What are the top skills employers demand? Communication skills, judgement and decision making, active listening to name a few. These skills are referred to as soft skills, or non-cognitive skills that are not measured by a cognitive or academic test, like IQ, for example.

In an age when our economy demands more college grads in order to fill the jobs of the future and to be globally competitive, the answer has been to make our classes harder and rank students, schools, and teachers by the scores students earn on their standardized test. Put more effort behind increasing IQ and get a better prepared workforce, right?

Wrong. Little to no research gives evidence that more rigorous classes or standardized tests will lead to more college graduates, according to the review, “Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners.” In fact, studies show the best indicator of success in college is not the difficulty level of classes a student took in high school or their standardized test scores, but rather their course grades, GPA, and class rank.

Researchers argue these standings are much more indicative of a student’s academic and economic potential because they measure, in part, the transferable and non-cognitive skills a student possesses:

“The prevailing interpretation is that, in addition to measuring students’ content knowledge and core academic skills, grades also reflect the degree to which students have demonstrated a range of academic behaviors, attitudes, and strategies that are critical for success in school and in later life, including study skills, attendance, work habits, time management, help-seeking behaviors, metacognitive strategies, and social and academic problem-solving skills that allow students to successfully manage new environments and meet new academic and social demands. To this list of critical success factors, others have added students’ attitudes about learning, their beliefs about their own intelligence, their self-control and persistence, and the quality of their relationships with peers and adults.”

This is one reason why parents put their kids on a soccer team, students are told to get involved in activities so they can highlight them on their college application,  and job seekers have a place to showcase their extracurricular achievements on their resumes. While there is no direct economic value to a child playing soccer, it is thought of as a social activity where people acquire the non-cognitive, or social and behavioral, skills that are necessary to get along with people at school and in the workplace, learn responsibility to a team, balance school and life, work under pressure, etc.

While classroom time is traditionally thought of as  a time to develop cognitive skills and after-school time is used for non-cognitive, the two skill sets are inextricably linked and don’t need to be exclusive. At LifeBound we train K-12 teachers, professors, advisors, tutors, and staff to use coaching skills to capitalize on the time they have with students and develop these non-cognitive skills for success in school, career, and life.

Through the coaching process, students answer questions and engage in self-reflective activities to mindfully create:

• Vision for what is possible
• Balance in their academic, social, and emotional lives
• Perspectives on the challenges they face and the choices they make
• Accountability to themselves and others
• Fulfillment from making choices that align with core values
• Habits of success to help address their personal strengths and weaknesses

What would your brightest students be capable of if they developed their non-cognitive skills alongside their cognitive? How would your struggling students benefit if they were asked powerful questions and learned to ask themselves powerful questions when they need help?

If you’re in the Denver area, join us on November 1 for a one-day Introduction to Academic Coaching. This training will give you a thorough introduction to the coaching process as well as leave you with coaching skills you can use Monday morning.  If you are interested in LifeBound coming to your area, email me at caroljcarter@lifebound.com for more information.

Millenials have it rough. Not only are these 18-25 year olds struggling to complete college, land a job that requires a degree, and start a family, they get criticized for all these shortfalls, and on top of it, get called narcissistic, lazy, and lecherous.

Matt Bors is one Millenial whose “rage” over the headlines about his generation lead him to create the opinion cartoon below, “Can We Stop Worrying About Millenials Yet?“. Our own summer intern, Sarah, a college senior who works, has an internship, goes to school full time, and lives with her parents, also had something to say in response to the TIME magazine article “The Me Me Me Generation” with her article, “Long Live the Twixter!”

Check out the Cartoon below (via @CNN), and let know what you think.  Can we stop worrying about Millenials yet?

It’s National Summer Learning Day on June 21st! This advocacy day aims to spread awareness of the critical role learning plays in the summer months for kids from all backgrounds and socioeconomic standing.

Why is summer learning so important? Research shows:

• All young people experience learning loss when they are not engaged in a summer learning activity.
• Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months.
• Only about 10 percent of students nationwide participate in summer school or attend schools with non-traditional calendars.

There are many ways parents can give students summer learning experiences, from no cost/low cost experiences to structured day camps.

• Get creative. If you need creative summer learning ideas for students of any age, try searching on Pinterest for low or no cost learning. Do you have a piece of chalk and a young child who needs some educational entertaining while you work in the yard? Try this gardening activity, and follow creator Cathy James on Pinterest.

• Take a summer class. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a great no-cost way for older students to keep their brain engaged during the summer months, while learning some new skills they don’t get in middle or high school. Share the top MOOC providers, like Udacity, Coursera, EdX, and Udemy, with your kids. There are also many day camp options in your community. For National Summer Learning Day, LifeBound is offering a 50% discount on our 5-day summer enrichment workshops in July.  Check out the Summer Learning Day activities and deals happening in your area by clicking on the map below.

•  Get outside. It’s summer time, so take advantage of the farmer’s markets, festivals, fairs, and the outdoors. There’s always something to be learned when you step out the door and try something new.

These are just a few ideas to keep kids occupied with valuable learning experiences through the summer months. Please share your ideas and tips on how you balance summer with learning and fun.

This spring we’re definitely not sitting still at LifeBound. In the next few months we have many new events, trainings, blogs, and more that will reach communities who are dedicated to improving learning opportunities for students, teachers, and professionals. One initiative we’re supporting all summer long is to get more students involved in productive learning activities over the summer months.

Research shows all young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. That’s why LifeBound is offering summer enrichment workshops at Lighthouse Writers Workshop for students in middle school through high school that foster self-awareness, critical thinking, and practical know-how. You can find out more about our week-long workshops for teens at our website. We are also encouraging students to read over the summer with our book display at the Tattered Cover Book Store on Colfax.

Coming up on Wednesday, April 10th, I’m excited to give a keynote to faculty at University of Oklahoma’s First-Year Experience Program. If you’re in the area, the event is free and open to the public. You can find out more at the event website.

Also coming up this month, is our three-day academic coaching training. Academic Coaching is an ongoing partnership to help students produce fulfilling results in their lives. Through the process of coaching, students deepen their learning, take responsibility for their actions, improve their effectiveness, and consciously create their outcomes in life. We conduct trainings for professors, teachers, administrators, and counselors. LifeBound Academic Coaching trainings are available year-round. Learn about our lead trainers, check out upcoming dates, and register for your next coaching session at our coaching website www.lifeboundcoaching.com.

Last but not least, I am now blogging for the Huffington Post under “Impact”.  For the next two months, I will be focusing on remedial students, posting every Tuesday.  Check out my most read article, “Why Aren’t Low Income Students Succeeding in School?” You’ll see some of the best insights include what readers posted in response.  Below is a sample of some of the topics I will be exploring in the future. Let me know in the comments if you have any additional ideas for blog topics.

• “From Trailer Park to Corporate Executive: One Woman’s Path to Personal and Professional Success”
• “Where Are We Struggling With Literacy?”
• “Why And How Are We Struggling with Innumeracy?”
• “Why And How Are We Struggling with Thinking Skills?”
• “Why And How Are We Struggling with Communication?”
• “Pipeline Success for Developmental Students.”

I look forward to sharing more about this eventful season. For inquiries about academic coaching, speaking engagements, summer reading, and anything else, call the LifeBound office at 1-877-737-8510.

As many as 1.7 million first-year students will take a remedial course to learn the math, reading, or writing skills they need to enroll in a credit-earning college-level course. Of all remedial courses most students are remediated in math skills. Due to a variety of factors — class dynamics, curricula, instruction,  skill-level, academic support, financial standing, life — retaining and passing students in a remedial course is a major concern.

Colorado Community College System conducted a longitudinal remedial math study that tracked remedial math students for 4 years. They found that though the majority of students required remedial math, math had the lowest pass rate of all remedial classes.

• Only 8% of students who enrolled in remedial math had graduated after four years
• Unlike the findings of a national study, the majority exited the sequence due to withdrawal or failure to pass a course, rather than completing and failing to enroll in the next course
• More than 40% of CCCS remedial math completers did not attempt college math

How can we equip these students with the tools to stick with and pass a remedial class? You’ll know from my blog earlier this week that ideally I believe more resources should be used at the K12-level to address learning difficulties before students graduate from high school and enter college. However, eliminating the need for remediation will not happen over night. What can we do today for the students who are graduating from high school with the dream of graduating from college, but who don’t have the skills to do so?

Academic Coaching promotes student accountability, motivation, and follow-through. It asks the student to not only do their homework, but to make a commitment to studying, getting a tutor, finding a support system, and passing the class. A faculty member with Academic Coaching skills asks the struggling developmental student powerful questions that puts the student in the driver’s seat of their own learning and asks them to invest in their own success.  LifeBound is at the National Association of Developmental Education (NADE) Conference this week sharing the benefits of using Academic Coaching with developmental students with faculty from around the country. Today, Maureen Breeze is giving the session Academic Coaching for Hybrid, Online, and Self-Paced Math to train faculty to use academic coaching skills to inspire students to persevere and foster success in any level or mode of math class.

If you’re at the NADE conference is Denver, make sure to come say hello to LifeBound in the exhibit hall.

There is no question that the need to improve American students’ math scores has garnered much attention on a national level. U.S. Education officials have been pushing reform for years now. We simply aren’t going to be able to compete with our global competitors in knowledge-based fields if we continue to fall short in math and science. So what can we do?

Set high expectations

According to the College Readiness report by ACT, students who take the recommended core curriculum for high school including three years of math achieve higher ACT scores than those who don’t, regardless of socio-economic background, race and gender.¹

But expectations for students to take and succeed at high level math and science courses in high school must be balanced by preparing them well in early years to do just this.

Our expectations for students to succeed at high levels of math and science need to be rooted in deep learning early on and continued support throughout the years, rather than pushing high level curriculum down the pipeline to earlier grades.

Provide ample challenging opportunities

We need to help students learn to embrace challenge early on in their mathematical studies and develop critical thinking road maps for problem solving.

As a nation, continued PR and media campaigns promoting role models in math and science innovation can add to a shift in the mindset of young students. NOVA has a fantastic series called The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers that aims to inspire more youth to pursue STEM careers by profiling STEM professionals who lead less than ordinary lives.

Debunk the “I’m not good at math” myth

If we begin to teach math in a way that rewards students for their time and effort, rather than simply on a right or wrong answer, we can nurture a mindset where they aren’t afraid of a challenge and take the time to figure it out.

Part of the challenge lies in helping students see that their math skills are not fixed, and that with effort they can improve with the help of a consistent educator or mentor working along side a student, helping him or her build on previous skills, and witness growth in process.

Adopt practices that are getting great results

What seems to work the best is when students learn math in a logical, consistent manner, mastering number facts and arithmetic, while being given the opportunity, once such mastery is achieved to explore conceptual problems and more challenging abstract applications of mathematical concepts. To do this successfully requires teachers adept at teaching math in both of these modes.

If we improve the math education for teachers in training and reduce their anxiety toward math, they’ll be better prepared to help students develop math as a strength skill rather than a liability.

Last of all, a simple but strategic practice for improving student math performance is to teach students strategies for working with their math textbooks.

Make Use of Technology

From Khan Academy videos, to online tutorial programs, to flipped classrooms, technology can be leveraged today to improve students’ math performance

Promote Positive Attitudes for Students

An additional insight offered by the TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center is that students from around the world do better in math if they maintain a positive attitude about the subject.²

Do you have any other strategies for improving math skills? Please share in the comments.  Stay tuned for more math themed blogs this week!

_____________________________________________________________________________

^{1 “}Benefits of a High School Core Curriculum” College Readiness, 2006, ACT. http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/pdf/core_curriculum.pdf 

² “Parental Expectations and Academic Achievement” Julie Grossman, Megan Kun-McKearin, William Strein, 2011. http://www.education.umd.edu/Academics/Faculty/Bios/facData/CHSE/strein/ParentalExpectationsAndAcademicAchievement.pdf

Children from low-income families tend to fall behind their more affluent peers in every stage of life. They are less likely to be prepared to enter school at age 5, achieve academic and social competencies by the end of elementary schools graduate from high school with good grades, no crime involvement, or teen pregnancy, or achievement equivalent income in their twenties.[i] 

 

Look at all the cognitive elements in the reading comprehension framework and it becomes obvious why students who have minimal access to books and spoken language in the home fall behind. An exposure to language is how students learn to form sentences, understand new words and build vocabulary, and comprehend what is being spoken or read. Without a book or someone to share a book with, a child doesn’t get experience deciphering new words, understanding phonemes, and structuring language.

Though putting a book on a bookcase, understanding that a book is read from left to right, or chewing on a book are deceptively simple steps down the road to literacy when compared to the complexity of reading comprehension skills, literacy is rarely achieved in households that don’t have access to literature. In fact, reading aloud is known to be the most important activity that leads to literacy and determines a student’s reading success through the rest of their life.[ii]

Parent involvement is critical in early childhood development. Before the first school bell rings, 90 percent of brain development has occurred between birth and age 5.[iii] It’s no wonder why children in poverty, who hear as many as 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers before the age of 4, are kept at a perpetual academic disadvantage. [iv]

According to the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, their research shows 37 percent of children entering kindergarten are not prepared with the skills they need to learn. Research also shows that an academic setback in kindergarten makes it very difficult for students to ever catch up.[v] The quality of a student’s early childhood education is strongly correlated with their high school success.

Email me at caroljcarter@lifebound.com if you are interested in learning more about how you can bring summer learning to your community.

The ability to write well is meant to evolve naturally from a few simple sentences on a first-grader’s notebook to the polished draft of a senior paper, and when it does the entire school experience tends to proceed naturally as well. In the workforce, good writing is the hallmark of a professional that can express himself clearly and display one’s company/product in an attractive way. This has only become more true in today’s world, where email, text messaging, and social media have taken over many of the communications that used to be performed by phone or in person.

In fact, the changing role of writing in the world today has many teachers wondering how they should adapt their teaching to make it more relevant to today’s writing needs, personally and professionally. Susan Lucille Davis, a writing teacher with over 30 years of experience, expresses this question in her blog, “Teaching Authentic Writing in a Socially Mediated World,” but admits that she herself doesn’t have the whole answer. She and many of her colleagues agree, however, that the answer would need to address and prove relevant towards improving writing in the following categories:

• Text messages to friends/colleagues.
• Captions for photos that express important information.
• Questions that probe and dig for what matters.
• Status updates that share a mood or point of view.
• Comments on interactive websites that continue the conversation.
• Product reviews that are convincing and detailed.
• Emails written with the appropriate tone and length.
• Collaborative documentation online, which requires more than simply dividing the work.
• Tweets that add valuable insight to an online conversation.
• Blogs that allow ideas and information to percolate over time.
• Citizen journalism that is current and relevant.
• Storyboards and scripts for the many different types of videos being made today.
• Proposals to make, do, or change something.
• Process analyses that help examine the way things work.
• Syntheses that help organize disparate resources and media.
• Reflections that share transparently and probe thoughtfully.

This rather daunting list points out a clear gap between traditional writing education and the evolution of writing needs in the world today. At the same time, it makes clear just how important writing skills have become in a world where every individual is a user and a maker, a consumer and a producer. The role of writing has expanded to the point where there’s hardly a place left in American society for someone who isn’t fluent in text.

Recent statistics support this idea. According to various studies cited by Gene A. Budig in his article, “Studies Show the Importance of Writing Skills,” 8 out of 10 parents believe writing is more important now than it was 20 years ago. 86% of teens believe that good writing predicts future success, and 82% express a wish to write better and for teachers to address the topic more in their classrooms. The highest percentage of teens who believed this came from minority and low-income groups.

We don’t need a study to know trends in technology have expanded the role writing plays in our lives. People of all demographics and ages text, instant message, and email every day — many times a day. We’ve hung up on using verbal communication, and turned to the more convenient, efficient, and, arguably, most unsocial mode of communication: writing.

That doesn’t mean we are all better writers for it. We’ve seen the birth of textlish, like LOL, BRB, YOLO, which has become so standard in the English language that it crossed over into verbal communication. Twenty-first century writers come with autocorrect, which knows what you want to say faster than you can type it (sometimes). Social media has unveiled our friends that don’t know the difference between there, their, and they’re. Writing may be more prominent in our daily tasks, but it doesn’t mean the art and craft of writing, critical thinking, grammar or self reflection has become more prominent with it.

It’s clear that literacy is important to America’s future, however, it’s also clear that we should begin to worry about what is to come if literacy scores in the U.S. continues to decrease.

Both the SAT and ACT scores in 2012 show poor reading levels. The SAT showed an average score that was one point lower than last year’s, and the lowest since 1972 (Layton and Brown 1-2). According to college readiness benchmarks in the SAT, only 49% of test takers were ready for critical reading at the college level (College Board 24). Only 57% of grads who took the ACT met their benchmark for reading scores, which is much the same result as last year’s tests; in fact, the average composite score for the ACT hasn’t shown much change at all in either direction since 2008 (ACT, Inc. 1,16). The reason these particular tests are important in evaluating high school graduates is because they’re one of the most important evaluation tools a college uses to determine whether an applicant should be admitted. As such, the tests are widely recognized by colleges as trustworthy in determining whether or not a student is ready for college-level work.

Though these poor results are measurable in the late teens, they find their root in early childhood. A report entitled Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which came out in 1998, listed some issues of that time that America is still facing in regards to teaching our young children. They point out first that a large number of our young students have difficulty learning to read, and that this is particularly true for low-income, non-white, or non-English speaking children. These issues are exacerbated by the increasing levels of learning disabilities observed among students today, many of which are directly associated with difficulty learning to read (dyslexia, e.g.). In addition, federal responses to these issues, including investments and programs, often don’t reflect current research regarding reading development and young childhood (Snow, Burns, and Griffin 17-18).

The most basic literacy skills might be sufficient for a workforce that still resembled the industrial era, but tomorrow’s workforce will need more than the ability to read a sign or a menu. Tomorrow’s workers will be expected to collaborate online with individuals who could be on the other side of the globe, adapt to new requirements and learn new skills as fields rapidly shift and change, and keep up with an increasingly hyper-connected world, not to mention graduate from high school and earn a certificate or degree.

We must make literacy a priority in our schools, homes, and community. We need more out-of-school resources for the students who don’t get their needs met during the school day. We need more parents reading and speaking to their children from the day they are born. We need the community to step in and provide free learning opportunities in order to give underprivileged students the same learning opportunities as their more affluent peers.

We all can make a a difference. Sign up to read to young children at the library, donate books to a school, mentor a child, or start a summer learning initiative.

• 60% of America’s prison inmates are functionally illiterate and 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems.
• Approximately 50% of the nation’s unemployed youth age 16-21 are functionally illiterate, with virtually no prospects of obtaining good jobs.
• 55% of adults with below basic reading comprehension did not graduate high school.1