Education Commons^™

In Education, Delayed Feedback Is Often More Efficient Than Immediate Feedback: A Geometric Explanation, Francisco Zapata, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Feedback is important in education. It is commonly believed that immediate feedback is very important. That is why instructors stay often late at night grading students' assignments -- to make sure that the students get their feedback as early as possible. However, surprisingly, experiments show that in many cases, delayed feedback is more efficient that the immediate one. In this paper, we provide a simple geometric explanation of this seemingly counter-intuitive empirical phenomenon.

Maybe The Usual Students' Practice Of Cramming For A Test Makes Sense: A Mathematical Analysis, Francisco Zapata, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We always teach students that cramming for a test is a bad idea, that they should study at the same speed throughout the semester – but many still cram. We ourselves are not that different: when we prepare papers for a conference, we often “cram” in the last days before the deadline instead of working with a regular speed for the whole time before the conference. The ubiquity of cramming makes us think that maybe it is not necessarily always a bad idea. And indeed, a simple model of a study process shows that an optimal solution often involve some …

How To Teach Implication, Martha Osegueda Escobar, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Logical implication is a somewhat counter-intuitive notion. For students, it is difficult to understand why a false statement implies everything. In this paper, we present a simple pedagogical way to make logical implication more intuitive.

Compounded Inequities: Assessing School Finance Equity For Low-Income English Language Learners, David S. Knight, Jesus E. Mendoza

Working Papers

School districts face different costs to produce the same level of educational opportunity because of differences in student population, geographical costs of living, and district size. However, in many states, the school finance system fails to take these factors into account when distributing funds to school districts. Most prior analyses of state school finance systems focus on the relationship between district funding and the percent of low-income students in that district or the percent of emergent bilinguals, who are typically classified as English language learners (ELLs).

We present the first longitudinal descriptive evidence of the extent to which state school …

Implementation, Cost, And Funding Of Bilingual Education In Texas: Lessons For Local And State Policymakers, David S. Knight, Elena Izquierdo, David E. Dematthews

Policy Briefs

Despite the rapid increase in enrollment of students who speak a language other than English at home, little prior research examines the resources required to implemented instructional programs for emergent bilinguals and whether school districts receive adequate funding for these programs. This policy brief (a) synthesizes research on implementation of bilingual education, (b) describes research on the cost of bilingual education programs, and (c) reports the findings of a study showing that bilingual education programs are severely underfunding in Texas and nationally.

The brief offers recommendations for local and state policymakers. School leaders can use bilingual education models to support …

Assessing The Educational Opportunity Of Emergent Bilingual Students: Why Are Some State School Finance Systems More Equitable Than Others?, David S. Knight, David E. Dematthews

Working Papers

Despite the rapid increase in enrollment of students who speak a language other than English at home, little prior research examines whether school districts receive adequate funding for instructional programs for emergent bilinguals. We show that prior to the Great Recession, districts with greater proportions of students classified as English language learners (ELL) received approximately 10 percent more funding than otherwise similar low-ELL districts. However, recessionary budget cuts disproportionately impacted high-ELL districts, effectively removing resource advantages. Cross-state analyses suggest that states using direct reimbursement methods and those with smaller ELL student weights in their formula funding tend to have less …