Group items tagged

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced the launch of edX, a transformational partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners. EdX will build on both universities' experience in offering online instructional content.

Interesting use of a data set.

Admittedly, peer grading is not the same as grading by an expert who really knows the material. But it is better than nothing! In fact, done conscientiously, using a well designed rubric, it's a lot better than you might think, particularly when the results are compared with grading by an instructor who has a large number of assignments to grade in a limited amount of time! In some studies, students were observed to learn better when they were asked to actively assess their answers and those of their peers according to the instructor's rubric. In particular, students who self-graded using a rubric outperformed students who were graded by instructors.

Tim Brown's article on Design Thinking in the Harvard Business Review. What does the subject of "design thinking" have to contribute to the field of education? A topic of considerable interest to educators.

"curiosity is both intrinsic to children's development and unfolds through social interactions. Thus, it should be cultivated in schools, even though it is often almost completely absent from classrooms."

Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining educational innovation and technology, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. One of the most poignant summaries of the market for innovative technology solutions in education is that it is forever in its infancy.

In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems. Then he discovered that his success as a teacher "was a complete illusion, a house of cards." THIS IS A MUST READ ARTICLE!

I've honestly never considered this before. Whether you agree with the chart's conclusions is obviously open for discussion, but the chart left me thinking about specifically WHY we assign HW and what we should be doing about it.

Given technology, can homework be used as a means to (a) differentiate assessment, (b) have students demonstrate understanding via a different modality, (c) scaffold learning to further enhance the classroom experience. For a while, Howard Gardner experimented at Harvard with assigning his lectures as homework. Students watched videos and then came to class prepared to engage in discussion. Could a similar approach be taken at the high school level?

Chris: I think this flow chart is very interesting and worthy of considerable discussion. I like it. I would tweak it a bit. For example, I think you could (and should) give application homework that is formative as well as summative. I think all types of homework that fit with all six levels of Bloom's taxonomy could be given both formatively and summatively. The only homework that should be "graded" is homework that leads to end-of-learning assessment. If the homework is given in the process of learning, then it should not be graded but should receive feedback, both from the instructor as well as from the student(s).

In addition to those shown on this page, you can find topical videos on these other pages of the Bok Center site:

A great source for inquiry based instruction and other teaching techniques, ideas, and conversation around creative instruction to improve student learning.