Group items tagged

"Most of us recognize that more of our students need to be doing deeper, more complex thinking work more often. But if we want students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers and effective communicators and collaborators, that cognitively-complex work is usually more divergent rather than convergent. It is more amorphous and fuzzy and personal. It is often multi-stage and multimodal. It is not easily reduced to a number or rating or score. However, this does NOT mean that kind of work is incapable of being assessed. "

What I'm not sure people realise is that at some point reliability and validity can become mutually exclusive. The author describes a situation where reliability has triumphed over validity, which is very wrong, as any psychometrician can tell you.

Slavin, Hurley, and Chamberlain (2003) have shown that activating students as learning resources for one another produces some of the largest gains seen in any educational interventions, provided two conditions are met. The first is that the learning environment must provide for group goals, so that students are working as a group instead of just working in a group. The second condition is individual accountability, so that each student is responsible for his or her contribution to the group, so there can be no "passengers."

'In the analysis presented in this article, it has been argued that the problem lies less with the quality of feedback than with the fundamental assumption that telling, even detailed telling, is an effective approach to complex learning. Because feedback is commonly expressed in verbal form, learning from being told is flawed as a general strategy because the conditions for the statements to make intimate connection with the student work (with a view to future work) are frequently not satisfied. Assuming that low student dispositions to learn is not the reason for their failure to capitalise on learning opportunities, the issue is how to create a different learning environment that works effectively. A proposed alternative to the usual sequence of [task - response - appraisal - feedback] is to make intensive use of purposeful peer assessment as a pedagogical strategy, not just for assessment but for substantive aspects of the course as well. Students need to grasp three groups of concepts in particular - response genre, quality, and criteria - if interactions between teachers and learners are to be formatively effective, and capability in complex appraisal is to be developed. These assessment concepts must be understood not as abstractions but as core concepts that are internalised, operationalised and applied to concrete productions. Unless this occurs, the key assessment concepts are likely to remain submerged and invisible.'

"In general, there are more and more systematic studies of behavior and performance that are minimally disruptive to the informal activity but also allow for documentation of what kinds of participation occur and capacities get put to use in a learning environment, and also what types of choices follow from experience. Ethnography can be used to demonstrate how a type of learning environment or system works, what kinds of outcomes follow from participation. "