Bahía Ballena made list of Hottest Travel Destinations in 2013

Our place in Costa Rica Selva Escondida looks out over Ballena bay (Bahía Ballena)!

Bahía Ballena made it on the list of the “Hottest Travel Destinations of 2013,” by the renowned U.S. travel magazine, Travel & Leisure, read by more than 4.8 million people worldwide.  http://goo.gl/K4DZy

New Agana Look

Here are the latest renders for Agana's new look. The new labels were inspired by comments from our consumers & distributors too. They're designed to better explain why Agana is the best bottled water on the market in that it's incredibly pure, yet it neither expends the fossil fuels nor wastes high volumes of water like reverse osmosis.

 

Half-Liter Bottle

1-Liter Bottle

The labels are at the printers and will be hitting shelves over the next couple of months. For more info, visit www.aganawater.com.

Agana Rainwater places 2nd in Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting

Agana Rainwater took home silver in the global competition under the Non-Carbonated Bottled Water category.  Not bad for a little water company from Texas. Read press release here.

Online tests and online proctors

With online testing growing in use, the opportunities for cheating are similarly growing. So, why not use webcams & microphones on test-takers' computers to observe their behavior? I can see this feature becoming a standard in online tests. Read the full article here.

NYT: Asians and School Tests

This New York Times did a fascinating piece on how children of Asian immigrants study very hard in order to do well on school exams in the US. The article describes how the parents will spend money on test prep classes despite working meager jobs, and how such parents will resort to corporal punishment to ensure their children make the grade. These parents logically view such tests as the path to prosperity for their future generations. The article goes on to highlight the Asian children's success brings up uncomfortable debate on why other races can't do well on such tests.

Here's a bottle we designed as part of Agana Water's pursuit of better water for fish in fish tanks.

2012 Teacher of the Year puts standardized testing into perspective

Council of Chief State School Officers 2012 Teacher of the Year Rebecca Mieliwocki was interviewed on PBS Newshour. In the interview Ms. Mieliwocki said that standardized tests are like taking someone's temperature. They can provide a snapshot of one aspect of students, but do not provide a complete picture of a student's or teacher's progress anymore than taking someone's temperature provides a complete picture of one's health.

Wow! Great analogy!

Test prep of reasoning skills alters brain structure

A recently released study by UCLA demonstrates that intensive preparation for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) changes the structure of the brain. The study specifically addressed the ability to improve reasoning skills.  This is good news for future lawyers looking to improve their chances because LSAT scores are derived from three sections: Reading Comprehension, Analytical Reasoning, and Logical Reasoning.

Costa Rica Tourist Arrivals Increase 7.4% since last year

I came across this article discussing Costa Rica tourism. The majority of visitors came from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Costa Rica's Minister of Tourism said they've been working hard to attract new airlines and increase the frequency of flights, which has resulted in an increase in the number of seats available to our country. Nice work!

Texas State University System developing $10K degree

This caught my eye. A $10,000 university degree.

If such a degree teaches students adequately to get a job, this would be a major success story and a game changer.

I've seen several university luminaries such as Michael Crow at ASU address the cost of education in creative ways. However, the bottom line is that a university degree hasn't been making sense lately. If Texas State University and other institutions follow suit, the traditional university model in the US will be under increasing pressure to cut costs for all but the richest of students.

What's a question worth?

According to a Businessweek article on the next version of the GMAT which is scheduled to be official on June 5, the test's developers say they spend "about six months to develop each question, with as many as a dozen people taking part in the process."

This makes a lot of sense to me. In my work in assessing students in their preparedness for standardized exams, I've seen that a question can test dozens of metrics at once. While no single questions can be conclusive, a full test with many questions can use underlying metrics to highlight meaningful patterns about the test-taker.

Schools need to boost their bandwidth

Schools in the U.S. will need broadband speeds of 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and staff members by the 2014-15 school year in order to meet a growing demand for Web-based instruction and a skyrocketing number of student-owned Web devices, according to a new report by a trade group representing state education agencies.

Read more here.

History seems likely to repeat in US...

The U.S. Department of Education administered a history exam called the "National Assessment of Educational Progress", aka the Nation's Report Card, to a representative sample of public and private schools, testing 7,000 fourth-graders, 11,800 eighth-graders and 12,400 high-school seniors. The test results were then broken into "below basic," "basic," "proficient" and "advanced."

Only 20% of U.S. fourth-graders, 17% of eighth-graders 12% of 12th-graders who took the 2010 history exam were "proficient" or "advanced," unchanged since the test was last administered in 2006. Given that USA is a democratic society, it's critical that we prepare our children to vote from an informed perspective.

For more info see http://nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory_2010/

Great conference: Education Innovation Summit

My mind is still reeling from the presentations at this week's Education Innovation Summit at ASU's SkySong facility. The crowd was a healthy mix of VCs, Edupreneurs, industry players like Pearson, local practitioners, industry luminaries such as Joel Klein, Ron Huberman, and Adrian Fenty.

A common theme I heard was that politicians in US are afraid to make such changes because they fear the environment here isn't ready for such reforms, and if they propose changes, the public will react negatively, and they won't get reelected. So, the political environment needs to be more open to change.

While we keep hearing about budget cutbacks in US, we should note that the US still spends more per student than any other country in the world. So perhaps the Republicans aren't simply against education. The US has been increasing budgets and shrinking class sizes over the last decade, but these aspects alone have not affected student outcomes. That means we need to look beyond these factors.

ASU's president Michael Crow explained that times have changed and education needs to change. Under his mangement, ASU has improved student outcomes, increase enrollment numbers, graduate rates, and research projects despite a 60% drop in public funding. You can't do this by sticking with traditional models. Of course higher education isn't tightly controlled like K-12.

Joel Klein explained that we should not be surprised that a monopoly government institution with a unionized workforce resists change as this is what our current education system really is. However, we have to do something with urgency to prevent the "American dream from becoming the American memory". Here are Mr. Klein's top five ways to reform our system:

1. Move towards data-driven system. With data we can see what's working and what's not. Right now we don't have such details.
2. Move from textbook to digital. If history is any indication, this has greatly improved other industries.
3. Shift away from traditional school classroom model towards new models.
4. Embrace customized/individualized approaches to student education.
5. Rethink human capital. Are we mandating that teachers do bureaucratic tasks? How could they better spend their time?
   

These points resonated with with others said. Ron Huberman, a humble public servant that ran Chicago Public Schools with a $5 Billion annual budget expressed he could have done a much better job with $4 Billion if the system was free of the bureaucracy that holds in back. In the US, 90% of school board members are directly aligned with teachers unions. Can you say conflict-of-interest? But the problem is not union's alone. Ineffective management by superintendents and others are equally to blame.

Carlos Watson, journalist turned investment banker, compared Education's struggle to move beyond "incrementalism" with Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail commentary that "superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes."

As an edupreneur, it was great to attend some business sessions and be reminded of key points like maintaining focus, partnering wisely, remaining student-driven and to make sure we're solving real problems.

DFMv3 is live!

After 3 years of research and development, Dr. Flowers Test Prep and Logical Steps have launched the next iteration of our test prep platform helping students prepare for the MCAT online - DrFlowersMCAT.com

A big thanks for all of those that worked with us - advisers, students, teachers, parents, consultants, designers, programmers & project managers. Geeze, Lynn, wherever you are, thanks! ASU and SkySong, thanks for being the conduit for much of our premed research.

In this release, we've moved away from a strict individualization of student curriculum and more towards a guided journey to what you need to know. We now let students select which journey they'd like to pursue from Cram Session to Physics Booster. We've reworked thousands of concepts in math, chemistry, biology, physics, verbal reasoning and writing to be compatible mobile devices. We've moved everything to the cloud. We added a massive "question pool". We built support systems and trained resources to grade essays our client's essay according to AAMC's metrics.

The research told us so much. We gave cameras to premed students to photograph and tell their stories of preparing for the MCAT. From this we learned that students have busy and varied lives, and may study anywhere and anytime. We conducted surveys of premed students that revealed weaknesses in our competition. Second hand research and monitoring of what's working in mobile, social media, web 2.0, etc provided the reality check for the underlying platform.

We also learned that there's a lot of good content online. Yet finding it and tracking what you've learned vs what is covered on the MCAT is tedious. And fitting that into a busy schedule means the value of online test prep courses now is how to make efficient use of students' time.

It was amazing studying so many educational theories and trying to fit them together to deliver an effective & coherent experience. This meant we had to iteratively rework the application dozens of times and occasionally have heated debates about which theories should be applied when, where and how. As my friend Waseem once told me, "figuring out what to execute seems to take forever; execution is the easy part."

I learned that performance on standardized exams has more to do with applied knowledge than theoretical knowledge. I feel the same applies to building an elearning system. Now, let's see how we did applying our knowledge in DFMv3.

Top Socially Networked Cities in US

Men’s Health recently ranked US cities by how socially networked they are by considering analysis from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster, Reddit and Digg, and SimplyMap. Online social gurus Mashable feels the study is scientifically accurate.

Notice Denver's strong showing.

Most socially networked
1 Washington, DC A+
2 Atlanta, GA A+
3 Denver, CO A+
4 Minneapolis, MN A+
5 Seattle, WA A+
6 San Francisco, CA A
7 Orlando, FL A
8 Austin, TX A
9 Boston, MA A
10 Salt Lake City, UT A-

11 Cincinnati, OH A-
12 Raleigh, NC A-
13 Burlington, VT A-
14 Portland, OR B+
15 Madison, WI B+
16 Dallas, TX B+
17 Portland, ME B
18 Sacramento, CA B
19 Aurora, CO B
20 Boise, ID B
21 Charlotte, NC B
22 Wilmington, DE B
23 Oakland, CA B
24 St. Louis, MO B
25 Las Vegas, NV B
26 Columbus, OH B
27 San Diego, CA B
28 San Jose, CA B
29 St. Paul, MN B-
30 Plano, TX B-
31 Tampa, FL B-
32 Nashville, TN B-
33 Los Angeles, CA B-
34 Phoenix, AZ B-
35 Newark, NJ B-
36 Miami, FL B-
37 Norfolk, VA C+
38 Richmond, VA C+
39 Chicago, IL C+
40 Durham, NC C+
41 Colorado Springs, CO C+
42 Des Moines, IA C+
43 Jersey City, NJ C+
44 Indianapolis, IN C+
45 Milwaukee, WI C+
46 Fargo, ND C+
47 Columbia, SC C+
48 Houston, TX C+
49 Philadelphia, PA C+
50 Birmingham, AL C+
51 Cleveland, OH C+
52 Kansas City, MO C
53 New York, NY C
54 Greensboro, NC C
55 Reno, NV C
56 Manchester, NH C
57 Providence, RI C
58 Baltimore, MD C
59 Little Rock, AR C
60 Louisville, KY C
61 Sioux Falls, SD C-
62 Omaha, NE C-
63 Pittsburgh, PA C-
64 Baton Rouge, LA C-
65 Lexington, KY C
66 Wichita, KS C-
67 Anchorage, AK C-
68 Lincoln, NE C-
69 Cheyenne, WY D+
70 New Orleans, LA D+
71 Tucson, AZ D+
72 Buffalo, NY D+
73 Honolulu, HI D+
74 Santa Ana, CA D+
75 Charleston, WV D+
76 Oklahoma City, OK D+
77 Virginia Beach, VA D+
78 Winston-Salem, NC D+
79 Tulsa, OK D+
80 Albuquerque, NM D
81 Fort Worth, TX D
82 San Antonio, TX D
83 Jackson, MS D
84 Chesapeake, VA D
85 Jacksonville, FL D
86 Riverside, CA D
87 Memphis, TN D-
88 St. Petersburg, FL D-
89 Toledo, OH D-
90 Corpus Christi, TX D-

Least socially networked
91 Billings, MT D-
92 Fort Wayne, IN D-
93 Bridgeport, CT D-
94 Detroit, MI D-
95 Fresno, CA F
96 Bakersfield, CA F
97 Lubbock, TX F
98 Stockton, CA F
99 Laredo, TX F
100 El Paso, TX F

US Students not the best as science....

The National Center for Educational Statistics just released a report on the science knowledge of American students in grades 4, 8, and 12.



Visit the reports Execute Summary page.

Breast-feeding leads to better test scores

While it's widely known that breast-feeding has many health benefits, a new study has reinforced earlier research to indicate that breast-feeding can boost your test scores!

A study from Australia in the journal "Pediatrics" found that babies, especially boys, who were breast-fed for the first six months of life or longer, scored higher academically, including in standardized tests when they were older, than children who were not breast-fed.

The research found that breast-fed boys scored 30% better in writing and 20% better in math at 10 years old than their formula-fed peers.

Early Findings from Gates Foundation on How to Measure a Teacher's Impact on their Students Learning Outcomes

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are researching the widely disputed issue of how to measure a teacher's efficacy through their Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) initiative. The more effective the teacher, the better the student outcomes.

The foundation is trying to uncover "a more complete indicator of a teacher’s impact on student achievement" and how such an indicator relates to how teachers are recruited, developed, rewarded, and retained.

The initiative just published their initial findings.

In getting to the answer to the massive question concerning teacher efficacy, the MET initiative captured 13,000 classroom lessons on video, student vs teacher perceptions of these lessons, and consider standardized tests and their relationships to students and their teachers. Based on this raw data, here are some early findings from the researchers:

1. In every grade and subject we studied, a teacher's past success in raising student achievement on state tests (that is, his or her value-added) is one of the strongest predictors of his or her ability to do so again.

2. The teachers with the highest value-added scores on state tests also tend to help students understand math concepts or demonstrate reading comprehension through writing.

3. The average student knows effective teaching when he or she experiences it.

4. Valid feedback need not be limited to test scores alone. By combining different sources of data, it is possible to provide diagnostic, targeted feedback to teachers who are eager to improve.

Exciting stuff! Again, these are early findings so more findings are coming.

Thanks Bill & Melinda for your awesomeness.

New exams coming for math and language arts for third graders to high school

U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan Announces Education Grant Awards aimed at Improving Student Assessments. Two winning applications composed of 44 States and D.C. Win Grants to Fund Assessments Based on Common Core Standards.

The grant requests, totaling approximately $330 million, are part of the Race to the Top competition and will be awarded as follows.

Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, (PARCC), (PARCC) is a coalition of 26 states including AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, DC, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, LA, MA, MD, MS, ND, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OK, PA, RI, SC and TN.

The PARCC coalition will test students' ability to read complex text, complete research projects, excel at classroom speaking and listening assignments, and work with digital media. PARCC will also replace the one end-of-year high stakes accountability test with a series of assessments throughout the year that will be averaged into one score for accountability purposes, reducing the weight given to a single test administered on a single day, and providing valuable information to students and teachers throughout the year.

The SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium is a coalition of 31 states including AL, CO, CT, DE, GA, HI, IA, ID, KS, KY, ME, MI, MO, MT, NC, ND, NH, NJ, NM, NV, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, SD, UT, VT, WA, WI, and WV. The assessments will be ready for use by the 2014-15 school year.

The SMARTER coalition will test students using computer adaptive technology that will ask students tailored questions based on their previous answers. SMARTER will continue to use one test at the end of the year for accountability purposes, but will create a series of interim tests used to inform students, parents, and teachers about whether students are on track.

For both consortia, these periodic assessments could replace already existing tests, such as interim assessments that are in common use in many classrooms today.

For more, read ed.gov's article here.