Education •

Massachusetts to Ditch Common Core Testing, Replace it with Own Exams

One of the states with outstanding K-12 education results, Massachusetts, plans to ditch common core testing and replace it with own exams.

The Massachusetts State Board of Education recently made the announcement that Common Core tests would be replaced with own state exams. Coming from one of the nation’s education leaders – Massachusetts is also dubbed the education ‘miracle state’ – the move may be a push for nationwide education experts to design a better alternative.

Yet, the latest decision is not unique. Other states plan to forego the controversial testing over various reasons. Parents say that the tests are too hard; teachers say that score-based evaluations of their professionalism are unfair, while conservatives suspect that the federal government may plan to use Common Core to take over the states’ education systems.

To date, only 20 states pledged that they will stick with PARCC tests under Common Core.

Though it was once key supporter for Common Core testing, the Bay State may now become a key breakaway. Education officials declined to provide the reason behind the move but there is a major goal Common Core somehow failed to achieve.

The tests were designed to provide state-to-state comparisons between students’ levels of progress, but in the meantime some states began to use carefully selected wording to report test results. This is why in some states a score was deemed ‘approaching expectations,’ while in other states, the same score was considered ‘proficient.’ And so, differences between states became blurry in recent years.

Massachusetts Secretary of Education James A. Peyser told reporters last month that it might be ‘premature’ to say that Common Core was a failure, but he acknowledged that the testing was ‘in retreat.’

Moreover, Obama administration, which heavily promoted the standard in a bid to boost performance nationwide through a good ol’ carrot-and-stick approach, admitted that the heavy testing in the last 20 years may have been an exaggeration.

Last month, Obama administration urged Congress to put a cap of 2 percent of educational time to test-related activities. Nowadays, an average student in a U.S. major city takes eight standardized tests on an annual basis, and there isn’t yet any compelling evidence that the tests improved students’ performance nationwide.

Some teachers, however, believe that Massachusetts should have a little more patience and refrain from reverting to old standards and dismiss a 20 years worth of educational turnaround.

While Massachusetts doesn’t plan to leave the PARCC consortium, it will revert to its MCAS tests, which were first introduced through an education reform in 1993. Education state officials plan for MCAS tests to follow Common Core standards and eliminate all the bureaucratic hassle.
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US Kids Don’t Have Enough Time to Eat their Lunches at School Cafeterias

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According to a recent report, 20-minute lunch periods may not be enough for kids to have a filling lunch in school cafeterias. Researchers found that children barely have any time to eat when arriving late or staying in line to be served.

Short lunch periods are not only affecting children’s overall health on the long run but they also lead to tons of perfectly edible food to be discarded.

A research team at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston found that many kids end up with just 10 minutes to sit and consume their meals and 20 minute for lunch may not be enough.

Researchers noted that the phenomenon raises a health concern especially to kids from poor families that often take up to 50 percent of their daily energy intake at their schools’ cafeterias.

“It is essential that we give students a sufficient amount of time to eat their lunches,”

said Juliana Cohen senior author of the study and nutrition expert at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Eric Rimm, another author of the study, was puzzled that so little research was conducted on how effective the National School Lunch Program really is. According to background information, 30 million children in more than 100,000 benefit from the program.

During their research, Harvard scientists monitored 1,000 elementary and middle school students coming from low-income communities in Massachusetts. Researchers analyzed how much and what type of food children left on their plates after lunch period was over.

The team compared students who had 20 minutes at their disposal to eat with those who had 25 minutes. Study authors learned that the first group didn’t consume 13 percent of their main course, 12 percent less of their veggies, and 10 percent less of their diary products than their peers in the second group.

Moreover, children who had shorter lunch periods avoided picking fruits during their meal time and tended to leave more food untouched than kids who had more time at their disposal.

Researchers said that they were surprised with the findings. They expected shorter lunch periods to force kids to skip fruits and veggies and focus on the main course and milk. But the study showed that they tried to eat everything but there wasn’t enough time left.

While schools may not be able to fix lunch duration due to busy schedule, they could still prevent long serving lines in their cafeterias and make sure that kids do not arrive late to lunch.

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Google Docs to Make Student Life Easier with Powerful New Features

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Google recently added some powerful new features to its cloud-based office suite aiming at making the applications more appealing in the classroom.

Goggle Docs word processor now supports voice recognition technology via a new feature named Voice Typing, so you can now basically dictate your computer what you want to write and the systems transforms your spoken words into a written document on the go.

Unfortunately the feature is not set in place yet for Android. It can only be accessed by desktop users who use Google’s Chrome browser.

Voice Typing doesn’t forget about proper punctuation, but it cannot tell what punctuation mark should go where unless you tell it to. For instance, you need to utter “comma” to end a phrase, and a “new paragraph” instead of pressing the enter key.

Although the feature targets people that want to dictate their way into a document rather tan typing it from zero, Google developers explained that it can also be used in meetings to take notes.

The update comes with support in nearly 40 languages, just like other Google services that use voice recognition technology are.

Additionally, there’s another new feature in Google Docs called ‘Research’ that allows Android users to hunt for content on the Internet and insert it into their work. This can be done without having to minimize the word processor application and switching to browser. It can be done within the document. This feature may prove extremely useful to students with Android tablets in a classroom when taking notes or editing a document.

Nevertheless, the new function is safe to use when searching for images because it has SafeSearch on by default. That’s because the feature is especially designed for students. Moreover, only the images tagged as “licensed for reuse” will show up in search results. It is the exact strategy Microsoft employed in its Bing image search feature from its office suite.

Google Doc has even a new button called “See New Changes” that also desktop users to see what changes their peers made to a document that they shared with. Changes would appear highlighted in various colors depending on the person that made them. You can see changes by simply scrolling down or using the arrows key to navigate within the document.

The feature is enabled by default and tracks changes in real time without having to instruct the word processor first to do so.

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U.S. Education Secretary: College Debt is just one Part of the Problem

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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently addressed the underlying causes of the decline of higher education system in the U.S. and proposed a couple of solutions. Mr. Duncan believes that universities are no longer appealing to students because they focus less on providing students with quality degrees at lower costs.

Duncan expressed his view on education issues Monday during a speech delivered at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). The Education Secretary believes though that removing debt from students’ back is not the only solution. Higher education should also focus on delivering quality and better job prospects for graduates, or simply put “outcomes.”

He also noted that regulators unfortunately focus on tackling higher education costs but lose sight of the poor quality of training. F. King Alexander, head of Louisiana State University who also took part in the event, shared a similar view.

“We need to increase access and success, persistence and retention, and make sure our graduates walk away with little-to-no debt, and walk into fulfilling careers,”

Alexander said.

He added that improving higher education can be made through a three-step approach. First, universities should be focused more on outcomes and less on money, second states should support public universities more, and third, regulators should issue strict rules that ensure accountability.

Alexander also noted that the current “national reality” is grim although the numbers may show that universities are doing “the right thing”. He pointed out that too many students choose to default, while others drop their studies or don’t even bother to start.

Duncan said that the nation’s students have a very clear view on what they expect from higher education. Students usually seek to be set on a path to success after graduation without the burden of decade-long student loans. The college degree should also help them live independently and have enough financial stability to be able to support their families.

But in reality, higher education institutions fail to deliver what students “need, and deserve,” Duncan noted. He proposed as partial solution debt-free degrees. He explained that debt and costs are not the only problem of America colleges. Poor education is also a problem. And if regulators plant to tackle just the financial facet of the problem, the U.S. would end up paying for a system that offers next to nothing to its students.

Heads of the LaGuardia Community College, North Carolina Community College, Northern Virginia Community College, State University of New York, and Morgan State University also attended the event.

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Critical Typo in SAT Test Books Confuses Students and Parents Alike

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U.S. students that took the SAT test Saturday reported a printing error that confused them over the time limit given to solve a specific section of the test.

Some of them believed that they had more time on their hand when they were abruptly interrupted from solving the test by proctors that had different info on the duration that section may require to be solved.

The College Board, which publishes the SAT, announced that it was working towards finding the best solution to the problem in order to “ensure the fairness of the test and the validity of the scores.”

Proctors reported that they had no idea that students received different times for solving one of the test’s sections. They learned about the mistake when they notified students that their time was nearly up.

On Saturday, the College Board was flooded with phone calls and text messages from proctors desperately looking for some directions. Moreover, parents and students complained on the social media and web sites‘ comment section almost leading to a national hysteria.

On the collegeconfidential’s discussion forum one parent said that his daughter read the test instructions to learn that she had 25 minutes to solve one section. But after 19 minutes a proctor came in and told her that she had one more minute to go. The girl had to leave three questions unanswered since she thought she had six more minutes left.

The Sat’s maker released a public statement about the “printing error” in the test books they gave U.S. students taking the SAT test. The group also disclosed that the printing error affected only section 8 or 9 (depending on the edition) of the test books, but didn’t appear on the manual given to Test Center Supervisors.

Though students read that they had 25 minutes to solve the sections, the “correct time limit” was 20 minutes.

The College Board also pledged to “actively” work towards determining the next move to ensure the fairness of the test. They also apologized to students and parents for the “confusion” created. The group said that future updates on the issue would be posted online.

The College Board disclosed Monday that there was no typo on the test books provided to students taking the test outside the U.S., though a false alarm was triggered by a claim that the printing error occurred in Asia as well.

A spokesperson for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing said that unless the erroneous time limits were “experimental” the College Board currently faces a real test scoring issue since not all students were given misprints.

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Barack Obama Launches E-book Initiative

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Low income students will access for free a large number of children’s titles, made available by several publishing houses in a $250 million initiative.

President Barack Obama announced Thursday that a number of major book publishers have promised $250 million in donations to aid low-income kids get access to electronic versions of approximately 10,000 of the most famous titles in children’s literature. The US president is also looking for backing from local governments and schools in order to ensure that each student has a library card.

“We’re going to provide millions of e-books online so that they’re available for young people who maybe don’t have as many books at home or don’t always have access to a full stock of reading materials,” said Obama.

The president chose a public library from one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods, Anacostia to announce his plans to provide educational support to low-income students. The White House is considering the initiative as a much needed measure to offer more educational chances for kids from low-income families. On the other hand, some critics have said that e-readers and other electronic gadgets which are needed for reading e-books could not be available for all students.

E-readers are present in nearly half of American homes, according to a research study by Pew Research and published last year. However, in lower income households, these objects are much less prominent. According to the research data, only 14 percent of households with earnings of under $30,000 per year have an e-reader.

E-books can be read on other devices, such as personal computers or tablets. A US Census Bureau research of computer and Internet use revealed that only 62 percent of households with incomes under $25,000 had a computer, compared to 88 percent of households in the entire country.

White House officials have announced that plans are being made to ensure that children can access both the necessary technology and the e-books. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Domestic Policy Council, said that computers and smartphones are prevalent in both schools and homes. She also added that Apple Inc. will donate $100 million in laptops, iPads, and software to school which are underprivileged, a technology that would make the use of e-books much easier.

“It’s very different than for our generation. More and more, you’re going to be seeing kids using devices, and what we’re doing is making sure that there’s more books available on those device,” Ms. Munoz explained.

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Hot Vents On Ocean Floors Could Have Created Life On Earth

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Hot volcanoes located on the ocean floor could have spontaneously gave birth to the organic molecules needed for life in Earth’s early days.

A recent research showed how the surface mineral particles which are found in hydrothermal vents share similar chemical properties to enzymes. According to University College London, these enzymes are charged with the chemical reactions that happen inside living organisms.

These results suggest vents can build simple carbon-based molecules like methanol just by dissolving carbon dioxide in water. The research helps explain how some of the most important building blocks of life appeared, and could have also created the first life forms seen on Earth.

“There is a lot of speculation that hydrothermal vents could be the location where life on Earth began. There is a lot of carbon dioxide dissolved in the water, which could provide the carbon that the chemistry of living organisms is based on, and there is plenty of energy, because the water is hot and turbulent. What our research proves is that these vents also have the chemical properties that encourage these molecules to recombine into molecules usually associated with living organisms,” said Nora de Leeuw, who heads the team.

To reach these findings the scientists combined supercomputer simulations and laboratory experiments to examine at the conditions that could allow mineral particles to catalyze the change of carbon dioxide into organic molecules which are needed in order that life could exist.

The lab experiments simulated the hot alkaline conditions existing in deep sea vents. The experiments provided a “molecule-by-molecule view” of the way the carbon dioxide mixes with the mineral greigite which is also present in the vents.

“We found that the surfaces and crystal structures inside these vents act as catalysts, encouraging chemical changes in the material that settles on them. They behave much like enzymes do in living organisms, breaking down the bonds between carbon and oxygen atoms. This lets them combine with water to produce formic acid, acetic acid, methanol and pyruvic acid. Once you have simple carbon-based chemicals such as these, it opens the door to more complex carbon-based chemistry,” explained Nathan Hollingsworth, a co-author of the study.

The results could be the first step for a new method for developing carbon-based chemicals just out of carbon dioxide without the help of pressure or heat, which could replace the need for oil in many raw material production.

The study was published in a the journal Chemical Communications.

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Bullying Worse For Mental Health Than Child Abuse

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A new study suggests that children who are bullied at school could be more likely to suffer from mental health issues later in life than those who are abused by adults.

Previous studies has linked physical, sexual and emotional abuse during childhood to psychological problems later in life. According to the new research, bullying can have severe, long-lasting physical and psychological effects.

For the new study, scientists looked for links between being bullied and long term mental health problems. The researchers wanted to know whether mental health problems in children exposed to these experiences are the result of both maltreatment and bullying or just bullying alone.

“We found, somewhat surprisingly, that those who were bullied and maltreated were not at higher risk than those just bullied,” senior study author Dieter Wolke, a psychology professor at the University of Warwick in the U.K.

The data was gathered from two large studies that analyzed mental health in children and then observed them at least until turning 18-years old. One study, from the U.S., was focused on more than 1,200 participants. Another, conducted in the U.K., involved over 4,000.

Both studies meant a series of interviews with parents to discover abuse in younger children, but also reports of bullying incidents by older children.

As young adults, almost 19 percent in the U.K. focus group and more than 18 percent in the U.S. group had been affected by mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.

After eliminating other family factors that could have contributed to psychological issues, the scientists discovered an increased risk of depression among abused children in the United States group, a trend which was not found in United Kingdom group.

In both studies, however, mental health issues were dramatically more likely in kids who were bullied by other children than in kids who were abused.

It’s possible that abuse was not reported by parents whom were asked about their children, the scientists say in the study, which published in The Lancet Psychiatry and explained at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in San Diego. The study also did not account the severity of abuse or the age at which it happened.

Even so, the results show the need for parents, teachers and doctors to pay more attention to bullying.

“It is particularly novel that they found bullying is a greater source of mental health problems than maltreatment,” said Catherine Bradshaw, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence in Baltimore.

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How Can a Tiny Songbird Fly 1700 Miles Over The Atlantic

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A very small songbird that spends its summers in the forests of North America has been tracked by scientists over an 1,700-mile journey over the Atlantic Ocean, to the Caribbean, while migrating in the winter to South America, according to a new study.

Researchers were almost certain the blackpoll warbler is making its journey to the Caribbean over the ocean, but until now they had no proof. The scientists attached tracking devices to the birds in the summer of 2013 when scientists.

“It is such a spectacular feat that this half-an-ounce bird can make what is obviously a highly risky journey over the open ocean,” said author Chris Rimmer of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.

The number of these birds has been declining. “Now maybe that will help us focus attention on what could be driving these declines,” he added.

According to results published Wednesday in the United Kingdom in the journal Biology Letters, the warblers, known to be voracious insect eaters, departed near the northern parts of the United States and Eastern regions of Canada and headed directly to the Caribbean.

The results on the blackpoll warblers migration can help scientists understand more about the significance of changing climate, explained Andrew Farnsworth, a research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who is an expert in migration biology, but was not involved in the study.

“How much energy do they need and if they don’t get it, what happens?” he asked.

An important number of bird species fly great distances over water, but the warbler is not fitting the regular specifications, because it is the only one who lives exclusively in the forest. Most other species of birds that winter in South America fly via Mexico or other parts of Central America.

Scientists tagged 19 blackpolls on Vermont’s Mount Mansfield and other 18 in Nova Scotia. Three of those were caught again in Vermont still having the tracking device attached on their tiny bodies and two others in Nova Scotia.

Four of these warblers departed for the Caribbean between Sept. 25 and Oct. 21 and flew straight to the islands of Puerto Rico or Hispaniola. Their flights ranged from 49 to 73 hours. The fifth bird left Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and flew almost 1,000 miles before safely reaching the Turks and Caicos islands for a short stop before heading towards South America.

An interesting fact is that their return flights north, the birds followed a course along the coast.

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Unusual Total Lunar Eclipse At Dawn on April 4th

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A total lunar eclipse, called the “blood Moon,” will be visible in North America, East Asia, the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand on Saturday, April 4, 2015.

The ”blood Moon” is a rare form of lunar eclipse that happens when the Earth casts its shadow on the moon and also blocks the sunlight. The light emitted by the Sun still light up the surface of the Moon in spite of the blockage, but gives Earth’s natural satellite a strange color, varying from bright red to brown.

The lunar eclipse is expected to last for about three hours and 29 minutes while the total eclipse will be visible for five minutes, according to Time and Date. The Moon is in the middle of a lunar tetrad, which happens when four total lunar eclipses occur in a row. The lunar eclipse that will occur on April 4, 2015 is the third eclipse of this event. The lunar tetrad also had two prior eclipses on April 14-15, 2014 and October 7-8 2014, while a fourth eclipse is expected to occur on September 8, 2015.

The schedule of this lunar is as follows. Penumbra, which happens when the Moon enters the outer fringe of the Earth’s shadow, is the start of the lunar eclipse. Since the shade is still weak, penumbra cannot be seen with the naked eye. When the Moon advances inwards, the shading becomes much stronger. This marks the beginning of the umbra second stage or the partial eclipse.

The third stage is the total eclipse where the Moon is completely covered by Earth’s shadow. The Moon will then glow in red, orange or brown color. Two factors influence the color of the eclipse. The first is the state of the Earth’s atmosphere. The second is the amount of the surface of the Moon that enters the umbra phase as it passes through. The last two stages, the fourth and fifth, respectively, of the lunar eclipse are next, and refer to the period in which the moon re-emerges into the sunlight, ending the eclipse.

Unlike a total solar eclipse, which can only be observed from a small path across the Earth, the lunar eclipse can be seen by half of the world. Also, compared to the solar eclipse, for the lunar eclipse you don’t need special protection for the eyes to safely observe it.

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Ancient Humans Were Similar in Size To Modern Humans, Research Finds

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Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Tubingen,Germany have carried out a new study which has investigated if our human ancestors were similar to us regarding the shape and the size of their bodies. The research discovered that this diversity was present as far back as two million years ago.

“What we’re seeing is perhaps the beginning of a unique characteristic of our own species. It is the origin of diversity,” said study co-author Jay Stock, of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

This is the first research that has compared the body size of early humans. The scientists used fossils from 1.5 million to 2.5 million years ago.

“It’s possible to interpret our findings as revealing that there were either multiple species of early humans, such as Homo ergaster, Homo habilisand Homo rudolfensis, or one extremely diverse species. This fits well with recent cranial evidence for the extraordinary diversity among early members of the genus Homo”, said the researcher.

The study also revealed that early humans had heights ranging from 4’8” to nearly six feet tall, which is very similar to the average of height of the modern human.

One of the most credible theories of our evolution is that genus Homo evolved from an early human ancestor, which had a small stature, and then become the taller, heavier Homo erectus, which also had longer legs. Homo erectus was thus able to migrate beyond Africa and settle in Eurasia. Until now, the geographic origin and the timing of the larger body size has remained unknown.

According to the new study, the main increase in body size occurred tens of thousands of years after Homo erectus left Africa. Before then, our ancestors were rarely over 5 feet tall or particularly heavy in body mass, said the co-author of this study, which was published in the March 27 issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.

The study also discovered that the shift to taller humans happened in one place in particular, the Koobi Fora region in Kenya, around 1,7 milion years ago. “That means we can now start thinking about what regional conditions drove the emergence of this diversity, rather than seeing body size as a fixed and fundamental characteristic of a species”, Stock concluded.

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Planet Jupiter Destroyed The First Version Of Our Solar System

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According to a new a study of Caltech’s planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin and by Gregory Laughlin, UC Santa Cruz professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Jupiter was a wrecking ball for the ancient Solar System, which was made up by a number of super-Earths.

The new research states that that the system used to contain planets which were bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

“Our work suggests that Jupiter’s inward-outward migration could have destroyed a first generation of planets and set the stage for the formation of the mass-depleted terrestrial planets that our solar system has today,” said Batygin in a statement, adding that the discovery is filling some gaps in the understanding of the evolution of our solar system.

Researchers have been baffled by the low mass of the planets of in the Solar System. Most systems with a star of the dimension of our Sun have super-sized planets. This new theory explains how our planets, which are the remnants of bigger bodies, ended up to be so small.

Most planetary systems, which are different from ours, typically have one or more planets that are larger than Earth orbiting closer to their suns than Mercury does, our closest world.

In the Solar System, there’s nothing closer to the Sun than Mercury except a little debris from near-Earth asteroids and lots

A scenario that explains the formation of Jupiter and Saturn suggests that Jupiter was migrating towards the Sun, but the movement stopped when the formation of Saturn pushed back the plane. The two scientists completed a set of simulations to observe what would have occurred if a set of planets near the Sun had formed before Jupiter got there.

The researches say that some rocky worlds were forming close to the Sun, and their bodies were becoming super-Earths, gathering dense gas and dust, but as Jupiter headed in towards the Sun, gravitational forces from the huge planet would have swept these planets and other asteroids into overlapping orbits, which destroyed them.

The remnants from the collisions headed towards the Sun.and this would have destroyed all newly-formed super-Earths. Some debris would become the source material for a second generation of the current smaller worlds.

The Jupiter crashing effect through the system is how smaller planets, like Earth , Mercury, Venus and Mars, with their more thinner atmospheres were formed.

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