Improving Teaching & Learning in Our Schools

Fusing experience with innovation, science with practice, and learning with teaching is essential to blazing new paths in education.

When Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Roy Romer needed help finding a fresh approach to teaching, he knew who to call. Romer, the former governor of Colorado, got in touch with Lauren Resnick, professor of psychology and director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC). The two had collaborated in the mid-1990s, when Romer headed the National Education Goals Panel and Resnick codirected the New Standards Project, a groundbreaking initiative that created educational performance standards and assessments that have widely influenced state and school district practice. Romer’s assignment for Resnick, LRDC, and its Institute for Learning (IFL) was to help him improve student achievement in the nation’s second-largest school district.

Founded in 1963 by Director Emeritus and University Professor of Psychology Robert Glaser, LRDC has a philosophy based on the confluence of scientific research and practical application. Supported by about $14 million annually in federal and private grants—coupled with approximately $3 million from school districts served by IFL—LRDC provides a home for researchers in a broad range of disciplines. Ten education faculty members have LRDC appointments, as do 14 faculty in psychology, but LRDC also includes faculty in neuroscience, business, law, and computer science. Central to the center’s success is the notion that fusing experience with innovation, science with practice, and learning with teaching is essential to blazing new paths in education.

“With 10 of our faculty also part of LRDC, there is a rich collaboration that connects us all, both in our research and in our efforts to prepare educators and help schools and school systems,” says School of Education Dean and LRDC Senior Scientist Alan Lesgold. “The collaboration between the School of Education and LRDC is a wonderful example of the effective way in which Pitt fosters interdisciplinary research and links between research and practice. It is no accident that American Educational Research Journal, the most prominent international journal in educational research, has been edited by School of Education and LRDC colleagues.”

According to Lesgold, Pitt faculty have made important contributions to a variety of endeavors at the crossroads of education and scientific research, including understanding the best ways to learn and teach reading; deciphering how the brain learns language; teaching children with disabilities; and improving the performance of teachers, principals, and school administrators. All of this vital research has been characterized by rigorous science, classroom trials, and closely monitored follow-up work.

“There’s the Thomas Edison approach to experimentation, where you find what works and stick with it, even if you don’t understand why,” says Lesgold. “Then there’s the Louis Pasteur approach, where you find what works but also try to understand the theory behind it. Here at Pitt we take the Pasteur approach.”

The Institute for Learning

The success of IFL is the most recent evidence of Pitt’s influence in the field of education. Since its inception in 1995, the institute has worked with school districts across the country, including New York City; Los Angeles; Denver, Colo.; Cleveland, Ohio; Austin, Texas; St. Paul, Minn.; Providence, R.I.; Hartford, Conn.; Springfield, Mass.; and Columbia, S.C. Many more districts use compact discs and other educational tools produced by IFL.

The institute serves as a liaison between Pitt and working educators, delivering the most recent research about learning processes and principles of instruction. It is also a think tank—a design center for innovative professional development systems in the schools—and a resource for core groups of school professionals.

“There’s nothing quite like IFL in the country,” says Lauren Resnick, the founding director. “We really roll up our sleeves and get into the work. Many university-based initiatives work with local school districts, but, as far as I know, we’re the only one that works on such an extensive national level.

“A school district will get in touch with us, usually if there’s been a change in administration and the new leadership is looking at ways to innovate,” Resnick says. “Although we have a contractual agreement with these schools, we consider them partners.”

The driving force behind IFL’s innovations is the need to help district leaders understand the importance of creating a culture of ongoing learning for teachers as well as students.

“Typically, a teacher comes out of teacher training, enters a classroom, and has very little continuing engagement with other professionals,” Resnick says. “This arrangement is sometimes called the egg-crate school, each egg in its own little box.” Unlike professions where collaboration is the norm, teachers tend to be isolated, causing bad habits to be reinforced and great ideas to lie fallow.

But when teachers continue to learn, their students benefit, says Resnick, and it is up to school administrators and principals to provide teachers with time to learn, converse, and grow.

To help spread the word on the need for continual learning for teachers and administrators, the institute recruits top-notch educators like Judy Johnston and Patricia Magruder as IFL Fellows. Johnston founded Pittsburgh’s Schenley High School Teacher Center, which is regarded as a forerunner of the teacher professionalism movement. She is also working with school districts in New York City and Rhode Island. Magruder was a distinguished educator in the Kentucky Department of Education and is now leading IFL’s effort with the Los Angeles Unified School District. Working with an enormous school system facing unique challenges, she interacts most closely with system-wide directors of education from different disciplines, who, in turn, work with school principals.

“Our task is to understand what the school district’s goals are and to encourage professional development,” Magruder says.

One way to gain a better understanding of the school’s goals is through a method called a LearningWalkSM, an IFL tool that aims to make educators and administrators smarter about teaching and learning and to establish teaching standards for a school or district. LearningWalkSM involves IFL professionals coming to a school on organized visits that focus on the school’s instructional core and examine distinct practices and student responses to them. The visits are followed by conferences to discuss what observers found: What kind of texts are teachers using? Are they building on the students’ understanding of those texts? Are they setting clear expectations that students can fulfill?

“We are calibrating their eyes,” Magruder says. “We find common measuring sticks for effective teaching.”

Once a month, Johnston, Magruder, and other IFL fellows come to Pittsburgh for a week of sharing and learning. They hear presentations from scientists and educators and communicate their own experiences in the field. These sessions are where “cross-fertilization” occurs: The LRDC research scientists present their findings but also listen to IFL fellows and learn what is happening in the schools.

“One of IFL’s goals is to hire people who bring areas of expertise that add to our collective knowledge,” Magruder says. “The institute is always looking to build a group with diverse backgrounds and knowledge levels that encourage us to push on each other. There is an expectation that we are constantly learning. We are always assessing our work and our understanding, and we get challenged in the districts if we don’t.”

School districts also are embracing Disciplinary Literacy, a new collaborative development from LRDC and the School of Education. Disciplinary Literacy develops ways of teaching that challenge students to learn both the concepts of a discipline and its habits of thinking. For example, a youngster learning history will learn not only facts and dates but also the basics of historical inquiry, such as the sources an historian uses. It is a method used to expand both the knowledge and intellectual capacities of all levels of students.

Learning about Language

For decades, educators have debated whether the brain pays attention to the sounds of letters or whether it takes reading directly from the characters on the page. Pitt researchers have shown that phonetics translation—associating certain letters or groups of letters with the sound they commonly represent—is a crucial part of reading, even in nonalphabetic languages like Chinese.

LRDC Associate Director and University Professor of Psychology Charles Perfetti is a leading authority on reading and how students recognize words. His current research centers on what students can learn about reading through the study of different writing systems. He and Julie Fiez, an LRDC research scientist and professor of psychology and neuroscience, are conducting a study to map the brain’s responses to reading Chinese and English.

Many English speakers think of Chinese as a pictographic system, assuming the character for “tree” may actually look like a tree. The fact is, although Chinese writing has its origins in pictorial representation, only about 1 percent of Chinese characters are pictographs.

“We don’t have picture writing systems any more,” says Perfetti, whose behavioral studies have pointed toward a Universal Phonological Principle, which describes a global tendency for the writing systems to be associated with word pronunciation. “Writing is rooted in oral language, not in meaning.”

In addition to work comparing cognitive processes in reading Chinese and English, Perfetti and Ying Liu, an LRDC research associate and a research assistant professor of psychology, are carrying out research on how American college students learn the Chinese writing system.

Pitt students who sign up for Introduction to Chinese are offered the opportunity to be subjects in various behavoral and imaging experiments. Some volunteer for studies in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), carried out in collaboration with Julie Fiez. In these studies Perfetti, Fiez, and Liu test native speakers of Chinese, native speakers of English who are learning Chinese, and English native speakers who are not learning Chinese. The students’ brains are scanned by means of fMRI to map activity in regions of the brain. Once subjects are in the fMRI scanner, they are shown English words or Chinese characters on a monitor. Typically, when reading English readers show activity in an area of the left posterior cortex known as the “visual word form area” when they see a word they recognize. Moreover, when the subjects see a pseudoword, that is, a word that makes no sense but can be pronounced [“klag”], the visual word form area again shows activity. However, there is less activity in that region if the subjects see an unpronounceable chain of letters [“xntrp”].

The team conducts similar experiments on Chinese native speakers. Although the Chinese writing system has correlations to sound, the sounds are larger. In English the letter “t” corresponds to a minute component—a phoneme—of the word; in Chinese, a character corresponds to a syllable, a heftier portion of the word. It is possible, however, to string together Chinese characters to create novel combinations [“pseudocharacters”] out of subcomponents that are pronounceable or have a meaning.

The findings, so far, indicate a link between the Chinese and English readers; the Chinese pseudocharacters, like the English pseudowords, spark a response in the visual word-form area of the brain.

The team has established that, while English readers show activity in the area near the word-form area, native Chinese readers show additional activity in the right-hemisphere visual area. After a few months the English-speaking students also exhibited right-hemisphere activity when they read Chinese. This shows that the brain “learns”—that is, it doesn’t limit learning but is changed by learning—a very important, basic finding in educational debates.

Educating Students with Special Needs

In an effort to apply what research has revealed about the importance of phonics and how the brain learns to read, Rollanda O’Connor, an associate professor in Pitt’s School of Education, is studying how early intervention can help children with learning disabilities.

“In the late ‘80s, we came to understand the importance of phoneme awareness—taking a spoken word and breaking it into sound—for very young children,” O’Connor says. “And we have come to understand its importance in teaching children with disabilities.”

According to O’Connor, most students achieve phoneme awareness by the middle of their kindergarten year, but she is interested in those who don’t. Although they’re not reading yet, kindergarteners can reveal learning disabilities by their facility with the spoken word. Red flags include trouble understanding how a word can be broken into segments, how two letters can blend to make a third sound, or lack of participation during story time.

“We cast a broad net,” O’Connor says, adding that although many of the students selected for special instruction may not have disabilities, the importance of early intervention overrides concerns of false identification. Intervention strategies include phoneme awareness activities for 15 to 20 minutes several times a week, but not placing children identified with reading problems in a special classroom. And, O’Connor says, intervention strategies involve more than the student and classroom teacher; she also works with the principal, reading specialist, speech therapist, and classroom assistants at the school.

Although O’Connor acknowledges that there are many irregularities in English that can frustrate a teacher, there are rules too, and English does make sense as a phonetic language. “One thing we do is train teachers to start with the short vowels,” she says, pointing out that vowels by themselves create the short sound. Creating a long vowel sound always means adding a letter—changing “can” to “cane” or “bat” to “bait”—a rule that helps both teachers and students better understand the English language.

O’Connor, who has worked with educators in the Pittsburgh, Shaler, and Wilkinsburg school districts as well as Pitt’s Falk Laboratory School, says she encourages them to break out of their “egg crates.”

“It’s important for faculty from different systems to meet and mix it up. Teachers don’t get to leave their classrooms very often,” says O’Connor, who gets together three or four times a year with educators from different school districts for a general meeting and a meal.

The Teaching of Reading

One educator who left the classroom but took what she learned with her is School of Education Professor and LRDC Research Scientist Isabel Beck. As a young Army wife and teacher on a military base in Fort Smith, Ark., Beck encountered a unique group of students—noncommissioned officers who didn’t know how to read. The Army had provided her with a primer, similar to the one she had used for first-grade students. It soon became clear, however, that the primer was ineffective in helping these soldiers to learn how to recognize words.

So Beck took another tack, asking the men to sound out the words. Some resisted because, from the context, they knew “vehicle” could work perfectly well in a particular sentence, even if the word was “truck.” But Beck patiently guided them through the sounds of the word—how the “r” followed the “t,” then came the short vowel, and, finally, the harsh “k” ending—until they discovered the word was “truck.” Soon the men were connecting the spoken language they knew with the printed words on the page.

Some 40 years later, Beck, who received the 2003 Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Research, recalls that breakthrough as a defining moment in her career.

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for those sergeants,” she says.

Her success with the soldiers motivated Beck to reassess the “whole word” approach that she had used with first-grade students, a method that was commonly accepted when she received her initial teaching instruction. But as school systems struggled to achieve standardized reading levels, some educators turned to phonics, breaking down words to their constituent sounds. Beck’s experiences convinced her there must be a way through cognitive science and neuroscience to understand why some children learn to read more easily than others. Using existing cognitive science principles, Beck developed easily taught strategies that children who needed more help could use to recognize words. These strategies related to phonics but better fit the specifics of human thinking capability.

Apart from her work with phonics, Beck is focusing on building children’s vocabulary. Along with LRDC Senior Scientist Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan, assistant professor in the Department of Language, Reading, and Exceptionalities in the Reich College of Education at Appalachian State University, Beck recently authored Bringing Words to Life (Guilford Press, 2002), a handbook to help teachers enhance their students’ vocabulary.

“One of the great, great problems in education is that kids from a higher socioeconomic status come to school with vocabularies that are twice as large, some researchers are saying four times as large,” as children from less affluent homes, Beck says. “This difference is evident as early as 3 years old, and it’s well documented. Our notion from years of work is that you start very early, you teach them very sophisticated words, and you have a lot of fun with it.”

Children revel in learning words like “exhausted” and “nuisance” when they are as young as five, says Beck, who never underestimates the abilities of young children. “They are capable of remarkable things,” she says, “if they get the support they need.”

Another Beck and McKeown contribution to reading education, Text Talk, captures the benefits of the “read-aloud” experience for young children. Text Talk is a set of guidelines supporting language development and reading comprehension of students from kindergarten through second grade by asking them to explain, develop, and expand upon story ideas. According to Beck and other researchers, reading aloud is “probably the most highly recommended activity for encouraging language and literacy,” and discussing what is read is vital to improving young children’s comprehension and language capabilities. Text Talk offers an approach that enhances a young reader’s ability to build meaning from text: Teachers intersperse reading aloud with questions and discussion, and follow each story with specific attention to vocabulary.

Also developed by Beck and McKeown, Questioning the Author is a package of educational materials outlining a reading enhancement program directed at intermediate-grade students who read independently. Questioning the Author promotes the principle of “teaching for understanding” and focuses on a text’s ideas in order to encourage students to build meaning from those ideas.

Text Talk has been used in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms around the country, while schools in a number of states—nearly 60 schools in the Pittsburgh area alone—have implemented programs based on the methods outlined in Questioning the Author.

All of these initiatives speak volumes as to the positive influence Pitt researchers are having on our nation’s education, says Lesgold. “Pitt researchers—in the School of Education, LRDC, and other units—have developed improved ways of teaching, ways that work with more children. And through the collaborations of School of Education faculty with LRDC’s Institute for Learning, hundreds of teachers in major school systems are learning how to apply these approaches, and their principals and district leaders are learning how to mentor them in the use of teaching methods that can reach all students.”

Pitt Researchers Reforming Math and Science Teaching on National SCALE

As part of the federal government’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative, Pitt researchers are playing a major role in improving math and science education for school children across the country. Under a partnership program called Systemwide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE), mathematicians, scientists, social scientists, engineers, technologists, and education practitioners are working together to build a new approach to reforming math and science education for children from pre-K through 12th grade.

Announced in October 2002 and launched in 2003, the five-year, $35 million National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project is being comanaged by Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Madison, Denver, Los Angeles, and Providence, R.I., are home to SCALE’s four partner urban school districts.

Christian Schunn, LRDC research scientist, is codirecting the project with LRDC Director Lauren Resnick. Schunn said that SCALE’s multipronged approach will provide students with more challenging and engaging math and science curricula, encourage them to work on exciting science projects—even at the elementary level—and improve the training of existing and new science and math teachers, while enticing more math and science college students into teaching careers.

“Reforming math and science education is an extremely complex task with many interconnected problems,” Schunn said. “The goal is to make major improvements in the way almost a million kids in our partner schools learn math and science, and then to spread that success across the country.”

The SCALE initiative, the largest, and one of the first, Math and Science Partnership projects funded by NSF, follows years of disheartening reports on the academic shortcomings of America’s students compared to youngsters in other countries. In a 1998 survey, U.S. high school seniors ranked 19th out of 21 countries in science and math knowledge. Only students in Cyprus and South Africa fared worse.

The vision of the SCALE partnership is to make it the rule for students at every grade level to experience high-quality teaching of, and achievement in, math and science. In pursuing its vision, SCALE is implementing strategies to transform the daily systemwide teaching of K-12 science and math, all the while integrating into the curriculum authentic extended (four-week) scientific investigations at least once a year.

Concurrently, SCALE is developing strategies to increase the participation of minority and female students in secondary math and science courses, intending to build a more diverse pool of science, technology, engineering, and math undergraduates, and, eventually, teachers and researchers.

SCALE is working with partner districts’ local institutions of higher education to design and implement new teacher preparation and professional development. It also is investing in research and evaluation to ensure that a culture of evidence permeates all lines of work; to that end, SCALE is compiling documentation for policymakers and educational leaders about how to construct such a partnership.

Urban Education Center Helps Ensure Access to American Dream

In October of 2003, the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Education launched the Center for Urban Education to help improve education in our region and to research and disseminate methods for improving urban education nationally. Work is now under way on two ventures—a pilot program in the local Wilkinsburg School District and a professional development program in the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ Phillips Elementary School.

The Wilkinsburg program is under the direction of the Partnership for School District Improvement, headquartered at Pitt. Pitt Professor Sue Goodwin, former superintendent of schools at South Side Area School District in Hookstown, Pa., serves as Wilkinsburg’s chief academic officer, and Jim Turner, who spent 10 years with the Pennsylvania Economy League in a variety of positions, including managing director and chief financial officer, is director of the partnership project.

The focus at Wilkinsburg has been to develop a core leadership team comprising representatives from the school board, administration, and teachers union, and University resource people to resolve problems impeding academic progress. The partnership also is working to improve the business, financial, and data systems in the district to give decision makers and teachers the information needed to implement reforms.

The Wilkinsburg School District, the Wilkinsburg Education Association, and the Pittsburgh and Grable foundations are supporting the program at Wilkinsburg.

“This partnership of a school district, a teachers union, and private foundations is a very positive landmark in regional educational reform efforts,” says Alan Lesgold, dean of the School of Education.

The second venture includes professional development activities with the staff of Phillips School. This site is both an urban education resource and a locus for teacher preparation and professional development centered on the needs of urban schools.

Undergraduate students contemplating education careers participate in tutoring and other parateaching roles, with mentoring and oversight from Phillips and Pitt faculty. Pitt students also serve as interns at the school.

In addition to the Wilkinsburg and Phillips programs, the center is holding workshops for Pitt education students that focus on two major issues—how to deal with bullying and how to connect with parents and other caregivers of the urban students. Erika Gold, a graduate student assistant and teaching fellow in the Pitt School of Education’s Department of Administrative and Policy Studies, is leading this effort.

“Pitt’s Center for Urban Education addresses the need to ensure that every child is well educated to become a full participant in the information economy and to have full access to the American dream of success in proportion to one’s personal efforts,” says Lesgold.