Happy Labor Day! This Memo is something of a milestone - the 300th issue, six years of publication, fifty issues a year, 2,937 article summaries so far. I love doing the Memo and hope I'll keep it going for many more years.

Here's an interesting factoid: only 17 of the 44 core publications I now read were on my original list six years ago. This shows the steady broadening of the Memo's reach. I do continue to read beyond the 44 - articles from 160 publications are in the database.

In case you missed the results of the Survey Monkey questionnaire over the summer, see below. The feedback will be most helpful in making the Memo even better.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=2B2Dd6VlIgKR5O93GefIjmi_2fs2tdxNOWzXrPvGah6fk_3d

I hope your year is off to a great start!

All the very best,

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“Google has given us the world at our fingertips, but speed and ubiquity are not the same as actually knowing something.”
Peter Cookson (see item #2)

“The ability to distinguish fact from factoid, reality from fiction, and truth from lies is not a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘must have’ in a world flooded with so much propaganda and spin.”
Peter Cookson (ibid.)

“Part of our work as teachers is to, in a sense, trick people into doing the most efficient learning they can.”
David Daniel (see item #1)

“The first day of school, they’re bombarded with so many things. If you stand there that day and say, ‘Do this, do this, do this,’ hardly any of it sticks.”
David Daniel (ibid.)

“For the life sciences, anyone who does not understand its major principles and tenets would be as illiterate as someone studying English who has never heard of Shakespeare.”
Jonathan Osborne in “Learning Science vs. Doing Science” in Education Week, Sept.
2, 2009 (Vol. 29, #2, p. 26-27), e-link for subscribers only

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1. Three Suggestions for Effective Teaching – With Caveats

In this thoughtful article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Glenn reports that over the last twenty years, educational psychologists have identified three general principles of good teaching. Each has broad validity, says Glenn, but each needs to be applied with sensitivity to the particular classroom situation.
• Desirable difficulties – Instructors should organize their presentations and assignments in such a way that students are forced to think about and integrate the central concepts. Interestingly, this approach reduces students’ performance on short-term assessments, but long term, it helps students absorb concepts more deeply. In an experiment with schoolchildren, UCLA professor Robert Bjork asked teachers to conduct a lesson on which planets can sustain life. All the teachers explained two variables: a planet’s mass and its distance from the star it orbits. One group of teachers presented and quizzed students on the two variables separately. Another group of teachers interwove the two variables.
Quizzed on the material the day it was presented, students in the “interwoven” class did worse than the students who had the material presented discretely. But 48 hours later, when students were given new questions about the material, the interwoven group did much better than the students who learned the concepts separately. Learning the content in the interwoven format caused some initial discomfort, but once students had processed it, the concepts stuck better in their minds. “Desirable difficulties force students to do deeper processing,” explains David Daniel, a psychology professor at James Madison University who co-authored a recent paper on the subject. “Part of our work as teachers is to, in a sense, trick people into doing the most efficient learning they can.” Like any technique, this one must be used with sensitivity to the context and dynamics of each classroom, and a lot depends on a skilled teacher’s instincts about the mood of a class. “In desirable difficulties,” says Daniel, “the important word is ‘desirable.’”
• Spacing – Teachers should present key concepts several times at intervals during the course, instead of presenting each one separately in a single block. “Some people are like, ‘Here’s this, here’s this, here’s this, and here’s a synthesis,’” says Daniel, “… But I do better with more interweaving, showing the content in different ways at different times. I think of it as giving students multiple windows of entry into the material.” Research indicates that spacing improves students’ long-term retention – but this technique doesn’t work in every discipline and every situation. Again, context is key.
• Metacognitive monitoring – Getting students to be more thoughtful about their learning styles and study habits is important to raising achievement, especially for students who have not learned these skills. But some teachers have bad timing with their metacognitive coaching, reducing its effectiveness. “The first day of school, they’re bombarded with so many things. If you stand there that day and say, ‘Do this, do this, do this,’ hardly any of it sticks,” says Daniel. A more effective approach is to present strategy suggestions and teach study skills as they become relevant during the year. “I’ll try to sneak them in,” says Daniel. “Sometimes in the middle of a presentation I’ll say, ‘Now, here’s a good way to think about it if you want to learn this.’”
Explicit teaching of study skills can make a big difference – but not for all students. A few years ago, Debra Poole, a professor at Central Michigan University, jotted down the names of all the students in her introductory psychology class with Ds and Fs on the first three weekly quizzes. She met with each one and assigned them to graduate students for one-on-one tutoring in study skills. For some of these failing students, the tutoring helped a lot, but for others, there was no difference. Why? “They were students who didn’t own the textbook and freely admitted they hadn’t read the book,” says Poole. “They were not coming to class. They were simply not engaged… These students didn’t need a learning intervention. They needed a get-out-of-bed-and-come-to-class intervention.”

“Three Paths to Better Teaching, and When to Stray from Them” by David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 4, 2009 (Vol. LVI, #2, p. A17), no e-link available

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2. Deep Skills for the 21st Century

(Originally titled “What Would Socrates Say?”)
“Socrates believed that we learn best by asking essential questions and testing tentative answers against reason and fact in a continual and virtuous circle of honest debate,” says Yale Divinity School professor Peter Cookson in this Educational Leadership article. “Google has given us the world at our fingertips, but speed and ubiquity are not the same as actually knowing something.” If we don’t approach information in a thoughtful, Socratic manner, Cookson continues, “the great knowledge and communication tsunami of the 21st century may drown us in a sea of trivia instead of lifting us up on a rising tide of possibility and promise.” He identifies four key elements to nurture in our students:
• Critical reflection – “The ability to distinguish fact from factoid, reality from fiction, and truth from lies is not a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘must have’ in a world flooded with so much propaganda and spin,” says Cookson. Schools need to help students see the world from multiple viewpoints and think through other possible outcomes.
• Empirical reasoning – It’s vital, says Cookson, to cultivate “the willingness to abandon supernatural explanations for naturally occurring events. Floods, famines, and human misfortune have often been attributed to angry gods, fate, and fantastic cosmologies that externalize our locus of control, making us perpetual victims who must please the gods or fate to survive. These non-empirical ‘theories of everything’ require us to suspend reason, fact, and logic. Although we can appreciate these worldviews for their aesthetic and poetic beauty, they are a poor foundation for problem solving.”
• Collective intelligence – Students must realize, says Cookson, that education is not a process of dispensing “cultural capital” to individuals. “None of us are educational islands unto ourselves,” he says. “There is a great deal of talk about teamwork today; the real basis of teamwork is the willingness to think collectively to solve common problems.” The space shuttle is a good example: no single astronaut can fly it alone; only a team in space and on the ground can master its intricacies.
• Metacognition – Students must be able to monitor their own learning and make changes if skills and knowledge are not being absorbed. “When we think about thinking,” says Cookson, “we turn our mental pictures around ever so slowly to view them from different angles… As the challenges facing the globe become increasingly complex, our frames of reference must be flexible, expansive, and adaptive.”
Cookson sees these new skills developing in a radically different educational context, with the “linear, text-bound culture” of the 20th century giving way to a new era in which “knowledge creation is fluid, fast, and far more democratic.” He urges schools to engage students in real-world problem-solving, for example, figuring out ways to tackle the world’s water crisis, with teachers learning beside their students. “Like any creative effort, this collective journey would include errors, lack of good information, and false starts – a process of which Socrates would approve,” concludes Cookson. “Organizing this new learning model is the work of the 21st century.”

“What Would Socrates Say?” by Peter Cookson, Jr. in Educational Leadership, September 2009 (Vol. 67, #1, p. 8-14) http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership.aspx; Cookson can be reached at peter.cookson@yale.edu.

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3. Teaching 21st-Century Skills Well

(Originally titled “21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead”)
In this Educational Leadership article, Eduwonk blogger Andrew Rotherham and University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham argue that the much-ballyhooed “21st-century skills” are nothing new. Critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, information literacy, global awareness, mastery of facts as well as complex analysis – all this has been taught by effective schools and teachers through the ages. What’s new, say the authors, is how critical these skills are to success in the years ahead – which means we have to teach them more intentionally and effectively to all students. “Today we cannot afford a system in which receiving a high-quality education is akin to a game of bingo,” say the authors. “If we are to have a more equitable and effective public education system, skills that have been the province of the few must become universal.”
The danger, say Rotherham and Willingham, is that the 21st-century skills movement will be implemented with weak fidelity to its core intent and won’t make a difference for the low-income and minority-group students who need it the most. To avoid this, they recommend careful attention to three areas they believe have been “weak links in past education reform efforts” – curriculum, teacher training, and tests.
• Better curriculum – In the debate between rich content knowledge and thinking skills, Rotherham and Willingham say it’s not either-or, it’s both. “[W]ithout content knowledge,” they say, “we often cannot use thinking skills properly and effectively.” They caution against three fallacies. The first is that, because knowledge is so easy to access on the Internet, it’s less important than skills. The second is that skills, once mastered, can be applied to any content. The third is that just mandating the teaching of 21st-century skills will result in students learning them. “But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature,” say the authors. “To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.” We need to decide which skills are most important and teach them systematically and well.
The authors also caution against introducing advanced, conceptual thinking too early, as happened with the “New Math” in the 1960s. And they say we need to have some humility as we embark on teaching these skills to all students. The fact is that “we don’t yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division,” they say. Having students work in groups doesn’t teach collaboration. Students will improve only if they practice, get feedback from someone more skilled themselves, notice what they are doing wrong, and learn strategies to get better.
• Better teaching – Most teachers already know that project- and problem-based learning is more effective, say Rotherham and Willingham, but very few actually use it. “Most data show that most instructional time is composed of seatwork and whole-class instruction led by the teacher,” report the authors. “Even when class size is reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered methods… What teachers need is much more robust training and support than they receive today, including specific lesson plans that deal with the high cognitive demands and potential classroom management problems of using student-centered methods.” It’s essential that school leaders provide time and coaching so teachers can plan, execute, get feedback on, and refine these approaches.
• Better tests – As important as improving curriculum and training, say Rotherham and Willingham, is developing assessments that do a better job evaluating what is and is not being learned in every classroom – including thinking skills. Such tests, which are in the initial stages of development, should include open-response items that encourage greater creativity, show how students got their answers, and even measure students’ ability to work with others.

“21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead” by Andrew Rotherham and Daniel Willingham in Educational Leadership, September 2009 (Vol. 67, #1, p. 16-21) http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership.aspx; Rotherham is at arotherham@educationsector.org and Willingham is at willingham@virginia.edu.

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4. Six Myths About Creativity

(Originally titled “Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson”)
“A big part of being creative is looking for new ways of doing things within whatever activity you’re involved in,” says British creativity expert Ken Robinson in this Educational Leadership interview by Amy Azzam. “…A creative process may begin with a flash of a new idea or with a hunch. It may just start as noodling around with a problem, getting some fresh ideas along the way. It’s a process, not a single event…”
Robinson believes that six misconceptions get in the way of teaching creativity effectively, and that as a result, “we’re systematically educating it out of our kids.”
• That creativity is possessed by only a gifted few. Not true, says Robinson. “Everybody has tremendous creative capacities.”
• That creativity is limited to a few special activities – the arts, for example. Nonsense, says Robinson. “You can be creative in math, science, music, dance, cuisine, teaching, running a family, or engineering.”
• That creativity is “letting yourself go, kind of running around the room and going a bit crazy.” Robinson disagrees. “Really, creativity is a disciplined process that requires skill, knowledge, and control,” he says. “Obviously, it also requires imagination and inspiration. But it’s not simply a question of venting: It’s a disciplined path of daily education.”
• That creativity is a solitary process. On the contrary, “Most original thinking comes through collaboration and through the stimulation of other people’s ideas,” says Robinson. “… The great scientific breakthroughs have almost always come through some form of fierce collaboration among people with common interests but very different ways of thinking. This is one of the great skills we have to promote and teach – collaborating and benefiting from diversity rather than promoting homogeneity.” Robinson worries that standardized tests promote a narrow view of intelligence and narrow the curriculum.
• That people who aren’t creative can’t teach creativity. There’s a distinction between teaching creatively and teaching for creativity, says Robinson. In the latter, the pedagogy is designed to encourage innovation, not give away the answers, and ask for divergent thinking, analogies, metaphors, and visual thinking. It’s especially helpful to connect students to a medium that excites them, whether it’s music, gymnastics, science, playing pool.
• That creativity can’t be assessed. Indeed it can, says Robinson, if you observe students in a situation in which they’ve been asked to look for new ways of solving problems. Should students be graded for creativity? “Certainly giving people credit for originality, encouraging it, and giving kids some way of reflecting on whether these new ideas are more effective than existing ideas is a powerful part of pedagogy,” he says. “But you can’t reduce everything to a number in the end, and I don’t think we should.”

“Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson” in Educational Leadership, September 2009 (Vol. 67, #1, p. 22-26) http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership.aspx; Robinson’s website is at http://www.sirkenrobinson.com.

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5. Teaching the Core Concepts of K-12 Science

(Originally titled “The Science Students Need to Know”)
“Science education is not just about training the next generation of scientists,” say George Mason University physics professor James Trefil and Maryland middle-school teacher Wanda O’Brien-Trefil in this Educational Leadership article. It’s also about developing citizens who can understand issues like global warming, wind and solar power, stem cells, and the storage of nuclear waste. “Someone who can do this is scientifically literate,” say the authors. This means that schools must help students understand a wide array of scientific topics and integrate them with ethical, political, social, economic, and moral dimensions that are part of debates on stem cells and other hot topics. “Scientific knowledge becomes a kind of entry ticket into that wider debate,” say Trefil and O’Brien-Trefil. “You can’t get into the debate without it, even though you’ll need more than a scientific background once you do.”
Fortunately, say the authors, there is an inherent structure to the sciences – like a spider’s web – that makes it easier for students to achieve scientific literacy. On the outside are trees, butterflies, cells, mountains, and other things that make up the physical universe. When we start anywhere on the outside and ask What is this thing? How does it work? we start working our way toward the inner area of the web, where we find a relatively small number of laws the govern the entire universe – a matrix of concepts that tie everything together. These include:
- The universe is regular and predictable.
- Energy is conserved and always goes from more useful to less useful forms.
- Electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the same force.
- All matter is made of atoms.
- Everything comes in discrete units, and you can’t measure anything without changing it.
- Atoms are bound by electron glue.
- The way a material behaves depends on how its atoms are arranged.
- Nuclear energy comes from the conversion of mass.
- All matter is made of quarks and leptons.
- Stars live and die.
- The universe was born at a specific time in the past, and it has been expanding ever since.
- Every observer sees the same laws of nature in operation.
- The surface of the earth is constantly changing.
- The earth operates in many cycles (for example, the water, rock, and atmospheric cycle).
- All living things are made from cells, the chemical factories of life.
- All life is based on the same genetic code.
- All forms of life evolved by natural selection.
- All life is connected.
These are the essential core of how the universe works, say Trefil and O’Brien-Trefil, and students need to know it by the time they leave school.
This means that the K-12 curriculum must provide systematic coverage of all key material, with a thoughtful integration of topics from biology, chemistry, physics, earth, and environmental sciences. Solid content knowledge is much more important than learning about the “scientific method,” say the authors. “[T]he quasi-mystical belief that students need to ‘know what scientists do’ is misguided,” they say. “There is, in fact, no magical scientific method, no silver bullet that, once mastered, will enable someone to easily acquire knowledge of new science. If you expect your students to understand molecular biology, you have to teach them molecular biology. You don’t teach them physics and hope that this knowledge will help them understand stem cells. It won’t.”
The awesome computing power of new technologies has made science itself far more complex than it was 50 years ago – which reinforces the importance of students learning the basic building-block concepts listed above. “Instead of presenting these laws in a compartmentalized way – divided into physics, chemistry, and biology,” conclude Trefil and O’Brien-Trefil, “teachers would get across the notion that nature presents itself to us in a seamless web, without artificial labels.”

“The Science Students Need to Know” by James Trefil and Wanda O’Brien-Trefil in Educational Leadership, September 2009 (Vol. 67, #1, p. 28-33) http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership.aspx; Trefil can be reached at jtrefil@gmu.edu.

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6. How Good Are State Curriculum Standards for Evolution?

In this new study in Evolution: Education and Outreach assessing evolution standards in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Louise Mead and Anton Mates found that the topic is getting more thorough treatment across the nation than it did a few years ago, but that creationist language has made its way into curriculum documents in several states. Their study provides an itemized analysis of the quality of standards. Overall grades are as follows; for commentary on each state’s grade, see the link below.
A – California, District of Columbia, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, South Carolina
B – Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington
C – Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Virginia
D – Alaska, Connecticut, Kentucky, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Wyoming
F – Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, West Virginia

Do state standards matter? “Yes,” Mead and Mates. “Even if a good treatment of evolution in state science standards does not guarantee that evolution will be taught well, it provides a critical resource for teachers who want to teach evolution correctly. The clearest example is that a good treatment of evolution in the standards provides important support for biology teachers facing protests from creationist students, parents, and administrators who want creationism taught, or evolution not taught, in life science courses.” Solid standards also help when parents ask that their children opt out when evolution is taught and other teachers undercut the teaching of evolution. All this leaves students ignorant or misinformed about evolution, say Mead and Mates. “A good treatment of evolution in state life science standards can help to persuade administrators that the teaching of evolution is not a matter for political negotiations between parents and teachers with different interests but a clear educational necessity. Students simply should not be allowed to opt out of material that the state considers essential, and non-science teachers should not be allowed to contradict or undermine this material in their own lessons.”

“Why Science Standards Are Important to a Strong Science Curriculum and How States Measure Up” by Louise Mead and Anton Mates in Evolution: Education and Outreach, Sept. 2009 (Vol. 2, #3) http://www.springerlink.com/content/9u0610162rn51432/fulltext.pdf
Spotted in Education Week Report Roundup, Sept. 2, 2009 (Vol. 29, #2, p. 4-5)

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7. A Middle-School Dropout Prevention Program in Philadelphia

In this article in Middle Ground, Liza Herzog, Johann Liljengren, Allie Mulvihill of the Philadelphia Education Fund and Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins University report on how they put some alarming dropout data to work in two Philadelphia schools. The data from a national survey showed that potential dropouts can be identified as early as sixth grade and that the key indicators can be summed up in the acronym ABC: attendance problems, behavior problems, and course failure (an F in literacy and/or math). Students who have any of these four risk factors have only a 10-20 percent chance of graduating within five years of entering high school. Here are the key components of Diplomas Now, the intervention the authors designed and implemented:
• A common vision – It was essential that the schools bought into the belief that all students would graduate ready for college and career success, say the authors: “Fundamental to this vision are middle grades educators who see themselves as vital links on a relay team, moving alongside their students to transition them to high school colleagues who will guide them to the finish line.”
• Effective whole-school and classroom practices – These included research-based attendance and behavior policies, pedagogy, professional development, professional learning communities, extra-help strategies, and effective family involvement.
• Teacher-friendly data – The first step was creating an Early Indicator Data Tool to identify students who were not on track. Next they added instructional reading levels “because we believe that literacy competence is the main portal to academic success.” The data tool was then made part of Philadelphia’s SchoolNet student information system, reporting results on interim assessments and other data online.
• School planning and implementation tool – This laid out three support tiers: whole-school/classroom, targeted, and intensive. The tool was used to allocate resources and then inform grade-level teacher team meetings as they discussed which supports students needed and how those supports would be delivered.
• On-track grade-level teacher team meetings – Teachers were organized into dyads, triads, and quads that met every two weeks. The explicit norm in these meetings, which the authors consider the “linchpin” of the program, was that the agenda was sacred and couldn’t be hijacked for other reasons. Teachers focused on students one at a time to identify, align, implement, assess, and adjust supports they needed to be on track. For example, a sixth-grade team focused on a girl with very poor attendance who seemed disengaged in all her classes, alerted teachers to watch her carefully, and referred her to the school’s social services worker.
• An on-site program manager – A key feature of the program was a full-time coordinator whose sole responsibility was to integrate the project into the daily life of the school. The program manager continuously scanned the school environment to identify what was and was not in place for students (for example, the lack of a guidance counselor, inappropriate textbooks), met weekly with the principal and leadership team, prepared and facilitated on-track grade-level meetings, and took the lead in weekly meetings of all service providers to coordinate efforts, provide professional development, and integrate goals that were on the school’s priority list. “Without an on-side program manager to center the work for at least the first three years,” say the authors, “we run the risk of even the most committed staff becoming sidetracked by the ‘crisis of the moment.’”
After a year implementing the model, the leaders decided that the schools didn’t have certain key personnel to make it successful. They reached out to City Year and Communities in Schools Philadelphia to provide 14 City Year corps members to one school for tutoring, mentoring, and after-school programming and a social service site coordinator and social worker to support students at all three grade levels.

“All Aboard: Students on Track for Graduation” by Liza Herzog, Johann Liljengren, Allie Mulvihill, and Robert Balfanz in Middle Ground, August 2009 (Vol. 13, #1, p. 8-10), no e-link available

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8. Is Accelerated Reader’s Point System Reducing High-Quality Reading?

In this column in the New York Times Book Review, novelist Susan Straight criticizes Accelerated Reader, a popular school computer program (owned by Renaissance Learning and reportedly used in 75,000 schools nationwide) that quizzes students on books they have read and awards points that are often used in classroom and schoolwide competitions. Straight’s concern is with the point system, which she says awards lots of points for books like these…
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – 44 points
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – 34
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – 32
while awarding surprisingly few points for books like these:
- Hamlet – 7
- Heart of Darkness – 10
- Go Tell It on the Mountain – 12 points
- My Antonia – 13 points
- The Remains of the Day – 13
- Great and Terrible Beauty – 14 points
- Ophelia – 14
- To Kill a Mockingbird – 15
- Frankenstein – 17
- Sense and Sensibility – 22
- Jane Eyre – 33
Teachers and librarians in schools using Accelerated Reader told Straight that students won’t read books that aren’t on the AR list (no points for those) and gravitate toward books that have the most points. This creates a perverse incentive to avoid books like the low-point classics above and pick up books that rack up points. Straight also believes the point system and schools’ use of the data spur competition and change the time-honored dynamic of deciding what to read next. “The passion and serendipity of choosing a book at the library based on the subject or the cover or the first page is nearly gone,” she says, “as well as the excitement of reading a book simply for pleasure.”
Straight concedes that Accelerated Reader means well (its mission is to instill a love of reading) and that many teachers say it has increased reading in their classrooms. “But as a writer and a mother of three girls who love novels,” she concludes, “I find the idea that we can apply a numerical formula to reading a bit insulting to literature.” Something is clearly missing in the Accelerated Reader metric, she says. “It cannot consider emotion and landscape and character, and certainly can’t identify what makes even some of the simplest-seeming sentences so complex and lovely and painful… And nothing can measure how a young life can be changed by literature.”

“Reading by the Numbers” by Susan Straight in the New York Times Book Review, Aug. 30, 2009 (p. 23)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Straight-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Susan%20Straight&st=cse

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9. Short Items: a. Big Apple Eighth Graders Show Their Stuff; b. College Choices Website; c. Band Leaders Website; d. Author Directory Website; e. Weight Bias Website

a. Big Apple eighth graders show their stuff – In June 2009, eighth graders from all five boroughs of New York City showed off more than 200 of their best research projects at a science expo at the American Museum of Natural History (part of Urban Advantage: Middle School Exit Project Initiative). Check it out at http://www.urbanadvantagenyc.org/home.aspx.

Spotted in “News to Use” in Middle Ground, August 2009 (Vol. 13, #1, p. 6-7)

b. College choices website – A new website, http://www.CollegeClickTV.com, provides more than 20,000 student interviews and information about hundreds of colleges.

Spotted in “News to Use” in Middle Ground, August 2009 (Vol. 13, #1, p. 6-7)

c. Band leaders website – This site, http://www.msbanddirector.com, has everything from flute fingering charts to analyses of scores of songs played by school bands.

Spotted in “News to Use” in Middle Ground, August 2009 (Vol. 13, #1, p. 6-7)

d. Author directory website – This site has information on more than 1.8 million author websites: http://www.filedby.com.

Spotted in “News to Use” in Middle Ground, August 2009 (Vol. 13, #1, p. 6-7)

e. Weight bias website – This site, http://yaleruddcenter.org/what_we_do.aspx?id=200, from the Rudd Center has resources to help teachers and students combat stereotypes, prejudice, and unfair treatment of overweight and obese students.

Spotted in “News to Use” in Middle Ground, August 2009 (Vol. 13, #1, p. 6-7)

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