Corrected links for Sosa's surveys

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=iMj1EUKgdcbxmg6E7Gveuw_3d_3d

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ZV8jxVgfm9JKuXdnAPh2AA_3d_3d

comment here or under the original post when complete.

Reminders

We don't have class on Friday do to parent/teacher conferences.

Your second drafts of your sports articles are due on Tuesday, 3/30 - they should be typed and all drafts should be attached.

Your final draft is due on Friday, April 3.

I'd also like you to submit these drafts to me once they are graded via email so that I can get them to the newspaper class for layout...

Please click on the below links and take the surveys for Mr. Sosa's class

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=iMj1EUKgdcbxmg6E7Gveuw_3d_3d

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ZV8jxVgfm9JKuXdnAPh2AA_3d_3d

They should only take you 10 minutes. Please post to this link when you've completed both. Thanks

2nd drafts of sports articles

2nd drafts are due on Tuesday, 3/31 - sports articles should be typed with earlier drafts attached.

Make sure that you have good research - more quotes, good student voice.

First drafts of sports articles

First drafts of sports articles are due in class on Tuesday, 3/24 - These drafts MUST be typed.

Any hand written notes should be attached.

Homework for Friday, 3/20

Analyze 3 sports articles of your own... try to look for different kinds (like in class today)

Consider how they are different and what kinds of information are in each article.

Make sure to attach the articles to your analysis

Homework due on Tuesday

Yes, you need to find a NEW article for this week's homework... you need to be immersing yourself in the kind of writing we are doing... so read the section and choose and article. (a new one.

Homework for Tuesday, 3/17

Homework for the weekend (due Tuesday)
Find a sports article on any topic you want (preferably from the NY Times).

Identify each of the following: headline, lead, quotes and structure.

Reflect on the effectiveness on the writing and the content

What did you learn that you can you use in your own writing from the article...

Make sure to cut out the article and staple it to your work to be handed in on Tuesday.

This assignment will be collected.

Tips after reading the last assignments:

• Make sure to read the article and annotate it - not just highlighting and writing what each part is, but also discuss its effectiveness when you highlight... plus there is difference between a direct and indirect quote... please note it on your article
• when talking of headlines, leads, quotes and other information, talk about how the author's choices help you understand what is being written.
• How does the structure affect your understanding?
• Does the author use good language? Which words, phrases, sentences specifically really stand out and WHY? (this means quote the pieces in your write up)
• In your reflection, talk about the content briefly, but mostly talk about what you learned about sports writing through this article... what can you use in your own writing specifically and how do you think you would use it?

How to use Teacherease for the 1000th time

Please do not look at the grade you have on teacherease...

use this tool as a way to know what you are missing and to record what you have received on finished work... make sure to read the comments written on there as well.

As far as knowing where you stand, refer to the following:
4= A
3=B
2=C
1= Needs Improvement

other break downs:
3.5= A-/B+
2.5=B-/C+
1.5=C-

I hope this helps... when I tabulate grades, I look at your standards and the work you have completed. If you would like to have a conference about your grades, please email me... Do NOT post it to this blog.

Rewriting assignments

When working on rewrites and revisions on "finished" work, please remember to resubmit all prior drafts with the rubric when resubmitting. I need to be able to see your old drafts to be able to recognize the changes you've made.

Thanks a bunch

Portfolio pulling for the second trimester

Please make sure you turn in all of your work for portfolio no later than this evening. I would like to see and give you feedback on the reflections you have written.

Please email me tonight.

Thanks

Make up work for the second trimester

Tomorrow is the last day make up work will be accepted for the second trimester... this includes all rewrites, papers, and blog posts.

Portfolio pulling will be in class on Tuesday, so please make sure you have all work in class on that day. You will be writing reflections and selecting the pieces you would like to put in.

Indesign / Photoshop Test Mon 3/16

Mon 3/16: Indesign / Photoshop Test

make sure you know how to:
- crop photos & adjust brightness / contrast
- set up columns in Indesign
- place text and image files
- adjust text wrap settings
- export from Indesign in Adobe PDF format

Fri 3/20: Final trimester project due
- Take your (or another student's) layout design and files from the Google group (http://groups.google.com/group/foundations-in-journalism) and put the layout together in Indesign
- Export the finished layout in Adobe PDF format and email to: laiernie@gmail.com
- If you need additional time outside of class to finish this, see me for a Pub Lab pass so you can work on it during lunch.

Homework for the weekend (due Tuesday)

Find a sports article on any topic you want (preferably from the NY Times).

1. Identify each of the following: headline, lead, quotes and structure.
2. Reflect on the effectiveness on the writing and the content
3. What did you learn that you can you use in your own writing from the article...

Make sure to cut out the article and staple it to your work to be handed in on Tuesday.

This assignment will be collected.

Obama's education plan

http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-na-obama-education25-2009feb25,0,2871040.story
Saw this one and thought it would it be interesting.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101269227&ft=1&f=1013

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/27/budget

Portfolio pulling for the second trimester

Please select three pieces that you feel best displays your command of the standards we have worked on so far in this trimester...

Major assignments that should be considered are:

Editorial
Feature article
Ethics project
Layout project
Pearl reporter article

Please make sure to reflect on your selections particularly discussing the standards and skills your work is displaying. We need these completed by 3/20

Visit nylearns.org to look up standards.

The trimester ends 3/20

All make up work must be turned in no later than Wed. 3/11.

Sports writing packets

Please read through and annotate the packets provided in class on sports writing.



Which packet or article did you find most helpful or useful? What did you learn?



Please comment on this post about the above questions... be sure to reference specific articles/tips/ideas from the packets.



Thank you... this is due by Friday.

From today's science times discussed in class - post your thoughts on content and writing style

This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.

March 3, 2009
Rewards for Students Under a Microscope
By LISA GUERNSEY
For decades, psychologists have warned against giving children prizes or money for their performance in school. “Extrinsic” rewards, they say — a stuffed animal for a 4-year-old who learns her alphabet, cash for a good report card in middle or high school — can undermine the joy of learning for its own sake and can even lead to cheating.
But many economists and businesspeople disagree, and their views often prevail in the educational marketplace. Reward programs that pay students are under way in many cities. In some places, students can bring home hundreds of dollars for, say, taking an Advanced Placement course and scoring well on the exam.
Whether such efforts work or backfire “continues to be a raging debate,” said Barbara A. Marinak, an assistant professor of education at Penn State, who opposes using prizes as incentives. Among parents, the issue often stirs intense discussion. And in public education, a new focus on school reform has led researchers on both sides of the debate to intensify efforts to gather data that may provide insights on when and if rewards work.
“We have to get beyond our biases,” said Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard University who is designing and testing several reward programs. “Fortunately, the scientific method allows us to get to most of those biases and let the data do the talking.”
What is clear is that reward programs are proliferating, especially in high-poverty areas. In New York City and Dallas, high school students are paid for doing well on Advanced Placement tests. In New York, the payouts come from an education reform group called Rewarding Achievement (Reach for short), financed by the Pershing Square Foundation, a charity founded by the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. The Dallas program is run by Advanced Placement Strategies, a Texas nonprofit group whose chairman is the philanthropist Peter O’Donnell.
Another experiment was started last fall in 14 public schools in Washington that are distributing checks for good grades, attendance and behavior. That program, Capital Gains, is being financed by a partnership with SunTrust Bank, Borders and Ed Labs at Harvard, which is run by Dr. Fryer. Another program by Ed Labs is getting started in Chicago.
Other systems are about stuff more than money, and most are not evaluated scientifically. At 80 tutoring centers in eight states run by Score! Educational Centers, a national for-profit company run by Kaplan Inc., students are encouraged to rack up points for good work and redeem them for prizes like jump-ropes.
An increasing number of online educational games entice children to keep playing by giving them online currency to buy, say, virtual pets. And around the country, elementary school children get tokens to redeem at gift shops in schools when they behave well.
In the cash programs being studied, economists compare the academic performance of groups of students who are paid and students who are not. Results from the first year of the A.P. program in New York showed that test scores were flat but that more students were taking the tests, said Edward Rodriguez, the program’s executive director.
In Dallas, where teachers are also paid for students’ high A.P. scores, students who are rewarded score higher on the SAT and enroll in college at a higher rate than those who are not, according to Kirabo Jackson, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell who has written about the program for the journal Education Next.
Still, many psychologists warn that early data can be deceiving. Research suggests that rewards may work in the short term but have damaging effects in the long term.
One of the first such studies was published in 1971 by Edward L. Deci, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, who reported that once the incentives stopped coming, students showed less interest in the task at hand than those who received no reward.
This kind of psychological research was popularized by the writer Alfie Kohn, whose 1993 book “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes” is still often cited by educators and parents. Mr. Kohn says he sees “social amnesia” in the renewed interest in incentive programs.
“If we’re using gimmicks like rewards to try to improve achievement without regard to how they affect kids’ desire to learn,” he said, “we kill the goose that laid the golden egg.”
Dr. Marinak, of Penn State, and Linda B. Gambrell, a professor of education at Clemson University, published a study last year in the journal Literacy Research and Instruction showing that rewarding third graders with so-called tokens, like toys and candy, diminished the time they spent reading.
“A number of the kids who received tokens didn’t even return to reading at all,” Dr. Marinak said.
Why does motivation seem to fall away? Some researchers theorize that even at an early age, children can sense that someone is trying to control their behavior. Their reaction is to resist. “One of the central questions is to consider how children think about this,” said Mark R. Lepper, a psychologist at Stanford whose 1973 study of 50 preschool-age children came to a conclusion similar to Dr. Deci’s. “Are they saying, ‘Oh, I see, they are just bribing me’?”
More than 100 academic studies have explored how and when rewards work on people of all ages, and researchers have offered competing analyses of what the studies, taken together, really mean.
Judith Cameron, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Alberta, found positive traits in some types of reward systems. But in keeping with the work of other psychologists, her studies show that some students, once reward systems are over, will choose not to do the activity if the system provides subpar performers with a smaller prize than the reward for achievers.
Many cash-based programs being tested today, however, are designed to do just that. Dr. Deci asks educators to consider the effect of monetary rewards on students with learning disabilities. When they go home with a smaller payout while seeing other students receive checks for $500, Dr. Deci said, they may feel unfairly punished and even less excited to go to school.
“There are suggestions of students making in the thousands of dollars,” he said. “The stress of that, for kids from homes with no money, I frankly think it’s unconscionable.”
Economists, on the other hand, argue that with students who are failing, everything should be tried, including rewards. While students may be simply attracted by financial incentives at first, couldn’t that evolve into a love of learning?
“They may work a little harder and may find that they aren’t so bad at it,” said Dr. Jackson, of Cornell. “And they may learn study methods that last over time.”
In examining rewards, the trick is untangling the impact of the monetary prizes from the impact of other factors, like the strength of teaching or the growing recognition among educators of the importance of A.P. tests. Dr. Jackson said his latest analyses, not yet published, would seek to answer the questions.
He also pointed out that with children in elementary school, who typically show more motivation to learn than teenagers do, the outcomes may be different.
Questions about how rewards are administered, to whom and at what age are likely to drive future research. Can incentives — praise, grades, pizza parties, cash — be added up to show that the more, the better? Or will some of them detract from the whole?
Dr. Deci says school systems are trying to lump incentives together as if they had a simple additive effect. He emphasizes that there is a difference between being motivated by something tangible and being motivated by something that is felt or sensed. “We’ve taken motivation and put it in categories,” Dr. Deci said of his fellow psychologists. “Economics is 40 years behind with respect to that.”
Some researchers suggest tweaking reward systems to cause less harm. Dr. Lepper says that the more arbitrary the reward — like giving bubble gum for passing a test — the more likely it is to backfire. Dr. Gambrell, of Clemson, posits a “proximity hypothesis,” holding that rewards related to the activity — like getting to read more books if one book is read successfully — are less harmful. And Dr. Deci and Richard M. Ryan report that praise — which some consider a verbal reward — does not have a negative effect.
In fact, praise itself has categories. Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, has found problems with praise that labels a child as having a particular quality (“You’re so smart”), while praise for actions (“You’re working hard”) is more motivating.
Psychologists have also found that it helps to isolate differences in how children perceive tasks. Are they highly interested in what they are doing? Or does it feel like drudgery? “The same reward system might have a different effect on those two types of students,” Dr. Lepper said. The higher the interest, he said, the more harmful the reward.
Meanwhile, Dr. Fryer of Ed Labs urges patience in awaiting the economists’ take on reward systems. He wants to look at what happens over many years by tracking subjects after incentives end and trying to discern whether the incentives have an impact on high school graduation rates.
With the money being used to pay for the incentive programs and research, “every dollar has value,” he said. “We either get social science or social change, and we need both.”

Final drafts of editorials

Please email me your final drafts of your editorials (as well as bring in a hard copy to class on Tuesday with all earlier drafts attached.)

Thanks for your cooperation

Happy Snow Day

Just a reminder that your editorials are still due tomorrow... please make sure to complete your midterm reflections and email them to me.

Thanks.

Reflections in general

It is really important when writing reflections that you really go into depth about what your understanding of the assignment was and then how your work demonstrates you have done it.

Use the rubrics provided by your teachers to be specific in the standards and skills expected of you and then you can address many of them in your reflection.

Talk about what you did well.

Talk about what you could still do better.

Talk about how you felt about the assignment while you were doing it.

What do you want the reader of your reflection to take away from the piece you have used?

Sample standard based portfolio reflection

I have chosen my independent reading assignment for my portfolio because I feel that it illustrates my ability to demostrate a variety of skills and standards in this class. Because I have achieved a 93 on it, I feel that I am more than meeting many standards. It shows that I can identify texts of various genres independently and then write brief critical analysis about my selections.

For questions 3 and 4 where it asked me to locate a passage that shows the author's effective use in language, I show that I am both able to identify different literary elements such setting and characterization as well as literary techniques like foreshadowing and figurative language in the text. In addition to identifying these elements, I can discuss and analyze the author's craft and effectiveness. I feel that is not enough to just mention, but rather also to discuss the effect it has on the audience by using these things. I feel that reading published author's work has further helped me develop my writing as well.

Other things I am successful with in the assignment is my ability to understand texts on more than one level. I show that there is deeper meaning by selecting a passage and then drawing my own conclusions and making inferences.
I think this assignment demonstrates my successful mastery of these standards. I have learned to read a novel more closely and become acutely aware not only of story line meaning, but author's purpose while reading. I've also been able to write about these things in a meaningful way.

In the future, I feel that I will need to be more specific in addressing theme in this assignment. I think that I misunderstood what theme was about in question 6. I could have also worke with symbolism, but I think I mistook theme to be the main idea, when really it is just an overriding idea and there could be many in a text. Author's use them to connect the story to readers. Sometimes I could have selected more effective passages too. I think I may have rushed alittle in my selection of a passage about setting.