Isegoria

The College Board is redesigning the SAT. Most notably, it’s pulling the essay section back out and returning the test to two sections, scored from 200 to 800 each — so the max score will once again be 1600, rather than 2400.

The essay section also happens to be extremely game-able.

Another change, rather more odd, is the shift away from point deductions for wrong answers. On a multiple-choice test, a small penalty for wrong answers is a simple way to make leaving a question blank worth as much as blindly guessing the answer — but it’s also confusing and frightening to many unprepared students.

The SAT math section always struck me as rather narrow, but in a good way. It seemed focused on the math that mattered. The new math section is going to be even narrower, so that “students can study these core math areas in depth and have confidence that they will be assessed.”

To make something hard to game, you need to make it hard to prepare for at all, or you need to make it something that everyone is already well prepared for.

One change stands out as not fitting this pattern:

Each exam will include a passage drawn from the Founding Documents or the Great Global Conversation. Students read from either a founding document such as the Declaration of Independence or from the conversation they inspire in the United States and around the world, such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or King’s” I Have a Dream” speech.

I expect the prepared students to be really, really prepared to discuss those documents.

Freedom Mountain Academy is a one-room boarding school on a farm in the Appalachian Mountain — where troubled kids earn their freedom:

In traditional schools, students start with all of the ordinary privileges, which are then removed for bad behavior. At FMA, students start with few privileges but gain more and more as they demonstrate commitment and personal responsibility. That little twist from entitlement and punishment to earning and reinforcement rekindles motivation in FMA’s students. The curriculum reinforces this approach by rewarding students’ efforts—all of which is kind of like life.

When students first arrive, they forfeit their electronic devices and all use of electricity. FMA has this rule in order to “eliminate constant trivial pursuits,” said Margaret Cullinane, the school’s director and Kevin’s daughter. And it comes as a rude awakening.

Former student Taylor Meidinger, 16, of Packwood, Washington, said most students can handle the isolation for a week or two. But after a few weeks, Meidinger said, students miss their electronics, the outside world, family, and friends. They usually hate their new environment until they reach the two-week holiday break in December, when they go home. “At this point everybody tries to talk their parents into letting them stay home,” added Meidinger. “Then they come back for the second semester and start to realize what opportunities they have, and they start liking it.”

FMA also incentivizes students to develop a sense of collaboration. The first book they read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicles Frankl’s struggle to find purpose in his life as an Auschwitz prisoner. Students discuss the book’s theme of suffering and how it relates to their own feelings. At this point they go on their first expedition into the wilderness, where they live off the land for 10 days, learning to work with and rely on one another.

“When you’re out in the wilderness you really can see how we’re all connected to each other,” said former FMA student Travis Ackerman. “They teach you how to grow up and take care of yourself. They don’t just teach you to memorize facts but they push you to think of new ways to solve problems,” he said. Ackerman, who was sent to FMA from Omaha, Nebraska, had to work with his classmates to set up camp, chop wood, start fires, and cook food. Learning to cooperate didn’t teach him rugged individualism, but rugged collaboration. After completing this first expedition, students reach the first of four levels of achievement. Each level grants both privileges and responsibilities in return for students’ adapting and adhering to expectations at FMA. Level one gives them permission to leave the building at will as long as they stay nearby. Reaching level two means students can range farther from the building. At level three students are free to roam the entire campus. For more than 90 percent of the students, this level is the extent of their achievements.

A select few, however, reach level four, at which they can help teach a class of their choosing. Fewer than 10 percent of the students reach this level, though more than 95 percent complete FMA’s nine-month program.

Swanson Primary School in Auckland, New Zealand ditched its playground rules — and found that the children behaved better:

Swanson School signed up to the study by AUT and Otago University just over two years ago, with the aim of encouraging active play.

However, the school took the experiment a step further by abandoning the rules completely, much to the horror of some teachers at the time, he said.

When the university study wrapped up at the end of last year the school and researchers were amazed by the results.

Mudslides, skateboarding, bullrush and tree climbing kept the children so occupied the school no longer needed a timeout area or as many teachers on patrol.

Instead of a playground, children used their imagination to play in a “loose parts pit” which contained junk such as wood, tyres and an old fire hose.

“The kids were motivated, busy and engaged. In my experience, the time children get into trouble is when they are not busy, motivated and engaged. It’s during that time they bully other kids, graffiti or wreck things around the school.”

Parents were happy too because their children were happy, he said.

But this wasn’t a playtime revolution, it was just a return to the days before health and safety policies came to rule.

AUT professor of public health Grant Schofield, who worked on the research project, said there are too many rules in modern playgrounds.

“The great paradox of cotton-woolling children is it’s more dangerous in the long-run.”

Society’s obsession with protecting children ignores the benefits of risk-taking, he said.

Children develop the frontal lobe of their brain when taking risks, meaning they work out consequences. “You can’t teach them that. They have to learn risk on their own terms. It doesn’t develop by watching TV, they have to get out there.”

The research project morphed into something bigger when plans to upgrade playgrounds were stopped due to over-zealous safety regulations and costly play equipment.

“There was so many ridiculous health and safety regulations and the kids thought the static structures of playgrounds were boring.”

(Hat tip to Eric Crampton.)

Ability levels vary by degree, as this figure demonstrates:

Verbal (V), spatial (S), and mathematical (M) z-scores vary across academic areas of study — from education and business to physical science and engineering — and degree attained.

Mikaela Shiffrin’s swift, if unplanned, ascent to World Champion hasn’t followed the usual pattern:

Not surprisingly, any predetermined strategy was remarkably elemental and always focused on process, not results. Jeff and Eileen, former college-level racers, believed in basic tenets, like keeping a light race schedule for their children as they loaded up on practice days filled with deliberate, skills-based drills and exercises.

And, they said, it was imperative to keep family close by.

Yet, these were controversial theories in the ski racing community — both when Mikaela was starting out and when she advanced to the World Cup.

Youth coaches were livid when Mikaela, faster than skiers several years older, chose to stay close to home to practice with her family instead of chasing the prestige of distant championships. Several years later, Eileen said, the United States ski team was adamantly against her accompaniment of Mikaela on the World Cup circuit in Europe. Eileen went anyway, and the Shiffrins paid for it for three years.

“Our plan produced the first 17-year-old World Cup champion the U.S. has ever had,” Eileen said. “They should thank us for our $500,000 donation to the U.S. ski team.”

The message, the Shiffrins insist, is that their approach, which stressed skill development and shunned goal setting, and always involved the family, has been the secret. If there was a secret.

“If you look at it, what we always sought was normalcy,” Eileen said.

Jeff recalled: “These top-level coaches would tell me that Mikaela was just ripping up a racecourse. And I would say: ‘Yeah, I agree, but she’s just 9 years old.’ And they’d say, ‘What are your plans for her?’ And I’d answer: ‘Plans? Well, tomorrow she’s trying out for a part as the angel in the Christmas play.’

[...]

When Taylor did not make a travel soccer team with all his new friends, the reaction of the Shiffrins was emblematic of their approach to almost everything.

“My mom went on Amazon and bought about 10 different World Cup soccer DVDs,” Mikaela said. “And she bought 12-foot-high rebound nets and bungee cords and all these contraptions so we could set up our own soccer complex in the backyard. Every day that summer, we had our own soccer camp for six or eight hours.”

Mikaela recalled that they bought a unicycle because Eileen had read that it was good for balance, which she considered a pivotal athletic skill. The Shiffrin children also learned to juggle to improve their coordination.

“We then started going around our block, which was two miles long, riding the unicycle and juggling at the same time,” Mikaela said. “And if I was doing that, then Taylor would be behind me dribbling a soccer ball as he ran around the block.”

Eileen was confident it would pay off, even as she worried what people were saying about her children.

“You would see the neighbors coming out to watch the Shiffrins going around the block juggling on a unicycle,” Eileen said. “I’m sure they thought we were completely nuts.”

But the next summer, Taylor and Mikaela made their travel soccer teams.

As Eileen recalled: “The coach said to me: ‘What did you do? They’re great now.’ And I said, ‘You don’t really want to know.’ ”

Jeff said: “Some people might call our approach intense. But it’s not, because the motivation is not to be better than other people at something. The motivation comes from a belief that almost anything can be mastered if you’re willing to put in the hours to master it. If you’re going to do something, do it as best as you can.”

[...]

“I believe there is always a faster way to do things,” she said in September after playing tennis with her mother. “Whether it’s learning to hit a backhand in tennis, learning high school chemistry or getting better at ski racing, I really believe with hard work and analytic preparation, you can skip a few steps and find the faster way.”

It is something of a family motto: Be faster.

Daniel Coyle recommends this DIY approach because it is aligned with the way skill actually develops — which is not through splashy public accomplishments.

Real engagement is often confused with “empty calorie” fun:

We’re all familiar with classrooms, sports teams, and offices that are absolutely brilliant at engineering fun, yet far less brilliant at producing real improvement. The late coach Tom Martinez called them “ice-cream camps” — places where the focus was not truly on skills, but rather on the sweet, entertaining buffet of activities that filled the day.

So the real question is: how do you spark engagement and avoid the empty calories of mere fun? Here are a few ideas:

1. Spend time designing a game that is built around the specific skills you want to teach. Aim to place learners in their sweet spot: tasks that are not too difficult, and not too easy.
2. Talk less. Real engagement doesn’t happen when a teacher or coach is talking (a recent MIT study showed that student physiological arousal essentially flatlines during lectures). Engagement doesn’t come from words, but from actions and involvement.
3. Aim for swift feedback. The most engaging games are transparent: you don’t need a coach or teacher to inform you how you’re doing, because the game tells you.
4. Keep it social. Engagement operates like a virus. As the video shows, small groups are a good way to increase the odds of those viruses being transmitted.
5. Do the minimum. The leader’s role is to do nothing except to keep things moving. Set the stage, then back off and let it happen. A good leader’s job is sort of like cloud-seeding. You can’t make the lightning strike happen. But you can design the conditions where the chances increase.

That’s not to say that fun isn’t a vital ingredient — it is. But the key is to understand that fun should be the seasoning, not the main dish.