Summer Learning Journey partners with Nanogirl

 The Manaiakalani Summer Learning Journey, covering the summer holidays of 2020-2021, was launched on December 14th with a full six week long programme of activities, including Christmas Day and New Year's Day. This has been designed to support the young people in Manaiakalani schools over the long break, where traditionally learners who are not exposed to stimulating opportunities experience the Summer Slide ie go backwards academically.

The theme for the current SLJ is 'Celebrating Summer' - something we were all desperate to do after the events of 2020. The activities are designed to be fun, as well as providing opportunities for learning along the way.

This year the design team chose to use a blog format for the activities, rather than the website approach used in previous years. This enabled us to design fun activities in strands, with a focus on STEAM, and to schedule new activities to appear throughout the day. This 'drip-feeding' is particularly engaging for young people with time on their hands and not a lot else planned for their day.

We were very fortunate to have Dr Michelle Dickinson – a.k.a. Nanogirl- and her team offer to partner with us and enrich the Science strand of the SLJ. Nanogirl designed science activities for our learners that kept in mind the limits of available resources on hand for children in our community. These have been enormously popular.

The activities created can be viewed here. 

Examples of the responses posted by children who engaged with the science activities can be viewed here and here and here.

We were delighted to see an article appear on the Stuff website on January 7th reporting the contribution Nanogirl and team are making to celebrating science and making it accessible to all young people.

The full article as it appeared on Stuff follows:

Dr Michelle Dickinson – or Nanogirl, as she’s perhaps better known – is a pro at getting children excited about science on a shoestring budget.

But when she launched Nanogirl's Lab during lockdown, beaming experiments into children’s homes, she realised that some of them didn’t even have string.

Or paper, or tape, or scissors.

Five hundred students from 12 schools across Tāmaki, Glen Innes and Panmure are spending their summer holidays taking part in a Nanogirl programme, doing a new experiment each week at home.

Knowing that many of them might struggle to access basic tools at home, Dickinson helped pack hundreds of boxes of stationery to make sure a lack of resources didn’t stop anyone taking part.

The programme is an expansion of a 50-student pilot run earlier in the year, which gave Dickinson insight into some barriers to STEM for kids in low socio-economic areas.

Eleven-year-old Finau Fileta from Auckland’s Pt England school is one of the students who took part.

She said she liked it because all the experiments used objects she already had at home, like kitchen roll tubes, serving spoons and bowls.

“You didn’t have to buy expensive stuff.”

She said she felt more confident with science after doing lots of experiments at home.

Check out some of Finau's blogposts sharing her science experiments here 

Manaiakalani, the cluster of schools involved in the programme, already have digital access sorted, so the students upload photos and videos of their experiments to their school blogs.

One student’s reluctance to blog during the pilot made Dickinson consider the messaging for the summer programme.

He didn’t want to post his video for an experiment about weight because he had used cans of spaghetti, and he was embarrassed about people seeing what he ate at home.

So the summer programme features a video at the beginning about how everything in your house is useful, “and it’s great that you’re resourceful”, Dickinson said.

Nanogirl is a social enterprise, and the summer programme for low-decile kids is funded through a ‘buy one, give one’ model. But that doesn’t mean it's the same as the subscriptions available off the shelf.

“We never do things that are generic for high-risk groups – it’s always customised.”

A lot of the time when they’re working with low-decile students, that means going offline because families don’t have internet access.

Not having scissors at home is one challenge, but the biggest barrier to kids getting into science is that they’ve made up their mind by about age 12 – and at the same time, primary school teachers are saying they feel ill-equipped to teach science.

There’s also a lot of intergenerational fear around maths and science, she said – when a parent tells their child they were bad at maths and hated it, it gives the child permission to not try.

To tackle that attitude, they include parent cheat sheets with every programme, so parents know what to ask their kids and can answer their questions.

It’s the feedback Dickinson gets from kids that makes it worthwhile, she said. “It's enough to make you cry.

“The kids come to us and say I never thought I could – but now I realise I can.” 

 

 

 

Blogging impact repeated for a second summer

For a second summer, 2016 -2017, Manaiakalani learners had the opportunity to blog supported by Dr Rachel Williams and her team from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre through the Summer Learning Journey (SLJ). While many children continued to blog 'freestyle' as they always have, 141 learners actively participated in the SLJ activities.  It is these learners that the latest publication reports on.


On receiving "An Evaluation of a Design-Based Approach to Holiday Blogging in New Zealand Primary and Intermediate Schools" authored by Dr Rachel Williams and Dr Rebecca Jesson this month we immediately looked to comapre the impact on literacy achievement outcomes with the previous summer.

Check out what Rachel says in her Executive Summary:

"At the end of the summer holiday, I evaluated the quality and accuracy of all of the posts provided by our students. I also explored the impact that participating in the Summer Learning Journey programme had on the writing and reading ability of our students. 

Writing: Figure 1

The results were really exciting! They suggest that participation in the programme led to significantly higher writing (e-asTTle) and significantly higher reading (PAT) scores in Term 1 2017 (after the summer programme) for participants than non-participants (see Writing: Figure 1, Reading: Figure 2). 

In fact, the participants were 31.65 asttle points (approximately 6-9 months of learning) and 5 full PAT points (approximately 6 months of learning) ahead of non-participants at the end of the summer. 

Reading: Figure 2

We believe that these differences are quite substantial and provide clear evidence of the significant, positive effect that sustained blogging over summer can have on the writing and reading ability of the students."

This insight into the impact of the Manaiakalani kaupapa is valuable. 

Our Manaiakalani Education Trust provides a free wifi network to our learners to support ubiquitous learning, and our summer bloggers have made full use of it. The SLJ would be challenging to support if the kaupapa of visibility was not genuinely supported, both for the learners and adults interacting with them. The design of the programme empowered our learners and overtly encouraged connectedness. We look forward to exploring the report in depth in Term 3 when our Kahui Ako theme is "Connected Learners Share".


There was a focus in this report on non-academic skills and 21st century competencies, including the development of individual prosocial skills (eg. communication, collaboration, empathy, support, etc).

"The presence of the commenting feature also appeared to drive student engagement and encourage participants to engage positively with the ‘expert’ commenting staff, with family/whanau and with students from New Zealand and overseas. There were numerous instances of positive, prosocial interactions between students in the commenting threads. 

There were also instances in which the commenting staff forged deep and meaningful relationships with the student participants. It was clear that students trusted the expert commenters and were prepared to share personal details of their lives with them. The ‘mutually reinforcing nature’ of this interaction ensured that the students continued to participate and the commenters continued to engage positively with them, driving further, deeper and more meaningful participation from both parties. 

 The research team strongly believes in the capacity of this digital programme to facilitate the development of genuine personal relationships between individuals separated by geographical distance. 

They also believe that individual, social and mental/emotional well-being may be enhanced through sustained participation in this programme, particularly for students who may be without much social interaction over the holiday and are at-risk of feeling lonely, alone or under supported. They would like to further explore the impact of participation on student well-being in future iterations of the programme."

Finally, I want to acknowledge Manaiakalani teachers and principals who encourage and actively support their learners as they head into the holidays. The report notes that

"Rates of engagement were highest amongst ... students attending schools with strong role modelling and support from teaching staff. Staff who valued the programme clearly communicated this to students who, in turn, were more likely to participate."

Data suggests blogging impacts literacy achievement

Teachers are investing time, and in some cases their own vacations, in supporting learners who blog in the holidays and want to know if it impacts academic achievement. Feedback from colleagues about my previous posts, sharing evidence of the significant impact blogging outside of school can have on learners literacy achievement, indicates that there is wide interest in research being conducted in this area. 

The programme being conducted in Manaiakalani schools to address the Summer Learning Effect (where students’ learning is adversely impacted over the summer period, in particular, because many school-like learning activities desist during this time) is being carried out by the Woolf Fisher Research Centre and led by Dr Rachel Williams.

Rachel has recently published an update on the pilot, carried out over the summer of 2015 -2016, tracking the original cohort of participants throughout the 2016 academic year. The difference in achievement over time on writing test scores is shown in this graph. The blue line is the participants, red line is matched baseline control group who did not participate.

Rachel comments:

"The data suggests to me that participation in the Summer Learning Journey has the potential to truly accelerate achievement in writing for our students. The SLJ participants continued to improve their writing over the course of the 2016 school year and ended with an average e-asTTle score of 74.5 (up from 63.47). Our matched control group also realised a significant improvement in writing over the course of the year (up from -119 to 12.88). Interestingly, however, despite the great gains that the matched control group made they could not catch up with our participants and ended the year approximately 60 points below the SLJ participants. This is a significant difference and represents a genuine 'gap' in achievement for the two groups. I find this quite startling as they both ended the 2015 at the same level. The matched control students then dropped over summer and were not able to re-gain the learning that they had lost over summer while our participants steamed ahead."

A further paper published by Rachel and Dr Rebecca Jesson investigates the achievement trajectory of these matched cohorts of young people over five time points. By using data available from the previous year, they show the two cohorts of learners following a parallel pathway from the end of year high in 2014, dropping back over the summer holidays to a low point at the beginning of 2015, then encouraging acceleration during the school year towards a high point at the end of 2015.

And then their pathways separate.
Those who participated in the first Summer Learning Journey, blogging over the summer holidays, settle into a positive incline pattern.  Those who didn’t, not only continued the ‘yo-yo’ sliding effect, but also failed to catch up during the school year.

Rebecca concludes:

While this is a small study to gauge the effectiveness of blogging as a suitable vehicle for summer programmes, the results are promising.  Of particular note are the sizes of the differences between the writing scores of participants and both estimates of the control condition: students’ own scores in previous summers and the scores of matched control group. This provides initial evidence that participating in a blogging programme over the summer holiday period can attenuate the drop in literacy scores realised by students attending schools in low SES communities. Given the high rates of SLE previously reported by these schools, and the negative effect that low literacy ability has on students, these results offer an important building block for tackling the educational challenge facing these schools, who seek educational solutions to ongoing challenges using digital learning initiatives.

I would like to acknowledge colleagues (eg Helen King, Sandy Lagitupu, Andrea Tele’a, Jenny She and Priscilla Lavakula) who have regularly supported and encouraged learners by commenting on their blogs over the summer holidays for almost a decade now.

And more recently teachers (eg Robyn Anderson, Kiri Kirkpatrick, Karen Belt and Jackie Buchanan) who have designed and monitored holiday blogging programmes for their own classes.

We had a hunch this was making a difference!

Another Summer of Learning

Following on from the success of the pilot one year ago, the Summer Learning Journey is underway again for Manaiakalani school children while schools are closed and everyone is on holiday. Rachel Williams has expanded the programme and her team, and they are supporting our children to continue learning during the Summer holiday period. 

The Summer Learning Journey utilises the embedded blogging programme existing in Manaiakalani schools and provides engaging activities for our young people to interact with throughout the Summer. Where this differs from other programmes which may provide stimulating holiday learning is the ongoing community building designed into the programme.  Every post shared is commented on by at least one adult and the children are encouraged to connect with each other and interact with the posts their peers share.

We look forward to the report that will emerge after school resumes as the researchers evaluate the impact on academic outcomes for the participants.

In the meantime we invite anyone with five minutes on their hands in the next couple of weeks to go to this URL : twitter.com/clusternz and follow the links to one of the 400 children who are currently participating in the programme. Become an active participant in their learning journey by leaving a comment on their blog.

Here are a sample, randomly selected from the Twitter feed:

Harrison	Riiana	Alex	Stanley	Jahzara

One thing that drew my attention was the number of boys participating (writing). Food for thought for teachers and CoLs beginning the year with a goal of "doing something about boys writing..."

We note that the Education Review has also published an article recognising this initiative.

Blogging Supports Writing Outcomes

Blogging has played an important role in the Manaiakalani pedagogy for over ten years now and a generation of young people have been through our schools knowing that sharing your learning publicly is an important part of the learning process.

Many of our learners have chosen to continuing sharing on their blogs during the school holidays and I have written posts like this sharing anecdotal observations about their holiday writing. Writing is a social activity for many people and our learners are encouraged when someone interacts with their post and they see on their feeds that people have viewed their blog.

Over the 2015/16 summer holidays the Woolf Fisher research team set up a project to encourage more of our young people to blog during the long summer break to observe whether this was in fact a valid way to arrest the frustrating 'summer drop-off' that so many of our priority learners experience. This was led by Rachel Williamson. Rachel constructed the Summer Learning Journey using the Manaiakalani pedagogy and the young people had multiple opportunities to Learn, Create and Share as they explored the world virtually.

A full description of the programme and the outcomes can be seen on this page on the Manaiakalani website.

Two observations I have noted from the research report:

The first one is a highly valued outcome in our Manaiakalani schools. The learners who participated in the blogging programme did not experience a significant drop off in their test scores as measured by the e-asttle writing test. The blue line on the graph shows the summer bloggers test scores over the course of a calendar year. The red line shows a matched sample of learners who did not blog over the summer (matching gender, ethnicity and achievement level) and displays the trend we are familiar with - writing outcomes rise during the school year and take a deep slide over the summer break.

The second observation is an outcome that is valued by some people who question us about 'WHY' we 'LET' our young people share their learning prolifically online. These adults express concern that the writing might not be perfect, and imperfect surface features may even reflect negatively on the child, the family or the school.

Glass is half full people!!

Rachel analysed the surface features of the writing shared online during the summer break - presumably completed with little direct adult support - and came up with surprising results that should reassure people whose inclination is to micro-manage children's published writing.

Accuracy was measured using four indicators: Percentage of words spelled correctly, percentage of word sequences that were correct, percentage of punctuation marks that were used correctly, and percentage of sentences that were complete and correct.
In each case the percentage score was calculated as: Number of correct examples/total number.

Spelling:
On average, 96.7% of the words in each post were spelled correctly

Correct Word Sequences:
 On average, 88.2% of word sequences in each post were correct

Punctuation:
On average, 77.1 % of punctuation marks in each post were used correctly.

Sentences:
On average, 73.6% of sentences in each post were complete and accurate.

We highly recommend you read the report yourself.