St. Pete College delving into online college readiness courses

CLEARWATER - A new online math tutoring program is exceeding enrollment expectations to such an extent in its first few weeks that professors at St. Petersburg College want to create more in time for the new school year this fall.

The free "Get Ready For College" math course has about 850 students from across Florida enrolled; many are hoping to avoid remedial classes at St. Petersburg College next year. The massive open online course, or MOOC, lets students work through online math lessons developed by SPC teachers at their own pace from anywhere in the world and grades practice tests to track their progress.

The program's popularity - hundreds signed up the first day - has encouraged the school to add reading and writing courses in the fall, said Jesse Coraggio, the college's associate vice president of institutional effectiveness, research and grants. College officials also are waiting to hear if they will receive a $300,000 grant from the Florida Department of Education that would help them create more courses in a shorter period of time. Word could come as soon as this week.

The online programs are aimed at students who have been away from school for a while and recent high school graduates who need to sharpen their math skills before starting college.

"Someone who graduated from high school three or four years ago may have been good at algebra at one point, but over time you loose those skills because you don't use them," Coraggio said. "This is an ideal solution for that kind of student coming back to school, because it gives them an opportunity to refresh their competencies before they have to take required placement tests to enroll in college.

"Likely, they'll do much better so they don't have to do remedial courses, they can go right into college-level coursework."

More than half of first-time college students at SPC are placed in remedial courses, and most struggle in math, Coraggio said. Remedial classes not only slow down graduation and rack up bigger tuition bills but also lower self esteem, which leads to more dropouts, he said. Once a student completes the Get Ready For College course with a 70 percent or higher on the final test, the student receives a certificate allowing him to retake the placement test and have another shot at getting into a college-level math class.

Because high school students also take the placement test in dual-enrollment classes, Coraggio is hoping to get more Pinellas County high school students involved and is developing a separate registration page for high schoolers to get more information about where they come from and what help they need. A handful is already taking the math class, he said. In fact, his daughter Sydney, a rising 10th-grader at St. Petersburg Collegiate High School, and her friends worked through practice runs of the program in its developmental stage before it launched in May.

"They actually enjoyed it, I think," Coraggio said. "They liked the format and that it didn't take too long to complete."

Pinellas County Schools is working with SPC to further develop the program for high school students, said Judith Vigue, the school district's director of advanced studies and academic excellence. Information about the MOOC will be provided to administrators, counselors and students this fall, so they can use it to prepare students for college readiness tests or use it for remedial work, she said.


A number of students enrolled in the math course are other college math professors looking to replicate the MOOC at their own schools, such as Valencia College in Orlando and Hillsborough Community College, Coraggio said. SPC is the first state college out of the 27 in Florida to offer a MOOC, he said.

Though schools such as Harvard University and the University of Florida have jumped on MOOC's as they've emerged over the last few years, most course offerings are on complex topics such as artificial intelligence and engineering. SPC's math course could be beneficial to anyone that needs a "refresher," Coraggio said.

When students first sign into the course, which usually takes a few weeks to complete, they're greeted with a video of communications professor Tony Smith, who assures them that they'll soon get the "confidence boost" they need for success. Students work through six modules covering everything from fractions and conversions to graphing, earning completion badges when they score a 90 percent or higher on the section's practice test. If they get stuck on a particular problem, guided instructional videos, notes and practice exercises help students work through it.

Right now, the whole project involves just 10 people, who each were paid about $1,000 for their efforts, but the demand is huge. At the University of Florida, which became the state's first university to offer MOOC's in March, there are five classes, such as instructor Wendell Porter's semester-long Global Sustainable Energy course, which at one point enrolled 22,000 students from as far away as Norway and Mozambique. Though students don't receive credit for the coursework, and most of the "grades" are just based on completion, the material is the same Porter presents to paying students, he said. It takes a lot of time and energy, but as legislators push for more online learning, Porter expects that the free courses will only grow over the next few years.

"In just one class, I'm teaching more students then I've ever taught in a classroom put together," said Porter, 57. "It's incredibly nerve-racking, but it's almost addictive to talk with them and read their posts.

"There are certainly benefits to staying in a classroom and building those face-to-face relationships, but the opportunities we have now with today's technologies are incredible. This is the future, and I don't want to be left behind."

Of course, the true impact of SPC's math program won't be felt until graduation day, when he's hoping to shake a lot more hands, Coraggio said.

adawson@tampatrib.com

(727) 215-9851

http://tbo.com/pinellas-county/st-pete-college-delving-into-online-college-readiness-courses-20130714/ 

Teachers, medical students find tutoring not just for kids

BY JACKIE PILOSSOPH | Contributor July 5, 2013 12:52PM

Updated: July 8, 2013 9:10AM

Walking into the large, open loft that houses Winnetka based Loren Academic Services feels like walking into a comfortable living room.

Its exposed pipe and brick, huge skylights, and balloons hanging from the rafters makes it seem like anything but a classroom. It’s the look and feel that owner and founder of the curriculum design and academic services company, Loren Deutsch wanted.

“When we go into a traditional classroom, the chairs are all in rows,” said Deutsch, a professional educational therapist and a licensed clinical social worker, who started the business in 1994. “The loft is changeable and adaptive. It engages people and allows for discourse and discussion that you don’t see in a traditional classroom.”

Deutsch, who holds two master’s degrees in education and curriculum design, and social service administration, is a former high school teacher who taught at Anshe Emet Day School and at Harper High School, both in Chicago.

She said the jobs made her realize that some of the students’ academic needs weren’t being met in a traditional classroom setting, for reasons that included learning and neurological disorders, social and emotional difficulties and behavioral problems, and that she knew she didn’t have control as a teacher.

“I intuitively felt that if I could work one on one with my students, I would have greater success in helping them learn,” Deutsch said.

She spent the next six years working for the University of Chicago as a psychiatric social worker, and as the Director for the Academic Skills Assessment Program and the College Core Tutor program. It was during that time that Deutsch started a private practice for psychotherapy and educational therapy.

Loren Academic Services, which has been in the Winnetka location for 15 years is what Deutsch calls “the evolution” of her practice. The company offers tutoring for children from Kindergarten through grade 12, college students and graduate students of all levels. Each student receives a unique, personalized curriculum.

“We use an organic curriculum,” said Deutsch, who has lived in Winnetka with her husband, Jason Harris and their four children for 15 years. “We take a non-mechanistic approach. Every student gets a comprehensive plan with everything from learning objectives to measurable outcomes.”

Loren Academic also trains K-12 teachers, and has a special focus on medical students, residents and physicians pursuing continuing education.

“Most medical students are good at memorizing information, but when the material becomes more complex, and the volume increases, and they have limited time, the skill set that once served them well is no longer adequate,” said Deutsch, who still works at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine as a medical coach, providing one on one academic support to medical students and residents.

Dr. Alleda Mack is an internal medicine resident at Loyola University Medical Center, who saw Deutsch for educational and emotional counseling regularly for over 2 years during medical school.

“She’s warm and supportive, and she understands the multi-faceted nature and the hindrances of learning,” Mack said. “She helped me discover that I had a lot of anxiety and a lack of academic self-confidence at certain times.”

When asked what she enjoys most about her career, Deutsch said it’s seeing improvement in her students.

“My mission is to foster learning and a natural curiosity in all my students,” she said.

“She came to my graduation and we both cried,” said Mack. “I used to interpret things as ‘I’m not smart enough.’ Loren helped me deal with that and move past it.”

http://winnetka.suntimes.com/business/21153411-420/teachers-medical-students-find-tutoring-not-just-for-kids.html

Remediation If You Want It

June 5, 2013

By

Paul Fain

Community college students in Florida will soon be able to decide to skip remediation and enroll directly in credit-bearing courses, even if college advisers or placement tests say they have remedial needs. And recent high school graduates in the state won’t even need to take placement tests, because they will be deemed college-ready by holding a high school diploma.

The shifts in Florida’s remedial education policies are part of a broad bill the state’s Legislature passed and Gov. Rick Scott signed into law last month. The legislation will have major ramifications for students at Florida’s 28 two-year colleges, and perhaps beyond.

“It may foreshadow many of the things that are about to happen around the country,” said Stan Jones, president of Complete College America, an advocacy group that supported the Florida bill.

Among other provisions, the bill, SB 1720, featured a loosening of a proposed cap on general education credit hours for the state’s public institutions, back to 36 credits from a proposed 30 credits. That aspect was popular with college leaders. The remedial policies, however, have generated some controversy.

Under the legislation, colleges by 2014 will no longer be able to require recent high school graduates to take the state’s standard placement test or to enroll in noncredit remedial courses. Active-duty members of the U.S. military will also be exempt.

That change builds on previous legislation and essentially pushes the responsibility for remediation back to the public K-12 system in the state. A 2011 Florida law made college placement testing mandatory for most 11th graders. High school students who don’t make the cut are required to take courses during their senior year that are designed to address remedial needs.

When they arrive at Florida community colleges, recent high school graduates will still be able to take placement tests or enroll in noncredit remedial courses. They just won’t have to.

This approach contradicts popular ideas held by community college leaders around the country. They include: Students don't do optional and often make the wrong choices about courses; many high school graduates are not ready for college-level work; and students who start credit-bearing courses without adequate preparation face long odds of graduating.

The legislation differentiates between these traditional-aged students and their adult peers, which Jones said is an important innovation in the remedial reform movement.

Adult students will not be exempt from placement tests. If they demonstrate that they need remediation, the colleges will now be required to offer them a choice between several developmental education options. Those choices will include so-called “co-requisite” courses in which remedial students get extra help or do additional work in traditional, credit-bearing courses alongside non-remedial students.

College advisers can recommend that students take particular remedial paths, including noncredit courses. For younger students who no longer take placement tests, advisers can make recommendations based on other academic indicators, like students’ high school GPA or performance on standardized tests like the SAT.

The final call on remediation, however, will be made by students themselves.

More Flexibility

Some critics say the remedial legislation in Florida challenges community colleges’ commitment to open access by allowing less-prepared students to choose a path that will probably lead to failure.

Kenneth Ross, vice president for academic and student services at Polk State College, said there is widespread concern among community college educators in the state that the law threatens the “open door” mission of the colleges.

Many students will still arrive with serious remedial needs, Ross said. And the colleges will no longer be able to require that those students take noncredit courses to prepare for college-level work.

“We can advise them that this is a good thing to do,” he said. “But we can’t require it.”

As a result, Ross worries that many unprepared students will wash out after jumping right into credit-bearing courses.

However, Ross said there are several positive aspects about the bill. It offers welcome flexibility in how to deliver remedial education, he said in a written statement, such as allowing students to work more at their own pace.

William D. Law, president of St. Petersburg College, agreed that colleges needed more freedom in how they approach remediation. In particular, Law said the fixed semester schedule is often not appropriate for developmental courses.

“We won that argument,” he said. “It could not have been more straitjacketed.”

Law said he is confident that his college can add new remedial options and improve current ones to help more students succeed. And while the legislation doesn’t provide any new money for those experiments, he and other college leaders in the state said they will make do.

The legislation doesn’t threaten colleges’ open-access commitment, Law said. But he said it does make that mission “more tenuous” by taking remedial judgments out of educators’ hands and telling students “you have to choose.”

Big Problem, Big State

Remediation is major stumbling block to college completion. Only about one in four students who place into noncredit remedial courses will earn a degree within eight years of enrolling.

Research has also found that widely used placement tests may be steering too many students toward remediation, including those who could succeed in college-level courses.

"The evidence is overwhelming that remediation isn't working" Jones said.

Roughly three-quarters of incoming students at Florida’s community colleges currently place into at least one remedial course. And about 200,000 students in the state took one of the courses last year, the Orlando Sentinel reported. So even incremental fixes to remediation could have a substantial impact on college completion rates in Florida, which is the nation’s fourth most populous state.

Florida is among several states that have recently attempted to improve remedial success rates through legislation, including Connecticut and Colorado.

Whether or not the new approach to remedial education works in Florida may well be determined by academic advising, said several officials in the state.

“We’re going to really need to ramp up our advising,” said Julie Alexander, vice chancellor for academic and student affairs at the Division of Florida Colleges of the state’s department of education.

Tom LoBasso agreed. LoBasso, who is Daytona State College’s chief operating officer and provost, said the college will need to build upon the success it has had with its academic support center, which is already “hopping.” That means adding advising, supplemental instruction and tutoring capacity.

“We’re going to make sure we’re doing everything we can do to make sure we’re not setting students up for failure,” he said.

Semantics will be important in student advising, said Law. That’s because it is not realistic to think that many students will take the “optional” remedial path. Instead, he hopes colleges will present remediation suggestions as part of a range of choices.

“Let’s not tell them they can opt out of something,” he said.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/06/05/florida-law-gives-students-and-colleges-flexibility-remediation#ixzz2XuIptKoG
Inside Higher Ed 

Gov. Scott challenges colleges to offer $10k degree; Dems call it ‘Walmart of Education’

Jacksonville Business Journal by BRANDON LARRABEE, THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

Date: Monday, November 26, 2012, 2:35pm EST http://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2012/11/26/gov-scott-challenges-colleges-to.html?ana=RSS&s=article_search

TALLAHASSEE—Gov. Rick Scott “challenged” state colleges to create $10,000 four-year degrees, a continuation of his low-cost strategy for higher education that Democrats slammed as an attempt to turn the schools into “the Walmart of Education.”

Scott issued his challenge in a media blitz and a morning press conference at St. Petersburg College, with another event scheduled for Orlando in the afternoon.

“You should be able to work and go to school and not end up with debt,” Scott told WFLA TV, according to a transcript provided by his office. “If these degrees cost so much money, tuition is so high, that’s not going to happen. I have put out this challenge to our state colleges -- we have 28 great state colleges -- and say, ‘Can you come up with degrees where individuals can get jobs that the total degree costs $10,000?’”
State colleges are generally what used to be known as community colleges, though many of them now offer four year degrees.

The proposal echoes a similar push by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Scott’s political idol, for $10,000 degrees in that state. It also comes as Scott has made containing the costs of higher education a top priority after colleges and universities say years of budget cuts have forced tuition hikes.

At the morning press conference, St. Petersburg College President William Law said his school would accept the challenge.

“St. Petersburg College is once again excited about the opportunity to be part of a statewide college pilot program that lowers the cost of a college education for the citizens we serve,” Law said in a press release. “Affordable education always has been at the forefront of the college‚s mission.”

The Brain Trainers

By DAN HURLEY

Published: October 31, 2012

IN the back room of a suburban storefront previously occupied by a yoga studio, Nick Vecchiarello, a 16-year-old from Glen Ridge, N.J., sits at a desk across from Kathryn Duch, a recent college graduate who wears a black shirt emblazoned with the words “Brain Trainer.” Spread out on the desk are a dozen playing cards showing symbols of varying colors, shapes and sizes. Nick stares down, searching for three cards whose symbols match.

 

Nick Vecchiarello, 16, of Glen Ridge, N.J., finds the patterns in a LearningRx game.

“Do you see it?” Ms. Duch asks encouragingly.

“Oh, man,” mutters Nick, his eyes shifting among the cards, looking for patterns.

Across the room, Nathan Veloric, 23, studies a list of numbers, looking for any two in a row that add up to nine. With tight-lipped determination, he scrawls a circle around one pair as his trainer holds a stopwatch to time him. Halfway through the 50 seconds allotted to complete the exercise, a ruckus comes from the center of the room.

“Nathan’s here!” shouts Vanessa Maia, another trainer. Approaching him with a teasing grin, she claps her hands like an annoying little sister. “Distraction!” she shouts. “Distraction!”

There is purpose behind the silliness. Ms. Maia is challenging the trainees to stay focused on their tasks in the face of whatever distractions may be out there, whether Twitter feeds, the latest Tumblr posting or old-fashioned classroom commotion.

On this Wednesday evening at the Upper Montclair, N.J., outlet of LearningRx, a chain of 83 “brain training” franchises across the United States, the goal is to improve cognitive skills. LearningRx is one of a growing number of such commercial services — some online, others offered by psychologists.

Unlike traditional tutoring services that seek to help students master a subject, brain training purports to enhance comprehension and the ability to analyze and mentally manipulate concepts, images, sounds and instructions. In a word, it seeks to make students smarter.

“We measure every student pre- and post-training with a version of the Woodcock-Johnson general intelligence test,” said Ken Gibson, who began franchising LearningRx centers in 2003, and has data on more than 30,000 of the nearly 50,000 students who have been trained. “The average gain on I.Q. is 15 points after 24 weeks of training, and 20 points in less than 32 weeks.”

The three other large cognitive training services — Lumosity, Cogmed and Posit Science — dance around the question of whether they truly raise I.Q. but do assert that they improve cognitive performance.

“Your brain, just brighter,” is the slogan of Lumosity, an online company that now has some 25 million registered members. According to its Web site, “Our users have reported profound benefits that include: clearer and quicker thinking; faster problem-solving skills; increased alertness and awareness; better concentration at work or while driving; sharper memory for names, numbers and directions.”

Those results are achieved, the companies say, by repurposing cognitive tasks initially developed by psychologists as tests of mental abilities. With technical names like the antisaccade, the N-back and the complex working memory span task, the exercises are dressed up as games that become increasingly difficult as students gain mastery.

Conceived to appeal to adults, especially baby boomers looking to stanch the effects of aging, Lumosity now draws one-quarter of its audience from students between the ages of 11 and 21, according to Michael Scanlon, the company’s scientific director. “I was taken aback that so much of our user base is so young,” he said. “The particular audience I had in mind at the earliest stages of the company was my mother.” In response to requests from schoolteachers, the fee is now waived — $15 a month — for students in their classrooms. More than 1,000 teachers and 10,000 students have enrolled this year, Mr. Scanlon said.

For the one-on-one training at LearningRx, fees are decidedly higher, from about $80 to $90 an hour in Upper Montclair. The students come with learning disabilities, with grades they want to improve in a competitive academic environment, all with hopes of just being sharper.

TAYLOR WEBSTER, 16, trains daily for lacrosse with a personal coach. “She has natural athletic ability,” said her mother, Samantha Newman-Webster. “But it’s really through her training that she has been able to achieve to the point where she’s being sought out by college recruiters.” Would brain training, the family wondered, do for her grades what physical training did for her lacrosse game?

Ms. Newman-Webster enrolled Taylor, already a B student at the private Montclair Kimberley Academy, at LearningRx in February. “I felt like I wanted to do whatever I could to make her learning easier, faster, deeper,” she said. “I knew she was going to be taking the SATs, and they say it will improve whatever you’re trying to do.”

Speaking by cellphone on the way to a lacrosse game, Taylor explained, with a laugh, what it’s like: “In the beginning your head is sore. Honestly, I had headaches after going there the first few times. It was kind of tedious and made my brain hurt. But I started getting better and better at it. It kind of became a competition for me to do better each time.”

She’s now studying for the SAT. “It used to take me an hour to memorize 20 words. Now I can learn, like, 40 new words in 20 minutes.”

Others — a majority, according to LearningRx — seek cognitive training in the hopes of remediating a learning disability.

Nathan Veloric had learning issues since elementary school. Last December, he had just graduated from William Paterson University with a degree in communications when his mother heard about LearningRx from a business networking group. His goal was to build up skills. “I’ve got to keep on bettering myself,” said Mr. Veloric, whose first job out of college is as a part-time cashier at a CVS near his home in New Providence, N.J. “I’m happy to have a job in this economy. While looking for something better I’m working my way up at CVS — I’m trying to go full time and then get into their management training program.”

Of his brain training, he said, “I don’t know if it makes you smarter. But when you get to each new level on the math and reading tasks, it definitely builds up your self-confidence.”

Nick Vecchiarello struggles with attention deficit disorder. “During middle school we had every kind of tutor known to man,” said his mother, Diane. “Name it, we’ve done it” — stimulant medication, sessions with a psychologist. “He never liked anything to do with education.” A brochure from LearningRx showed up in the mail, and the scientific aura around the program impressed the Vecchiarellos. They decided to spend $12,000 for a year of visits, one to three times a week.

“It has been a financial strain,” acknowledged Nick’s father, Richard, a fifth-grade teacher in nearby Fair Lawn. “Yes, I think it’s made a change in Nick. His grades are better. If it gives him a leg up on life, you can’t put a price on that.” In September, after six months, Nick and his parents decided he had

made enough progress to stop his medication.

For all the glowing testimonials, there are postings to be found online from parents of children with learning disabilities, complaining about substantial fees and minimal benefit.

Whether the results last beyond the blush of training — indeed, whether I.Q. can truly be bolstered in a meaningful way — are questions on which serious scientists still disagree. Studies have been published in recent years finding that intelligence can be improved through training, but not enough of them are of sufficient scientific quality to convince everyone in the field.

One skeptic is Douglas K. Detterman, professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University and founding editor of the influential academic journal Intelligence. His research would seem to offer reassurance to college-bound brain trainees, because he has found a close correlation between I.Q. and SAT scores. “All of these tests are pretty much the same thing,” he said. “They measure general intelligence.”

The catch, however, is that Dr. Detterman believes that cognitive training only makes people better at taking tests, without improving their underlying intelligence. Dr. Detterman said of brain training, “It’s probably not harmful. But I would tell parents: Save your money. Look at the studies the commercial services have done to support their results. You’ll find very poorly done studies, with no control groups and all kinds of problems.”

Executives at traditional tutoring and test-prep services tend to share Dr. Detterman’s view — perhaps not surprisingly, because some of the brain training programs pitch themselves in direct contrast to standard tutoring. (“Brain Training vs. Tutoring,” says the headline of a LearningRx brochure. “Is tutoring what your child really needs?”) Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer of Kaplan Inc., questions whether improving performance on an intelligence test will translate directly to improved grades and test scores.

“I keep looking for good studies that show how math performance or an ability to write an essay or some other really important set of skills have been dramatically enhanced for normal kids,” Dr. Saxberg said. “What you care about is not an intelligence test score, but whether your ability to do an important task has really improved. That’s a chain of evidence that would be really great to have. I haven’t seen it.” Dr. Saxberg, by the way, holds a master’s in mathematics from Oxford University, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

Still,a new and growing body of scientific evidence indicates that cognitive training can be effective, including that offered by commercial services.

Oliver W. Hill Jr., a professor of psychology at Virginia State University in Petersburg, recently completed a $1 million study, yet to be published, financed by the National Science Foundation to test the effects of LearningRx. He looked at 340 middle-school students who spent two hours a week for a semester using LearningRx exercises in their schools’ computer labs and an equal number of students who received no such training. Those who played the online games, Dr. Hill found, not only improved significantly on measures of cognitive abilities compared to their peers, but also on Virginia’s annual

Standards of Learning exam.

He’s now conducting a follow-up study of college students in Texas and, he said, sees even stronger gains when the training is offered one on one.

Michael Merzenich, who spent years conducting brain plasticity research in animals as a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, started Posit Science to make the results of his research more widely available. “This is medicine,” he insisted. “It is driving changes in the brain.”

The programs offered by Posit, Lumosity and Cogmed are now being used by psychologists not affiliated with the companies to help people with diagnosed cognitive disorders, including traumatic brain injury, A.D.H.D., and the aftereffect of chemotherapy.

Kristina K. Hardy, a neuropsychologist at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, is testing the use of Cogmed with childhood cancer survivors, whose ability to learn is sometimes significantly reduced after chemotherapy and radiation. Founded by a Swedish neuroscientist, Cogmed was bought in 2010 by Pearson, the largest provider of testing and teaching materials, and is offered via psychologists and other clinical specialists.

“I entered this work with some skepticism that just doing some computer work at home could help anybody,” she said. “I thought we wouldn’t be able to move the needle on their cognitive abilities. And not everybody has been able to make gains. But I’ve had some kids who not only reported that they had very big changes in the classroom, but when we bring them back in the laboratory to do neuropsychological testing, we also see great changes. They show increases that would be highly unlikely to happen just by chance.”

Julie Schweitzer, director of the A.D.H.D. Program at the University of California, Davis, published a study in July finding that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who used Cogmed for 25 days were significantly better able to stay on task and to perform on a test of working memory — the ability to not just hold but to juggle items in the mind despite brief distractions.

“We got positive results, but it was a very small study,” she said. It involved just 26 children. Even so, she said: “In general, I’m cautiously optimistic about the potential for cognitive training. I’m concerned that some of the studies out there have not had the rigor that ought to be there. But I think the potential is there.”

AT Lumosity’s headquarters on the sixth floor of a rehabbed building in downtown San Francisco, bicycles line a wall, the meeting room has foosball, and the intensely focused young employees tap at their computers in a sprawling room without cubicles. It could be mistaken for a satellite office of Google. Except, oh, wait a minute, that guy who won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament five times in a row? He actually quit Google last year to work here.

“I looked around for a place that would get me closer to the kinds of games and puzzles I enjoy,” said Tyler Hinman, who is now a software developer and game designer at Lumosity. “But where crosswords and Sudoku are intended to be a diversion, the games here give that same kind of reward, only they’re designed to improve your brain, your memory, your problem-solving skills.”

More than 40 games are offered by Lumosity. One, the N-back, is based on a task developed decades ago by psychologists. Created to test working memory, the N-back challenges users to keep track of a continuously updated list and remember which item appeared “n” times ago. Practice on the N-back has been shown in some studies to lead to significant increases in fluid intelligence. Unlike crystallized intelligence, the mental storehouse of knowledge and procedures, fluid intelligence is the ability to solve novel problems, to see patterns and understand complex relationships — to find order in the chaos.

Not all the exercises offered by the commercial services carry the scientific pedigree of the N-back. Some offered by LearningRx exude an undeniable whiff of the theatrical, like having trainers shout and clap to help students learn to ignore distractions.

Perhaps that reflects the company’s origins. Whereas the founders of Posit, Cogmed and Lumosity all have advanced degrees in psychology and neuroscience, the founder of LearningRx obtained his Ph.D. in pediatric optometry.

“Largely my focus was on visual training,” Dr. Gibson said. Treating children with problems involving focusing or eye movement, he developed an interest in dyslexia and other learning disorders. “I realized I could help those who had eyes crossed, but I wasn’t helping very much with their academic performance,” he said. “I started reading the literature about training abilities of every skill, not just visual, but auditory and memory and speed of processing.”

Dr. Gibson is self-taught in the field of psychology; his confidence in his program, he said, comes from the gains students make on I.Q. tests. Trainers and franchise owners must be college graduates but need not have expertise — beyond the training given to them by LearningRx. Ms. Duch and Ms. Maia, the Montclair trainers, have B.A.’s in psychology.

“This has been a process since 1986,” Dr. Gibson said. “We have so systematized the program that the educational background of the trainers and franchise owners is not an issue. I don’t come from the perspective of an academic. We’re not part of Duke University or Harvard. We have to get results to justify the fees that we charge and get referrals.”

Back at the franchise in Upper Montclair, Nathan Veloric is trying to do his “speed numbers” exercise just a bit faster, in 45 seconds rather than 50, still without missing a single pair of numbers that add up to nine. Four times in a row he goes down a list, each time missing just one of the pairs.

“O.K., try it again,” says Ms. Duch. “I know you’re getting tired. Just give me two more tries.” And again she starts the timer.

Dan Hurley is a neuroscience reporter writing a book on new research into intelligence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/a-new-kind-of-tutoring-aims-to-make-students-smarter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

How to Deal with Non-cooperative Students as a Tutor

In a classroom setting, a student is surrounded by their classmates where everyone is expected to pay attention to the instructor. Not only are a student’s actions monitored by the teacher, their behavior is observed by their friends and classmates. Tutoring a student is usually done in a much different environment. A tutor works one-on-one with the student, many times in his/her own home and the student’s parent(s) may or may not be present for the tutoring session. These factors can sometimes lead to dealing with a student who is completely uncooperative with his/her tutor.
What do I do if my tutee won’t cooperate with me?

Set expectations
At the start of the tutorial, the tutor needs to set expectations with the student. The tutee needs to understand that just because he or she may not be in a traditional classroom, he/she is still expected to listen carefully and complete the tasks as assigned to them. The student may feel free to act out of line if his/her peers aren’t present, especially if the tutoring session is in his/her own home where he or she feels most comfortable and sometimes more entitled to act out. Establishing ground rules from the start can help to avoid misbehavior down the road.

Work through the behavior
Kids sometimes misbehave. Reasons can range from having a bad day at school to not getting enough sleep the night before. If a student is having difficulty in one particular subject, he or she may express his/her frustrations by acting out. If you can, try to work through the behavior when it happens. Have the student take a break. Try offering him/her a snack. Taking a few minutes for the student to recharge could be just the thing they need.

Provide an incentive
Incentives don’t have to be anything fancy. Encouragement and compliments can sometimes work wonders. Simple, but genuine praise helps. If the tutee is an elementary school level, sometimes gold stars on assignments, stickers, or even little trinkets can work to encourage good behavior. Consider setting up a point system and give the student an option of earning a reward by keeping tally. Over the course of the tutoring session if a student is listening and paying attention, he or she can receive good behavior points. If he or she misbehaves, you subtract points. Sometime as simple as keeping points could be just the incentive the student needs to be on his or her best behavior for the session.

Consult the parent
Tutoring is not babysitting. Depending on the age of the student, one or both parents should be present for the tutoring session. This doesn’t mean that the parent needs to be sitting at the table with the student and the tutor, but he or she should be in the house should the child begin to misbehave. Not only can it make the student feel more comfortable, but having a parent nearby for the session helps keep the parent in the loop. The tutor can review what was covered in the session with the parent so that he or she can continue to practice the material with the student before the next tutoring period.

http://blog.tutoringmatch.com/non-cooperative-students/?goback=%2Egde_66995_member_177006698

Not exactly for college-age tutors, but some good information.

Scholarly Publishing's Gender Gap

Women cluster in certain fields, according to a study of millions of journal articles, while men get more credit

 

Jennifer Jacquet, now a clinical assistant professor in environmental sciences at NYU, made the suggestion that kicked off the gender project, which she then worked on. The results showed that "things are getting better for women in academia," she says.

By Robin Wilson

When Jennifer Jacquet first visited Carl T. Bergstrom's evolutionary-biology lab at the University of Washington last year, she was surrounded by men. Men staring at data on the 27-inch Mac Pro computer screen that takes center stage in the lab. Men talking about mathematical proofs, about a South Park episode on evolution, about their latest mountain-climbing adventures.

Interactive Data

Women as Academic Authors, 1665-2010

Use an exclusive Chronicle tool to search gender differences in nearly 1,800 fields using historic data analyzed by the University of Washington's Eigenfactor Project.

Related Content

• Interactive Data: Women as Academic Authors, 1665-2010

Photos

John Brockman

Jennifer Jacquet, now a clinical assistant professor in environmental sciences at NYU, made the suggestion that kicked off the gender project, which she then worked on. The results showed that "things are getting better for women in academia," she says.

Stephen Brashear

Carl Bergstrom (left), a theoretical biologist at the U. of Washington, and Jevin West, a postdoctoral researcher there, analyzed whether the authors of two million scholarly articles were male or female.

"The lab is like visiting a fraternity," says Ms. Jacquet, who completed her postdoc at the University of British Columbia before starting this year as a clinical assistant professor in environmental studies at New York University.
Perhaps being the only woman in the lab prompted Ms. Jacquet's answer when Mr. Bergstrom, a professor of theoretical and evolutionary biology, asked her what should be done with a remarkable new trove of data. Mr. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West, a postdoc, had just gotten their hands on nearly eight million scholarly articles collected by J­STOR, a digital archiving service. They went all the way back to Isaac Newton's time.

The biologists at Washington, who specialize in using mathematical models and computer simulations to see how academic ideas flow through networks of scholars, wondered how they could use the data.

For Ms. Jacquet, the answer was clear: What did the articles and their authors show about gender differences in publishing? Were women and men equal in this fundamental coin of the academic realm, a currency that buys tenure, promotions, and career success?

To Ms. Jacquet's surprise, Mr. West and Mr. Bergstrom took her idea and ran with it. The result is the largest analysis ever done of academic articles by gender, reaching across hundreds of years and hundreds of fields. "This has never been done on this scale before," says Mr. West.

Although the percentage of female authors is still less than women's overall representation within the full-time faculty ranks, the researchers found that the proportion has increased as more women have entered the professoriate. They also show that women cluster into certain subfields and are somewhat underrepresented in the prestigious position of first author. In the biological ­sciences, women are even more underrepresented as last author. The last name on a scientific article is typically that of the senior scholar, who is not necessarily responsible for doing most of the research or writing but who directs the lab where the experiment was based.

"What we've done is assemble this huge collection of data across many of the major scientific, social-science, and humanities fields, providing a new lens for looking at how gender plays out in scholarly authorship," says Mr. West. "But this also provides a platform for further research to be done. We don't want this to stop here."

Publication Can Mean a Job

Scholarly publishing, more than anything else, is the measuring stick of professors' research productivity. In the humanities, it's usually the monograph. But in the hard sciences and in many social sciences, it's journal articles.

To be hired on the tenure track in those fields by a top research university, young scholars increasingly must have publications on their CV's by the time they finish their doctoral degrees. And once they are hired, more publications in leading journals typically are required to be promoted at every step along the way to full professor.

"When I went to get my first job, I had a sole-authored paper in a very good journal," says Shelley J. Correll, who started her academic career as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2001. "I think that article is what undoubtedly got me that first job. And it's even more common now for students to have that."

Ms. Correll is now a professor of sociology at Stanford University and director of its Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Research on Gender. Her name will appear fourth on an article that Mr. Bergstrom's lab hopes to publish on the findings, behind Mr. West (who is first), Ms. Jacquet, and Molly M. King, one of Ms. Correll's graduate students. Fifth is Theodore C. Bergstrom, an economist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and last is his son, the University of Washington's Mr. Bergstrom.

Author order is very important. "If I were to give people a vita of two people who had the exact same number of publications and one person was first author on a lot of papers and the other had publications in the same journals but was second through fourth author, I guarantee you people will prefer first," says Ms. Correll.

So negotiating author order becomes crucial. But women may not be as confident and have as much experience as men with those negotiations. "If I'm writing with a man, he may be more likely to insist he be first," Ms. Correll says. "When women negotiate in general, they are less likely to be successful. People don't consider their requests as legitimate."

That made names and gender the first order of business for Mr. Bergstrom's lab.

First they created an algorithm to label the millions of JSTOR papers by field and subfield. Then the trick was to figure out whether an author was male or female. The lab consulted data on birth names collected by the Social Security Administration. If a name was used at least 95 percent of the time for a female, they coded it female, and the same for a male. If use of the name was more ambiguous, they threw the paper out.

Of the eight million articles the group started with, it ended up analyzing two million—written by 2.7 million scholars—whose author composition was similar to the whole. Roughly half were published between 1665 and 1989, and the other half between 1990 and 2010. Included in the database are papers in the hard sciences, the social sciences, law, history, philosophy, and education. Missing from the JSTOR data are articles in engineering, English, foreign languages, and physics.

The data show that over the entire 345 years, 22 percent of all authors were female. (Even though few papers in the JSTOR archive originated in the first 100 years, the researchers still felt that examining the entire data set was worthwhile.) The data also show that women were slightly less likely than that to be first author: About 19 percent of first authors in the study were female. Women were more likely to appear as third, fourth, or fifth authors.

According to the data in just the most recent time period, it is clear that the proportion of female authors over all is rising. From 1990 to 2010, the percentage of female authors went up to 27 percent. In 2010 alone, the last year for which full figures are available, the proportion had inched up to 30 percent. "The results show us what a lot of people have been saying and many of my female colleagues have been feeling," says Ms. Jacquet. "Things are getting better for women in academia."

Women still are not publishing, though, in the same proportion as they are present in academe as professors. The same year that the share of female authors in the study reached 30 percent, women made up 42 percent of all full-time professors in academe and about 34 percent of all those at the most senior levels of associate and full professor, according to the American Association of University Professors.

As the proportion of female authors over all has grown, the biologists' study found, so has the percentage of women as first authors. In fact, by 2010 about the same proportion of women were first authors as were authors in general—about 30 percent.

But those gains have not been mirrored in the last-author position, which is of particular importance in the biological sciences. According to the data, in 2010 only about 23 percent of last authors over all were female. In molecular and cell biology, women represented almost 30 percent of authorships from 1990 to 2010, but only 16.5 percent of last authors. And over that same time period in ecology and evolution, women represented nearly 23 percent of authors but only 18.5 percent of last authors.

"The gap between women as first authors and women as last authors is actually growing, which suggests that women in scientific fields are allowed to have ideas and do most of the work on a paper, but do not yet have the big grants and labs full of students and postdocs that would establish them in the prestigious last-author position," says Ms. Jacquet.

A peek beneath the surface, going from field down to subfield, also reveals hidden disparities. For example, the database shows that over the final 20 years covered by the study, about 23 percent of authors writing in ecology and evolution have been female. But in some subfields of those disciplines, the proportion of women authors was even smaller, including just 19.5 percent in herpetology and 16.6 percent in paleontology.

The same phenomenon exists in economics: Between 1990 and 2010, 13.7 percent of authors in the database were female. In some subfields, though, the proportion of female authors was even smaller. In macroeconomics, for instance, women represented just under 10 percent of authors. In a subfield labeled "household decision-making," however, the proportion of female authors shot way up, to 30 percent.

What's notable, says Mr. Bergstrom, is the way some of those differences mirror gender-role stereotypes. For instance, in sociology, where the gender breakdown was more even—women represented 41.4 percent of authors since 1990, men 58.6 percent—things look very different in the subfield of criminology where men made up 74 percent of all authors. On the other hand, women were much more heavily represented in subfields including "sex roles," where females accounted for 56 percent of the authors, and in the study of aging parents, where women constituted 62 percent.

"Sociology represents a domain where we think of things being more even because of the overall gender ratios," says Mr. Bergstrom. "But once you get in, for whatever reason you see we stratify ourselves. And we do it in ways that are loosely consistent with our common sense, the stereotypes about who does what."

Why Not 50-50?

Women's progress in academe has long been a hot topic, not least the debate over why women publish less than men do. Female professors are more likely to emphasize quality over quantity, some scholars argue, turning out fewer but meatier pieces than do their male colleagues, who are more apt to increase their productivity by publishing their work in more-frequent chunks.

In addition, studies show that women spend less time on research and more time on teaching and committee work. And it is often research and publishing, which require sustained attention, that suffer when women devote time to caring for young children.

As more women earn Ph.D.'s and take faculty jobs, though, and as the gap between the number of women and men in academe narrows, scholars have begun thinking about whether anything can or should be done about gender-based differences that remain in publishing, hiring, promotion, and pay. Do those differences result from choices women make, scholars wonder, or from discrimination?

Where professors come down on that question influences how they interpret the data on scholarly publishing from Mr. Bergstrom's lab. Cheryl Geisler, dean of the Faculty of Communication, Art, and Technology at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, says the fact that women do not account for at least half of the professors in most fields, and half of those writing scholarly articles, doesn't necessarily mean that women face discrimination. But "if it's not 50-50," she says, "we should at least ask, Why not?" Authorship data showing that some subfields are even more male or female than the average is "like the canary in the coal mine" and deserves further study, she says.

Some academics argue that gender clustering in subfields can skew the results of scholarship. "Just as when you had primarily Europeans writing history, you had a certain version, the same thing happens when women begin to write about crime and punishment," says Anita Levy, associate secretary of the AAUP. "There may be a way of thinking about it, or women who may see fit to look at different factors that may not have occurred to a scholar who is male."

Ann Mari May, a professor of economics at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, has done research showing that gender influences the way economists view social policy. She sent surveys to 400 members of the American Economic Association who hold doctorates in economics from American universities. Of the 143 who responded, she found that the women among them were 24 percentage points more likely than the men to believe that the size of the U.S. government is either about right, too small, or much too small, and 21 points likelier to reject the idea that the United States suffers from excessive government regulations.

John J. Siegfried, a professor emeritus of economics at Vanderbilt University who has worked with the economic association, says there is not much that academe can do about gender imbalances, short of forcing women into subfields that may not interest them. "What's the solution?" he asks. "Should I tell women starting a Ph.D. that they should only study finance or econometrics?"

Wendy M. Williams is a professor of human development at Cornell University who studies the role of women in science, including scholarly publishing. She says the Bergstrom data on gender and authorship don't necessarily show discrimination in academic publishing, even though women cluster in some subfields and publish at lower rates than either their male counterparts or their presence in academe in general.

"The international literature show that when women submit work, there is no bias in it being accepted, but the likelihood of women submitting work may be lower," she says. "If a woman is interested in a field, but she has to devote time to three kids, she may not be submitting as often. I don't see that as discrimination."

Just last month, though, a new study released by Yale University suggested that gender bias remains a factor in academe. It found that science professors at six major research universities were likely to rate male job candidates as more qualified than female candidates to be hired as laboratory managers, even though the study assigned the hypothetical male and female applicants identical qualifications.

Ms. Jacquet says she was surprised to find that her own experience as a female scientist was not reflected by women in the Washington study of the JSTOR archives. At the time she visited Mr. Bergstrom's lab last year, she had published 10 scholarly articles and was the first author on all of them. Her fellow postdoc Mr. West, she noticed, had published a few more in total but was the second author on five. Although she knew that being first author was important, Ms. Jacquet also wondered whether it was because she is female that she had had to take the initiative in publishing all of her own scholarly articles, while Mr. West had been asked to collaborate on several peer-reviewed articles.

But the data, she says, show that female professors in the study actually were more likely to be second through fourth authors than first. It knocked down her theory that male scientists had failed to ask her to collaborate on academic articles because she is a woman. Since she first visited Mr. Bergstrom's lab, in fact, she has published three academic articles on which she is not the lead author. The article on gender and authorship will be her fourth.

"For me," she says, "this really showed the beauty of science, that you can have this personal experience that isn't reflected in big data."

Correction (10/22/2012, 3:36 p.m.): This article originally misstated Ms. Jacquet's authorship status on 10 scholarly articles she had published as of last year. She was the first author on all 10, not the only author. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Hard-Numbers-Behind/135236/