Innovations and other Findings

Abstract

ONE OF THE JOYS of my job is having the opportunity to browse through reports and descriptions of initiatives that don't necessarily get a lot of national attention. These documents might present one or two very interesting facts or hold some far-reaching implications. Just because they don't receive major attention from the press or wide distribution doesn't mean they're not important. Let's look at some examples. PREDICTORS OF SUCCESS Connecticut just published a study called First Steps: An Evaluation of the Success of Connecticut Students Beyond High School. The study tracked Connecticut students who took the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) in high school in 1996 to see if performance on the test predicted later success. The answer was yes. Performance on the CAPT was an excellent predictor of academic success high school. The study also provided insight into the college enrollment rates of the state's graduates who had completed the CAPT, finding, among other things, that some of the very best high school students (nearly 10% of the highest scorers in the state) never attend college. In addition, many students who attend college out of state are among the highest-scoring students, and this group is likely to enter the state's work force in smaller proportions than those who stay in Connecticut for college. In an article published by the American Psychological Society in Psychological Science in late 2005, Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman noted, Underachievement among American youth is often blamed on inadequate teachers, boring textbooks, and large class sizes. We suggest another reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline. The study found correlations between self-discipline and most academic performance variables that were significantly higher than (and at least twice as large as) correlations between I.Q. and the same academic performance variables (final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television, and the time of day students began their homework). As Rex Brown, former senior staff member at the Education Commission of the States, once said, Lazy is not a learning style. The study was called Self-Discipline Outdoes I.Q. in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents and is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/ abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01641.x. FROM THE HEARTLAND The Iowa Model Core Curriculum Project was developed in response to needs identified by the state department and state board of education through an intensive high school information- and data-gathering process undertaken in the spring of 2005. It came about after the passage of Senate File 245 during the 2005 legislative session, which requires the identification of a model core curriculum and establishes a statewide goal for completion of a core curriculum. S.F. 245 also requires districts to develop for each eighth-grader a core curriculum plan and to report progress on the completion of that plan to parents or guardians annually. The Project Lead Team is charged with leading the effort to identify the essential content and skills of a world-class core curriculum. Representatives of the state board, the Institute for Tomorrow's Workforce, the School Administrators of Iowa, the Iowa Association of School Boards, the Iowa State Education Association, the PTA, area education associations, local education agencies, higher education, the business community, and community colleges all serve on this team. The implementation of S.F. 245 is supposed to address the first recommendation of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national consortium of Fortune 500 employers, the U.S. Department of Education, and others. To develop 21st-century skills, the Partnership recommends that schools do the following: * Emphasize all core subjects beyond basic competency to the understanding of academic content at much higher levels. …