William Tate Quotations

The ultimate goal was to raise the cognitive demand in the curriculum for urban school kids, which is important for future opportunities. Generally, test scores in math and science fall drastically between seventh and 10th grade. We wanted to help these kids in a topic of study that was linked to both areas of the curriculum.

A dog can search quicker and more efficiently than a human can. They can do a room very quickly.

As unusual as it sounds, it is being investigated as a criminal incident.

We wanted to test whether quizzes encouraged greater memory retention over review. We found that the groups had no statistical differences, meaning that quizzes were not a harmful activity. That's an interesting finding for this pilot study. It suggests that the idea of giving quizzes regularly is worth further exploration and that quizzes might be better used as an effective teaching tool.

The students averaged about eight days absent each. That's a lot and it's one of the main challenges of summer school programming. If the kids don't come, they can't learn. However, for the kids that were there, I think it worked out great. They learned a lot.

Data analysis serves as a process that underpins scientific inquiry. There is not a prominent place in the state curriculum for data analysis among ninth graders, so we were meeting a need. Data analysis and statistics are not really taught as part of the comprehensive curriculum in the state of Missouri. We wanted to give the kids a chance to work with statistics. Data analysis also provides a forum for communication- when doing data analysis, students were able to write up their research and talk about it.