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The SchoolWorks Lab Professional Development
June 24, 2024

Hattie and Bloom in Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Robert A. Southworth, Jr

Integrating John Hattie’s and Benjamin Bloom’s educational theories into Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education can greatly enhance the effectiveness of AI-driven learning tools. Here’s how these theories can inform the design and implementation of AI in educational contexts:

1. Evidence-Based Practices (Hattie)

John Hattie’s Insights:

Visible Learning: Hattie’s research identifies the most effective teaching strategies based on their impact on student achievement. His meta-analyses provide a comprehensive list of what works best in education, such as feedback, direct instruction, and metacognitive strategies.
AI Application:

Adaptive Learning Systems: AI can use Hattie’s findings to prioritize high-impact teaching strategies. For instance, AI-driven platforms can incorporate frequent, personalized feedback mechanisms, which Hattie identifies as highly effective.
Data-Driven Insights: AI can analyze vast amounts of student performance data to identify patterns and suggest evidence-based interventions, aligning with Hattie’s emphasis on using data to inform teaching practices.
2. Hierarchical Learning Objectives (Bloom)

Benjamin Bloom’s Insights:

Bloom’s Taxonomy: This framework categorizes cognitive skills into six levels: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. It is used to design curriculum and assessments that promote higher-order thinking skills.
AI Application:

Personalized Learning Pathways: AI can tailor learning experiences to match students’ current levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy, progressively guiding them from basic knowledge acquisition to higher-order thinking skills like analysis and evaluation.
Assessment Design: AI can generate assessments that target various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of students’ cognitive abilities and facilitating differentiated instruction.
3. Effective Feedback Mechanisms (Hattie)

John Hattie’s Insights:

Feedback: Hattie highlights the importance of timely, specific, and actionable feedback in improving student performance.
AI Application:

Real-Time Feedback: AI systems can provide instant feedback on assignments and assessments, helping students understand their mistakes and learn from them immediately.
Detailed Analytics: AI can offer detailed analytics on student performance, helping educators tailor their feedback to address specific learning needs.
4. Student-Centered Learning (Hattie and Bloom)

Combined Insights:

Hattie’s Student-Centered Approaches: Emphasizes practices like cooperative learning and student voice in learning.
Bloom’s Focus on Comprehension and Application: Encourages moving beyond rote memorization to deeper understanding and practical application.
AI Application:

Interactive and Engaging Content: AI can create interactive and engaging learning modules that foster active learning and student participation.
Collaborative Platforms: AI-powered platforms can facilitate collaborative projects and peer-to-peer learning, reflecting Hattie’s findings on the benefits of cooperative learning.
5. Lifelong Learning and Continuous Improvement

Hattie’s Insights:

Lifelong Learning: Stresses the importance of teachers being lifelong learners and continuously updating their teaching practices.
AI Application:

Professional Development: AI can support teacher professional development by providing personalized learning resources, tracking progress, and suggesting areas for improvement based on data analysis.
Reflective Practices: AI tools can help teachers reflect on their teaching practices by providing insights into student performance and engagement, aligned with Hattie’s emphasis on reflective practice.
6. Holistic Assessment and Diverse Intelligences (Bloom)

Bloom’s Insights:

Multiple Intelligences: Although not originally Bloom’s theory, his taxonomy supports the assessment of various cognitive processes, aligning with Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory.
AI Application:

Multimodal Assessments: AI can create assessments that measure a wide range of skills and intelligences, providing a more holistic view of student abilities.
Adaptive Testing: AI-driven adaptive testing can adjust the difficulty and type of questions based on the student’s performance, ensuring an accurate measure of their understanding and skills.
Conclusion

Integrating Hattie’s and Bloom’s educational theories into AI systems can create more effective, personalized, and comprehensive learning experiences. By leveraging evidence-based practices, hierarchical learning objectives, and real-time feedback, AI can enhance both teaching and learning, ultimately leading to better educational outcomes. This approach ensures that AI-driven educational tools are not only technologically advanced but also pedagogically sound, promoting versatile intelligence and holistic assessment in line with the VIA

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Sharing Skills in the Arts with other Core Academic Content
by Rob Southworth | posted in: Arts, Assessment, Intelligence, Reform | 0

Context
David Byrne’s, “How Music Works,” (2012), starts with the chapter called, “Creation in Reverse.” In this first chapter, Byrne’s insight is that “context determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung or performed” (page 13). He argues that artists don’t create out of thin air, they create what can fit into the context they are given. For example, if you compose music in a small room, you will tailor the sound and the loudness to it. You will paint for the size of your canvas, and you will perform for the size of your stage or dance for the size of your dance floor. You will choose to organize your creation in an art form for the context in which it will be viewed.

Desk
For Schools and students, the context is severely restricted to the classroom, and perhaps the desk. Students are asked to draw, create, imagine at their desk, and perhaps to put that up on the wall for others to review. This tight context with peers watching can be inspirational, but may be more stifling of creativity than we have previously researched. I can imagine that creativity flourishes as long as the private desk context reinforces that sense of possibility, and I can also imagine that creativity is threatened to the extent that the context of the desk, or the classroom wall, limits creativity’s possibilities.

Arts Integration
The same creative limit on creativity could be observed about academic content retention. To the extent that students can read and absorb their assigned homework is the extent to which they can remember and recreate their knowledge to be used on a test several weeks later. However, what we found in our research was that the intentional use of the arts with academic content, the process of arts integration where students learn about academic content through the exploration of the arts, results in longer term memory and higher test scores (Southworth, 2014). So the logic model for our work is that students who create art in the context of academic content are making memories that are intertwined and overlapping and that can be more easily recalled and retained for future knowledge use. Arts integration helps creativity within the context of core academic content.

Transfer
The field of arts education has long argued that there is very little direct transfer between the arts and academic content areas. Transfer is seen as the important research lens as it would prove that the arts are useful to core academic content. Our research shows that direct transfer is not an accurate focus for the lens of arts integration research where there is a larger interactional effect of using the arts with core academic content. Transfer may be a helpful lens for limiting the research for direct causation of music and math, but there is something much more powerful going on that requires a wider lens, more accurate research measurement methodologies and much more understanding of long-term human memory! The assumption of transfer as the most important avenue of research has obscured our focus on the larger issue of interactional effect, overlapping memory and skill sharing.

Skill Sharing is Learning
The stronger avenue of research is identifying the skills that are promoted in the arts—such as creativity, interactional effects and memory—with the use of that skill in core academic contents areas. When children memorize the core history content of building the Erie Canal in New York State, we found that their learning is substantially buttressed when they have to draw a picture of the locks that lift or lower the canal boats to new heights. Once the 4th graders draw the locks, the gates, the pumps and the changing levels of the water involved, they never forget how these work. They can answer exam questions with ease and confidence months after they have learned the content. They are perceived as smart, but I would argue that they have always been smart, because when we give them arts skills and overlap those skills with academic content, the build shared skill memories that recall the context for when these skills were learned, perfectly! So let’s look at how music, painting and drawing, dance and theater are not only enjoyable and valuable for their own sake, but they are also valuable in motivating students to develop capabilities in the arts that help them more broadly in skill learning with all academic contexts (Gardiner, 2008, p. 18; Southworth, 2014).

Resources
Southworth, Gardiner & Westervelt. (2014). Measuring the Effect of the Arts on Academic Achievement in Disadvantaged Populations. New York, The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc.

Gardiner, M. (2008). Skill Learning, Brain Engagement, Context and The Arts. In Vrobel, Rossler & Marks-Tarlow (2008). Simultaneity: Temporal Structures and Observer Perspectives, Springer: 195-214.

Let's build new environments for learning that promote access and equity

Merry Christmas to all. Thinking of children and education everywhere in the world!

Moving Forward from Charlottesville
A message from Linda Darling-Hammond

We are all still reeling from the appalling events in Charlottesville last week, sparked by the white nationalist march that put bigotry on clear display. We at the Learning Policy Institute denounce the hatred that motivated those events, while we mourn for those engaged in peaceful protest who were hurt by the senseless violence and for Heather Heyer, who lost her life. And we remember with respect and deep gratitude the many others over hundreds of years who courageously stood and often gave their lives in the cause of civil rights and social justice.

As these marches spread to other cities, it is clear that Charlottesville was just the beginning of another historic arm wrestle between the forces of hatred and those that propel human progress. On the heels of the nearly continuous killings of black men and women by police, the widespread acts of anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic hatred, and the detentions and deportations of immigrants, we are experiencing a growing reign of terror, too often sanctioned and even perpetrated by those in authority.

As terrible as these displays of racism and discrimination are, equally terrible are the systemic practices hardwired into our society that aggressively neglect children of color and children in poverty, sending far too many of them into the school-to-prison pipeline instead of into a future where they can achieve their potential and contribute to our collective welfare.

As part of our mission to ensure empowering and equitable education for every child, we at the Learning Policy Institute work to dismantle these practices by, first, recognizing and documenting how they operate, and then working to create policies and knowledgeable practices at every level of government to level the playing field and create a genuine right to learn for each young person.

These systemic obstacles include lack of housing, health care, and food security for each child; inequitable school funding; continued incentives for segregation in housing and education; the failure to create strong, community-based public schools in each neighborhood; and the lack of access to a 21st century curriculum and a stable, well-prepared teaching force in many schools, especially those serving concentrations of children of color and those living in poverty.

It can feel overwhelming to contemplate how far we have to go before every child and adult can feel safe in our society and experience equal opportunities to achieve and succeed. We must remember that throughout history, every step of progress has been the result of the resilience of determined people who have overcome almost unimaginable adversity—threats, bombings, lynchings, and other attacks—and persisted in the face of setbacks, challenged but not defeated.

Each of us has a role to play in ensuring that the arc of the moral universe continues to bend toward justice. We can speak and act for justice individually and collectively as adults. We can also empower children and young people to understand and own their potential, power, and rights. We can support their parents in that same mission.

As we struggle to find pathways to peace and justice in these troubling times, we must seek to speak truth to power; we must keep faith in the necessity and ultimate triumph of this struggle for equality; and we must come together across all of the borders, sectors, and camps that too often artificially divide us.

Below are some resources that I hope you find useful in working with your students, colleagues, and communities in countering hate and fostering peace, justice, solidarity, and community. Our progress may feel slow, especially in these dark days, but together we can realize a society in which every child can prosper.

Resources

The Southern Poverty Law Center has published "Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Response Guide."

Teaching Tolerance offers a vast wealth of resources and a Learning Plan Builder to help teachers build lessons around social justice standards aimed at prejudice reduction.

A Twitter campaign, , is generating a trove of ideas for teaching tolerance, including contributions from the National Council of Teachers of English and Education Week. Brightly, an online reference for parents, also has relevant material, including “Books to help kids understand the fight for racial equality.”

Unite Against Hate! offers resources for students, educators, and families as they engage in current national dialogue about racism, hate, and bias, compiled by the National Education Association.

The Alliance for Excellent Education has produced: "Condemning Racism and Bigotry While Using Charlottesville as a Teachable Moment: Resources for Teachers, Parents, and Others" available here: tinyurl.com/CharlottesvilleResources.

The Anti-Defamation League explains the teachable moments resulting from the recent Charlottesville events in “Lessons to Teach and Learn from ‘Unite the Right'."

Future Ready Librarians from around the country are sharing Anti-Racist Resources in response to the tragic Charlottesville events.

Common Sense Media provides a list of resources for educators seeking to develop an inclusive culture in their classroom and teach social and emotional skills to students.

In “Talking to Children When Hate Makes Headlines,” CNN offers resources to teachers and parents now having conversations about hate and bigotry with children.

Teach Plus compiled a list of Tools and Resources for Teaching About Race, History, and Other Issues Related to Charlottesville.

Edutopia’s site features “How to Teach Beyond Ferguson,” by José Vilson, a middle school math teacher and coach, who provides tools and strategies for having difficult but necessary conversations.

The Century Foundation’s report, A New Wave of School Integration: Districts and Charters Pursuing Socioeconomic Diversity, addresses racial and socioeconomic segregation in schools. It highlights the work that schools are doing to promote integration.

Condemning Racism and Bigotry While Using Charlottesville as a Teachable Moment: Resources for Teachers, Parents, and Others The Alliance for Excellent Education filmed a special edition of Federal Flash that condemns the actions by white...

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When Teaching Matters and Student Learning is Enhanced

by Rob Southworth

The Efficiency of Studying Two Subjects

Inside a larger discussion about the system of education in the United States is a discussion about the subjects that are offered in every curriculum. The liberal arts are represented by subjects like English, math, history, social studies, science, languages, arts and physical education. The commonly held definition of an education in K-12 schooling in America generally includes exposure to all of these subjects with an emphasis on “reading, writing and arithmetic.” With the rise of testing and the use of tests as accountability measures of learning, the emphasis on the English and Math portion of the liberal arts has been re-affirmed and intensified. The Common Core curriculum which is widely used nationally reinforces the concentration of student focus on these two subjects and a reduction of focus on the rest of the liberal arts. This represents an age-old agreement, from an efficiency perspective, that narrowing the curriculum will produce better educated students.

No Change In Test Scores

Unfortunately, narrowing the curriculum has not produced a change in test scores nationwide for many years.

Over the last 17 years of federal policy under the no Child left behind law and now under the new law, student test scores have remained flat on a national basis. The standards era—approximately 1995-2017—movement started in the 1990s with Lou Gerstner and IBM and has resulted in a widespread corporate interest in how education works. This interest is a natural outcome for companies who want to hire people who are well educated. In reviewing the educational system from a corporate point of view, the theory has been proposed, that what matters in corporations also matters in schools. And at some general level I think we could all agree on this.

Preparation for Work?

But the actual alignment of what happens in school and what happens in corporations depends on a much more skillful analysis of the role of education in the outcome of being prepared for work. in fact the demands of the workplace when they include low level skills are actually being eliminated through the use of robots and machines. Corporations need highly skilled workers. The workplace actually needs more skillful workers who know how to integrate and apply their skills. This is why there are two movements in education that deserve our attention—one that is STEM education where science, technology, engineering and math are more fully integrated and the other one that is the subject of this blow, is the use of the arts in integration across the curriculum.

Arts Integration as a Bridge to Learning

The work I have been associated with (Southworth, 2016) defines the use of arts integration not as a transfer skill but as a bridge to learning. The field of arts integration continues to argue with itself about the role of the arts in school and there are many good points and more research needed. But my work in arts integration has shown me that the power of the arts is not so easily reduced to skill sets that transfer directly to other skill sets and is more about the complicated process by which learning is enhanced through the overlap of skills, not the transfer. My research in Rochester, NY found that arts integration helps students gain an academic advantage in a deliberate effort by students to improve performance through the overlap acquisition of skills such as elaboration, rehearsal of meaning, generation, enactment, oral production, effort after meaning, emotional arousal and pictorial representation (Rinne, 2011 #321). Here is a quote from the abstract of my latest paper on this:

New Arts Education Policy Needed

The current research on integrating the arts into core curriculums has at least two implications for defining policy in arts education and school reform: [1] Disadvantaged students who experience quality arts integration in ELA and Math are likely to perform better intellectually and [2] teachers who experience job-embedded arts integration teaching strategies with their own students are more likely to improve their teaching practice. It is by deliberate practice, the amount of deliberate effort to improve performance through arts integration, that learning is enhanced and teaching matters (Southworth, 2016, Abstract; Hattie, 2012, p. 123).
The arts help teachers engage students in the important work of learning. This is when teaching matters and student learning can be applied across the curriculum and throughout the work place.

References

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers. London and New York: Routledge.

NAEP: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/stateassessment.aspx

Rinne, L., Gregory, E., Yarmolinskaya, J., & Hardiman, M. (2011). What Arts Integration Improves Long-Term Rention of Content. Mind, Brain, and Education, 5(2), 89-96. doi:10.1111/j.1751-228X.2011.01114.x

Southworth, R. (2016). Measuring the Effectiveness of Arts Integration on Student Achievement in Disadvantaged Populations. New York: The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc. Research Reports.

United States Department of Education. (2015). Every Student Succeeds Act. (S. 1177, Section 8002, page 295, paragraph 42).

Today marks the first shipment of the SchoolWorks Lab’s ARTS IN THE BAG of fun projects and art supplies to 86 second and third graders in Rochester, NY! They are part of a new school called Renaissance Academy Charter School of the Arts. This school integrates all of the arts into their core curriculum and students flourish!

Arts in the bag delivers new ideas, fun projects and arts supplies every month, but in this case, the school wanted to send the bags home with the students over the summer. We are sending 86 individually packaged art bags with supplies and easy to read directions to every student. The pre-packed bags will arrive at the school and the teachers will add paper to them for the students to use as drawing pads, painting sheets and cut-out materials. In the bags are drawing pencils, erasers, sharpeners, scissors, glue sticks paper plates to draw the food charts on, paint brushes, water colors, etc.

Creativity is important to support in the summer and this school has decided to give their students plenty of ways to use that skill while having fun. Each student receives all of these art supplies and a nice new bag with our logo on it to keep the supplies in a safe and easily accessible place. The bag can be repurposed at the discretion of the family, or used for many years to keep the supplies at the ready.

Good Luck Renaissance Academy Charter School of the Arts!

In this crazy political season, it is important to review what brings us together and what draws us apart. Each of the candidates is employing their messages and resources to persuade the public to vote for them. Each candidate takes their message and tweaks it at groups of voters—blocks of voters who think the same—and tries to persuade that block to vote as a block for them. So far so good. The resulting dissonance, the clash of these tweaked ideas, is making us think more than we usually do. And that could be a good thing as it is potentially very powerful to wake up to new ideas.

How can we wake up to new ways of thinking about community? Community means different things to different people, and of course it gets defined differently in education, from classroom to school to district to state. Politicians try to define it differently depending on which voter block they are speaking to, or at, or with. Is there a candidate out there who wants to help us define community in new ways that help improve our country?

Classrooms are not perfect, but they could serve as examples of what is good about community and what needs improvement. Classrooms are really safe communities, except from outside aggression, so could we find a candidate who would work on that? Random violence in our country at large and against our classrooms in specific needs help in re-defining what is a safe community. What about collaborative community—yes classrooms foster that in spades—from project work to teams to integration of subjects. What about equal opportunity—well classrooms and the military are pretty good on that, but not as good as we need them to be. There is nothing schools can do to prevent the harm instilled in a child who has grown up in poverty, sickness and isolation. That prevailing condition limits the child on the way into the classroom, and the process of educating, drawing out the best in the child, is compromised.

Candidates could take a page out of what classrooms do best in their communities. Perhaps the most powerful definition of community in classrooms is the ethic of caring (Noddings, 2012): no matter where you come from or what your previous circumstances, you are welcome here, and we want to help you learn. That is a powerful definition of community.

Could we find a candidate who understands that schools do a great job at fostering community and classroom teachers are remarkable at implementing community as a caring relationships. Could schools and classrooms filled with hopeful kids get some help from a candidate who wants to attack previous limitations such as poverty, loss of opportunity, sickness and isolation? If we could we get a candidate who constructs national capacity-building policies—that directly address and support students and families at risk—we could graduate all students in communities built on caring relationships.

References

Noddings, N. (2012). Philosophy of Education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Designing the 21st Century K-12 Classroom -- THE Journal It's not enough to take a traditional K-12 classroom and fill it with technology. The smart classroom requires a more methodic approach that factors in the design of the basic shell, the teacher's space, and the students' independent and collaborative work areas.

There is a new film out called, "Girl Rising" and it is very powerful. From there website: "Thirty years of research shows that an educated girl is more likely to stay healthy, save money, build a business, have fewer and healthier children, innovate community solutions and educate her sons and daughters equally."