Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: NCLB: Benezet/Whitney Thinking



Although cross-posting offers a way to tunnel through disciplinary
barriers, some list subscribers vehemently object to it. If you are
one such, please hit the DELETE button now! If you respond to this
long post (10kB) please don't hit the reply button (bane of
discussion lists) and thereby inflict it yet again on all list
subscribers.

In response to Jerry Becker's (2004) seminal Math-Learn post "Re:
NCLB: Benezet/Whitney Thinking," regarding Louis Paul Benezet's
(1935/36) land-mark mathematics education research, Wayne Bishop
(2004a) erroneously wrote:

"[Benezet] reported *no* objectively assessed measures of student
performance, simply his own reports of great improvement as recorded
by him and his secretary as they visited these (six was it?) guinea
pig schools."

Then later Bishop (2004b) quoted passages from Benezet (1935/36) that
he claims to have forgotten in making the above false claim
[bracketed by lines "BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB. . . . . "]:

BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
Now we were ready to experiment on a much larger scale. By the fall of
1932 about one-half of the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade rooms in
the city were working under the new curriculum [in which drill in
arithmetic algorithms is delayed until the 6th grade].

About this time Professor Guy Wilson of Boston University asked
permission to test our program. One of our high school teachers . .
.[Etta Berman]. . . was working for her master's degree at Boston
University and as part of her work he assigned her the task of giving
tests in arithmetic to 200 sixth grade children in the Manchester
schools. They were divided fairly evenly, 98 from experimental rooms
and 102 from the traditional groups, or something like that. These
were all sixth graders. Half of them had had no arithmetic until
beginning the sixth grade and the other half had had it throughout
the course, beginning with the 3-A. In the earlier tests the
traditionally trained people excelled, as was to be expected, for the
tests involved not reasoning but simply the manipulation of the four
fundamental processes.

By the middle of April, however, all the classes were practically on
a par and when the last test was given in June, it was one of the
experimental groups that led the city. IN OTHER WORDS THESE CHILDREN,
BY AVOIDING THE EARLY DRILL ON COMBINATIONS, TABLES, AND THAT SORT OF
THING, HAD BEEN ABLE, IN ONE YEAR, TO ATTAIN THE LEVEL OF
ACCOMPLISHMENT WHICH THE TRADITIONALLY TAUGHT CHILDREN HAD REACHED
AFTER THREE AND ONE-HALF YEARS OF ARITHMETICAL DRILL. (My CAPS.)
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB

Then Bishop, in one of his usual non-sequiturs wrote:

"Now if anybody can find that masters thesis we'll have something to
go on. So far, I stand by my assessment; in essence, that there was
none."

Had Bishop bothered to scan Mahahan & Hake (2000) he would have known
that Etta Berman's (1935) thesis is well known to the cognoscente and
served as the basis of this paragraph in Mahajan & Hake (2000):

M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H
Etta Berman, in her Masters thesis (1935) on the Benezet experiment,
used numerous QUANTITATIVE ASSESSMENTS:

VERBAL: antonyms, synonyms, alphabet, analogies, anagrams;

MATHEMATICAL: word problems, single- and multidigit addition and
multiplication; subtraction, addition, multiplication, and division
of fractions; long division;

EVERYDAY KNOWLEDGE: 'common sense'; typical prices (e.g. of gasoline
and coal), interest rates, and discounts;

In formal arithmetic, the experimental students caught up to the
regular ones in only 4 months during the 6th grade. As Berman
concluded with academic understatement:

"The results of this study cast doubt upon whether we are justified
in devoting five years to the drilling of formal arithmetic" (Berman
1935, p. 40).

The experimental students instead got years of extra practice in
reading, writing, and thinking.
M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H-M&H

Judging from his usual practice [for criticism of Bishop's misleading
posts see Hake (2004)], despite Etta Berman's (1935) careful
quantitative assessment, Bishop will probably either continue to
stand by his erroneous claim that Benezet's study received no
assessment, or else find some other vacuous reason for rejecting
Benezet's study, which is so antithetical to Bishop's own drill &
practice advocacy.

In his latest empty pontification [Bishop (2004c)] and his endless
lists of meaningless data, Bishop makes it crystal clear that he
hasn't a clue as to what constitutes scientific research [Shavelson &
Towne (2003)].

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
<rrhake@earthlink.net>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi>


REFERENCES
Becker, J. 2004. "Re: NCLB: Benezet/Whitney Thinking," Math-Learn
post of 5 Sept 2004 10:56 am; online at
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/math-learn/message/6436>. Becker's
seminal post has thus far (11 Sept 5pm PDT) netted about 42 responses
on Math-Learn <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/math-learn/>.

Benezet, L.P. 1935, 1936. "The Teaching of Arithmetic I, II, III: The
Story of an Experiment,"Journal of the National Education Association
24(8): 241-244 (1935); 24(9): 301-303 (1935); 25(1): 7-8 (1936). The
articles (a) were reprinted in the Humanistic Mathematics Newsletter
6: 2-14 (May 1991); (b) are on the web along with other Benezetia at
the Benezet Centre
<http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sanjoy/benezet/>

Berman, E. 1935. "The Result of Deferring Systematic Teaching of
Arithmetic to Grade Six as Disclosed by the Deferred Formal
Arithmetic Plan at Manchester," New Hampshire. Masters Thesis, Boston
University, available in Boston University's Education Library.

Bishop, W. 2004a. "Re: NCLB: Benezet/Whitney Thinking," Math-Learn
post of 9 Sept 2004 10:27 am; online at
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/math-learn/message/6461>.

Bishop, W. 2004b. "Re: NCLB: Benezet/Whitney Thinking," Math-Learn
post of 10 Sept 2004 12:11 pm; online at
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/math-learn/message/6475>.

Bishop, W. 2004c. "RE: Mathematically Incoherent," Math-Learn post 11
Sept 2004 3:54 pm; online at
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/math-learn/message/6483>.

Hake, R.R. 2004. "Expert calls for optional math," online at
<http://lists.nau.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0408&L=phys-l&P=R8129>. Post
of 20 Aug 2004 15:49:42-0700 to AERA-C, AERA-K, AP-Physics,
Math-Teach, Math-Learn, PhysLrnR, Physhare, POD, and RUME.

Mahajan, S. & R.R. Hake. 2000. "Is it time for a physics counterpart
of the Benezet/Berman math experiment of the 1930's? Physics
Education Research Conference 2000: Teacher Education
<http://www.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~rstein/perc2000.htm>; online as ref. 6
at <http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sanjoy/benezet/>. We suggest
a K-12 science curriculum inspired by and compatible with the
virtually forgotten pioneering work of Benezet (1935/36) [See the
Benezet Centre <http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sanjoy/benezet/>.]

Shavelson, R.J. & L. Towne. 2002. "Scientific Research in Education,"
National Academy Press, online at
<http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10236.html>.