and no research was conducted to create the model. Dale's Cone was just a hunch, albeit an educated hunch, one that Dale warned shouldn't be taken too literally.

2. The percentages -- 'people generally remember 10% of what they read' and so on -- were most likely added to Dale's Cone by an employee of the Mobil Oil company in the late 1960s. These percentages have since been discredited.

You can see Thalheimer's complete report online here. It's an eye-opening read, especially if you're an educator, librarian or trainer. Let me also put in a plug for Thalheimer's blog here

While I've known about Thalheimer's investigation into Dale's Cone for a couple of years now, I've only recently discovered his blog. It contains a collection of "research-based commentary on learning, performance, and the industry thereof."

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NO MORE RIGHT AND WRONG IN BRITISH SCHOOLS?

Schools would no longer be required to teach children the difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum. Instead, under a new wording that reflects a world of relative rather than absolute values, teachers would be asked to encourage pupils to develop "secure values and beliefs". [Like "crime is good if you can get away with it", presumably]

The draft also purges references to promoting leadership skills and deletes the requirement to teach children about Britain's cultural heritage. Ministers have asked for the curriculum's aims to be slimmed down to give schools more flexibility in the way they teach pupils aged 11 to 14. Ken Boston, the chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), set out the proposed new aims in a letter to Ruth Kelly, when she was the Education Secretary.

The present aims for Stage 3 pupils state: "The school curriculum should pass on enduring values. It should develop principles for distinguishing between right and wrong." The QCA's proposals will see these phrases replaced to simply say that pupils should "have secure values and beliefs".

The existing aims state that the curriculum should develop children's "ability to relate to others and work for the common good". The proposed changes would remove all references to "the common good".

The requirement to teach Britain's "cultural heritage" will also be removed. The present version states: "The school curriculum should contribute to the development of pupils' sense of identity through knowledge and understanding of the spiritual, moral, social and cultural heritages of Britain's diverse society." The proposals say that individuals should be helped to "understand different cultures and traditions and have a strong sense of their own place in the world".

References to developing leadership in pupils have also been removed. One of the present aims is to give pupils "the opportunity to become creative, innovative, enterprising and capable of leadership". This is due to be replaced by the aim of ensuring that pupils "are enterprising".

Professor Alan Smithers, of the University of Buckingham's centre for education and employment research, said: "The idea that they think it is appropriate to dispense with right and wrong is a bit alarming." Teachers' leaders said that they did not need to be told to teach children to distinguish between right and wrong. A spokeswoman for the National Union of Teachers said: "Teachers always resented being told that one of the aims of the school was to teach the difference between right and wrong. That is inherent in the way teachers operate. Removing it from the National Curriculum will make no difference."

But she insisted that it was important for children to understand about their cultural heritage. "To remove that requirement can undermine children's feelings of security in the country where they are living," she said.

A spokesman for the QCA said: "The proposed new wording of the curriculum aims is a draft which will be consulted on formally next year as part of the ongoing review of Key Stage 3. One aim of the review is that there should be more flexibility and personalisation that focuses on practical advice for teachers. "The new wording states clearly that young people should become "responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society". It also identifies the need for young people who challenge injustice, are committed to human rights and strive to live peaceably with others."

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Why teachers must teach spelling

Failure to teach spelling is a failure of duty of care, argues teacher Judith Wheeldon

Are you proud of your good penmanship or embarrassed by your messy chicken scratches? Handwriting matters to us as a reflection of ourselves. Yet we sometimes purposely cultivate bad handwriting to fudge uncertain spelling. Deep down we know that spelling matters. Poor old spelling is the butt of almost as many jokes as mathematics. Spelling is boring. Most think spelling is no more than rote learning of long lists. Teachers treat spelling with disrespect by consigning it to "the wallpaper method", expecting learning by osmosis from words stuck up on the wall.

But spelling is important. Our written language, including our spelling, represents us as individuals in public, whether that public for a child is grandmother receiving a birthday card, the class at school or a job application. Fair or not, a piece of writing that contains spelling errors will never be taken as seriously as one that does not.

A child who does not spell well is likely never to be able to express themselves with confidence in writing. Don't take refuge in spell check. It's a Trojan horse from Microsoft that requires first-class spelling and grammar skills to avoid making horrendous errors. Without good spelling your child will go through life with poverty of expression and understanding that is largely avoidable through good syllabuses and teaching from kindergarten to Year 12.

Judging from the results of testing released this week by Educational Assessment Australia at the University of NSW, our schools are not doing the job. On the whole, our children don't spell English as well as Mandarin-speaking children in Singapore. Australian teachers and employers have plenty of anecdotal evidence that corroborates this view. These results cannot be a surprise since we stopped serious teaching of spelling, grammar and sentence construction decades ago, with the consequence that most teachers cannot analyse errors in speech and writing. If you want good spelling and grammar, find someone over 55.

We have wandered into a general belief that spelling has no intellectual content or feature that is intrinsically interesting. Even Peter Knapp, of EEA, said in The Australian this week that "spelling is not a high-order cognitive skill such as sentence construction". Is spelling anything more than letters in a prescribed, arbitrary order? Charles Perfetti, of the Learning Research and Development Centre at the University of Pittsburgh, defines spelling as a human literacy ability that reflects language and non-language cognitive processes. Spelling, he says, is the use of conventionalised writing systems to encode language. Acquisition of good spelling develops as the child's brain reaches new stages of physical development.

Small children begin to be spellers when they make marks with crayons on paper in imitation of adult writing. Muscular control and planning are used to make what adults see as scribbles. Preliterate writing is an intellectual task performed for pleasure at the child's own will. "Reading" aloud what they have written, young children show that they have made a cognitive leap in associating writing with sounds of speech.

Spirited singing of the alphabet song and naming the letters with pride is a highlight of this stage of language development. The child cannot yet separate discrete sounds accurately. Nor have they learned conventions of spelling. Writing of words begins but with a lot of errors that often evoke smiles from encouraging adults. From preschool to early primary, growing within-word pattern recognition leads to acquisition of sight words, essentially words that have been memorised. Wide reading, word games, spelling games and poetry will increase sight vocabulary and correct spelling.

Children use invented spelling to explore their ideas and to expand their new skills. Praise and encouragement help, but so does gentle teaching to replace inventions with accepted conventions. Children do not like mistakes and will learn quickly how to spell the grown-up way. Allowing incorrect spelling does not do justice to the child's desire to learn. The growing repertoire of sight words enables the child to generalise about how meanings are conveyed in spelling. Relationships between words are discovered; for example, that adding a "t" or "d" sound "ed" to the end of an action word pushes it to the past tense. The child who used to say correctly, "he ran" may now say, "he runned", attempting to follow the newly discovered pattern. Simple grammar and vocabulary lessons will explain to the child what they are grappling with and give early tools of language analysis that later will solve much bigger problems in language manipulation.

By the middle of primary school the child can break words into syllables and learns rules such as that doubling a consonant changes the pronunciation of the preceding vowel. Say "little" and "title" aloud to hear the difference. Rules such as "i before e except after c" and "add e to make the vowel say its name" as in hat/hate become helpful guides to speed up correct spelling, but the rules need to be taught and practised. Systematic grammar and spelling lessons are essential to allow the child's intellect to acquire the skills of controlling language. It is unfair not to help in this complex cognitive development.

By late primary school, many children are ready to build vocabulary, reading and spelling through noticing patterns that relate to the roots and origins of words. Incredible, credit, creed, credo, credulous. Chronological, chronology, chronic, chronometer. Children love word games. They enjoy building the power of their language. Latin study would not go amiss at this time. If French, German or Spanish is being taught in the school - and it should be - that language can be mined for discoveries.

Good spelling is for all children. Good spelling, vocabulary, grammar and reading make the passport out of poverty and joblessness. They build self-esteem based on achievement and foster the ability to face greater challenges later. Every child has a right to be taught these skills. A systematic program of grammar and spelling lessons consistently taught through all the years of school is essential to help the child's intellect acquire control of language. Teachers have the specific task of helping in this complex cognitive development. Parents have the task of ensuring it happens in their own child's school.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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