How can education be improved to better ...?

Question

compete with education in other countries?

I was just wondering if this question is an engaging question, does it make you want to discuss it and i think one could write a paper on it if they wanted right?



I'm not writing a paper on this just a question on education.

Answer 1

Yes, this is an engaging question. It does make me want to discuss it even though I am not an American. I am well-read though, and I have read about some of the faults of schools in America or schools in general everywhere. Your question provokes discussion so well that I will now have to answer it! :)

I have always read that the education in America does not emphasize science; I have also read that America is not supporting scientific research so much anymore either. The other countries are passing it up in terms of science. For example, think about Japan. Japan is very industrialized and modern. It is also a very wealthy nation and has good business. Japan continues to do well in scientific reserach and such especially now. In my opinion, American schools should emphasize the importance of science. There are not many good science teachers. Another item about science: think about where the pharmaceutical companies and such companies are located...Europe (especially France and Germany). Science can yield great wealth and make great students. Science students are known to be diligent students! (And that's not only because I am one!) American schools should emphasize science. And perhaps one of those gang-member students will take such a liking to science that he will leave it to become a better science student.

Also, I think that children should be given more opportunities for art and music. Some students like that so much; they go to school for only that reason, but it is being taken out for "buget issues."

In general, American students should be forced to learn another language. I learned three before I even went to school (well, the third one not so well, but sort of well enough). Then I learned three others. Schoolchildren in many other nations learn multiple languages at a young age. Some Americans assume that English is such a popular language that they will never need to learn another language. That is a poor attitude as not everyone will know English, but also because studying a language means studying a culture and using your mind! In a world which is quickly shrunken by the amount of international travel and business, it is important to learn about other cultures and languages. People need to be able to communicate and tolerate other cultures; this needs to start in school at a younger age. Many people in this world bend over backwards to learn multiple languages including English, but many Americans have the attitude that they don't need to do the same. As I say, English isn't popular everywhere, but it "exercises the brain" to learn a language. And someday very soon, it may be necessary to learn many languages because of the globalization.

I have also seen on television and know that by reputation that American schools don't seem to enforce discipline so much. I don't know by how much it is different because I have never attended an American school, but perhaps discipline really is an issue. Also, I know about some of the law issues with American students and teachers; I read that some teachers fear even yelling at the children otherwise the parents may become upset with the teacher. I also read that the teachers are afraid to mark papers in red ink because the students will panic from seeing it; the teachers use blue or black ink instead so that this does not stand out so much. I think that the teachers just need to not worry about the little things like that so much. Obviously, the teachers should not abuse the students and such, but they should be able to effectively criticize the student and discipline the student.

I have also noticed that in schools in general, the smart students are told that they are smart, but then they are not challenged. The money is instead spent on the students who are not learning well. Nothing extra is spent for the smart students. That was definitely a problem at my school. I did not often feel challenged. I took school very seriously, but it wasn't difficult because I was not challenged. I should have learned a lot more for the time I spent there, but schools aren't willing to do that.

It is also important to make sure that students are literate. Reading is a very insanely important skill. The number of children who cannot read or cannot read well is astounding. One can hardly get anywhere if he cannot read! Teachers need to make sure that the student can read, but this is obvious. Parents should also help. My mum and father used to read to me all of the time when I was young, and this instilled an interest for reading in me. Being a good reader is important because it is not enough to just be able to read; you need to be able to comprehend and retain the material which is read!

The parents need to be active in the students' schoolwork and school activities. The parents need to help the students and be involved. It does a child no good if the parent is absent from his or her life; the parent sets the example. My parents were very involved in my schoolwork and made sure that I at least cared about school, and it worked: I finished with the highest marks in my secondary school class. I was the only one who finished with perfect marks. I think it would have been different for me if my parents were not there to make sure that I took school seriously...or maybe I just inherited the smart genes! Ha ha!

I'm obviously not American and have not attended American schools; so, some of these things to be problems in schools in general. The school I attended had faults also, and some of these problems I assume are the same in American schools. So, you've a foreinger's opinion on this, but my opinion may not be as accurate as perhaps someone else's--an American's.

Answer 2

I suppose we could extend the school year. It would potentially benefit the students, but the teachers would be pushed even more than they currently are now. I really think that the best ways to improve the educational system are to
1) Pay teachers better - C'mon folks, the average teacher usually has to work multiple jobs, especially during the summer! More pay would hopefully entice more teachers into the field thus relieving the strain that the current teachers endure (eg-too many kids, not enough academics to go around).
2) Get rid of the No Child Left Behind laws or significantly revamp them.
3) School administrators need to back up their teachers, especially when it comes to disciplining unruly students. Teachers have stress from kids, their parents, and the administrators - lets eliminate at least one factor, and give the teachers some more clout in the classroom!
4) Let teachers teach in ways that best compliment their personal styles. Just because there is a lot of laughter coming from a classroom doesn't mean that the kids are misbehaving or not learning. Perhaps the teacher is a cutup, and uses this approach to get the kids involved. Wait to see the grades to see how effective he or she is in the classroom before passing judgment.
5) Urge parents to get involved with their kids' education. This is both critical and perhaps the most difficult to implement. But it is vital that somebody outside of the classroom encourages a student to achieve good grades.

Answer 3

Teaching used to be a notoriously low-paying job. People did it because they loved to teach. Now that so many teachers are making twice the average salary for their locations, people are getting into teaching for the money, not pride in their work. For some reason it was determined that paying them more would improve results. As we can finally see by our declining education status in the world, this was counterproductive. Union or not, effective teachers will find jobs and keep them. The overpaid, lazy, undeserving ones will be flipping burgers relatively soon.

Answer 4

it is too broad to write a paper on, you would have to narrow it down to say a specific field of education (math vs. english), a level (elementary, high school, college), or even if you are talking about in the classroom and the teacher, or the learning environment, or the testing procedures, just way too broad

Answer 5

improve the education and experiences of the ones who will be doing the teaching.

Answer 6

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Answer 7

illiminate government control and censorship.

Answer 8

your brain gets bigher

Answer 9

From mainframes in the 1960s to microcomputers in the 1980s, to the Web and Internet II today, higher education has hoped to use computers to improve educational outcomes on a large scale. By “outcomes,” I mean who can learn and what it is they can do by the time they’re finished with the academic program. By “large scale,” I mean improvements in outcomes for graduates of an entire degree program, institution, or nation.

After forty years of trying, the track record has been uneven, at best. The greatest success has been achieved in using information technology (IT) to teach technology-dependent content such as computer science, computer graphics in the arts, and data-intensive approaches to political science. A second, growing success has been to open access to education for students who couldn’t fully participate on campus before. And we have been able to enhance productivity in certain areas (e.g., by using computer spreadsheets instead of paper, pencil, and adding machine).

But what about the goal of improving teaching and learning? New purchases of hardware have often been justified by the claim that they would improve teaching/learning effectiveness in all fields.











Unfortunately, history has exhibited a grim cycle. Each time a new technology has come into vogue, its advocates begged the institution to buy it, so as not to fall behind. They promised that its use would improve learning. Yet five years later, a completely new technology had taken center stage. No large-scale improvements in the effectiveness of instruction had been achieved from the last purchase, but this new technology, advocates promised, would change everything! Whatever the question, “new technology” always seemed to be the answer.

Well, I don’t buy that theory anymore. For almost a quarter century I have been evaluating new uses of technology, both as a program officer with the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and later with Annenberg/CPB, and today as Director of the Flashlight Program. As early as the 1980s, we funded pioneers who tried to use “new” technology to improve outcomes for a degree program. Although we didn’t realize most of those hopes, I still believe that we could have succeeded, even in the 1980s, if we’d done a better job of implementation. Obviously such improvements are possible today, on an even larger scale. Yet we will surely fail again if we repeat the “common sense” policies that have sabotaged so many previous IT investments.

Why IT Investments Often Don’t Improve Educational Outcomes
At least three basic problems have dogged most attempts to translate technological investments into improvements in educational outcomes.

1. Surrendering to rapture of the technology. For a variety of reasons, institutions and programs tend to focus just on the new technology itself. That’s bad. To put it metaphorically, you must have yeast to bake bread, but if you buy only yeast, you’ll never produce bread. Whether a program’s aim is to use technology to support learning communities, or better skills or inquiry, or an internationalized curriculum, the recipe will require more than hardware. Other expensive ingredients include staff development and/or new staff; new assignments and course designs; more books in the library; altered marketing and advising; changes in roles and rewards; new organizational partnerships; and new internal coalitions. In the past, the technology siphoned money and attention away from the rest of the recipe.

2. Forgetting that the life span of many new technologies is far shorter than the time it takes to implement the recipe and improve educational outcomes. Those complex recipes are not “quick and easy”: assembling the ingredients takes a long time. Meanwhile the technology is aging, and losing value. Long before outcomes have a chance to improve visibly, new technologies usually distract attention from the “old” improvement agenda. Over the years, technology-related interests in improving outcomes such as programming skill, visualization (in the early days of videodisc), and collaborative learning (the computer conferencing systems of the 1980s) have risen, and fallen, and sometimes risen anew. Over the decades, waves of new technology have rippled across the surface of education but large-scale improvements in outcomes almost never had time to develop.

3. Trying to improve outcomes and save money by using tutorials and other forms of self-paced, interactive, branching courseware. This is one educational recipe for improvement of outcomes that hasn’t changed. It has been attempted with almost every new computing technology of the last four decades, from PLATO to the Web. These kinds of tutorials are always enticing: research has demonstrated that such courseware can dramatically improve outcomes, learning speed, and costs. But the problems of large-scale implementation have always proven insuperable: the short lifecycle of the courseware; the expenses of educational debugging of the many pathways; the hidden costs of altering the curriculum to take advantage of the courseware; the rigidity of the courseware in the face of new developments in the discipline and variations in students; the lack of rewards for authors; and the expenses of marketing and support.



How to Use IT Investments to Improve Educational Outcomes
Let’s learn from past mistakes. Here are five strategies that should help higher education institutions and programs use IT to make major improvements in educational outcomes.

1. Begin with a long-term focus on a few selected outcomes and the educational activities needed to improve them. Which goals and strategies are worth pursuing for the seven to ten years that are needed to make large, visible improvements? Here are a few candidates: skills of inquiry and research; the ability to apply learning more successfully in the real world; skills of working in teams, communities, and organizations; international and intercultural understanding; skills of designing, composing, and creative work.. These outcomes can be relevant in almost any field. Other, equally valid goals are specific to particular fields or types of students. If a program succeeds in dramatically improving even one such outcome, the rewards of enrollment and financial support could be great.

The simplest way to choose among candidate goals is to select one that represents both a current strength and a current concern. For example, an institution or program might decide to improve skills of creative work, both because some of its best work is already being done in that area and because it is worried that competitors might leapfrog over it.

2. Choose technology that can contribute incrementally and cumulatively over the long haul. Suppose that a program has already been using technology to pursue such a goal for a couple of years. Now discussions begin about a major purchase of a new technology that would be used by most faculty, staff and students. Several questions can be useful in the choice regarding new technology: (a) Can the dollars spent on the new technology help the program make major progress toward improving the chosen outcomes, compared with other ways of spending the same money for advancing that educational agenda? (b) Is the new technology ready for mass use, and are operating costs, including support and hidden costs, acceptable? (c) How badly will the adoption of the new technology disrupt the current educational strategy? For example, how much curricular material and how many course designs would need to be discarded in order to take advantage of the new technology? (d) If this brand or product disappears, will the curricular material become unusable or will competitive products also run those same files?

3. Emphasize forms of instructional material that most faculty members find quick and easy to create, adapt, and share. Most courses require materials that instructors or tutors can inexpensively modify to match the needs of students, personal styles, and recent changes in their fields. By the same token, the instructional formats should make it easier for faculty to organize, edit, and share those incremental improvements in the materials and course designs so that, as a field, they can move forward as quickly as possible.

4. Track the progress of the strategy to get the data (and money) needed to stay on course. An educational initiative is most vulnerable two to three years after it begins, as initial enthusiasm wanes and as other issues begin to distract attention from the initiative. Evaluation can refocus attention by charting the implementation of the “recipe” (e.g., changes in patterns of teaching). Periodic studies can provide data to help alter and fine-tune the strategy. For example, this is the time to detect stresses on people’s time and budget, before they lead to burnout. Regular reports can help attract energy, money, and less tangible forms of support (e.g., employer interest). Such reports do not need to be purely good news: evidence of solvable problems can be a great way to attract fresh resources. By the way, the best time to start program evaluation is immediately, in order to gather baseline data (the “before” picture) to help map the progress and problems that emerge in later years.

5. Create coalitions to ensure that the program has all the ingredients needed in the recipe for improving outcomes. On July 4, 1776, Benjamin Franklin remarked, “We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” To get the resources needed for the full recipe, build a coalition of people and interests from inside and outside the institution, a coalition that focuses on the outcome to be improved, not (just) the technology. Use that coalition as a whole to fight for the resources that each element of the coalition needs. Your institution may have a Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable (although perhaps not with that title)—a broad-based group of faculty, staff, and others that advises the chief academic officer on improving education through the use of IT. Such a group can provide an ideal setting in which to debate the above strategies and to map a path to using investments in information technology to achieve large-scale improvements in educational outcomes.