I had an interesting conversation with Nicky Burgoyne and she gave me some things to research regarding:
Complexity theory
Idea of emergence
James Gleick – Chaos Theory
Brent Davis – Blog on complexity theory
I think this is going to be good.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Assessing Learning
What do you assess in order to determine whether or not a student is learning?
What do you assess in order to determine if a student's rate of learning is increasing or decreasing (changing)?
The first question is a fundamental question asked by educational evaluators. It leads to simple metrics, generally speaking, that indicate student performance against a standard or group of standards.While this is an important measurement of student comprehension, it does not provide any information about whether or not the student is learning to learn. If students do not learn to learn, then their capacity to progress through higher levels of education and their desire to become life-long learners will be impacted.
The second question is intriguing because it assumes a second order assessment of student performance. In terms of metaphor, the first question is a first-order measure akin to position, and the second question is a second-order measure akin to velocity. What is the rate of change in a student's capacity to learn? How does this "velocity" change in learning capacity manifest itself in class? What can we look at to determine, even intuitively, that there is a change in "learning velocity"? Whatever the answer is, it will be fundamentally different from the considerations in the first question.
I propose that there is a correlation between a student's interest and engagement in course content and his or her "learning velocity". This is my own assumption. Taking this as a true assumption, then one can assess changes in a student's interest and engagement and gain insight into the ways in which a student's learning capacity is evolving. I am not sure what or how strong the correlation between these two concepts are. I only make this assumption based upon informal observations from my own experience and the experience of others. I intend to strengthen the support for this assumption as I conduct a pilot study research project this semester.
In my research project, I am going to video tape and analyze my courses that I teach, looking for indicators of interest and engagement in the course. I will cross reference this data against course grades and informal student ratings of their own performance. I hypothesize that correlations will begin to take shape as more of this data comes available. We will see what happens.
What do you assess in order to determine if a student's rate of learning is increasing or decreasing (changing)?
The first question is a fundamental question asked by educational evaluators. It leads to simple metrics, generally speaking, that indicate student performance against a standard or group of standards.While this is an important measurement of student comprehension, it does not provide any information about whether or not the student is learning to learn. If students do not learn to learn, then their capacity to progress through higher levels of education and their desire to become life-long learners will be impacted.
The second question is intriguing because it assumes a second order assessment of student performance. In terms of metaphor, the first question is a first-order measure akin to position, and the second question is a second-order measure akin to velocity. What is the rate of change in a student's capacity to learn? How does this "velocity" change in learning capacity manifest itself in class? What can we look at to determine, even intuitively, that there is a change in "learning velocity"? Whatever the answer is, it will be fundamentally different from the considerations in the first question.
I propose that there is a correlation between a student's interest and engagement in course content and his or her "learning velocity". This is my own assumption. Taking this as a true assumption, then one can assess changes in a student's interest and engagement and gain insight into the ways in which a student's learning capacity is evolving. I am not sure what or how strong the correlation between these two concepts are. I only make this assumption based upon informal observations from my own experience and the experience of others. I intend to strengthen the support for this assumption as I conduct a pilot study research project this semester.
In my research project, I am going to video tape and analyze my courses that I teach, looking for indicators of interest and engagement in the course. I will cross reference this data against course grades and informal student ratings of their own performance. I hypothesize that correlations will begin to take shape as more of this data comes available. We will see what happens.
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