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Gary Brown

Learning to Hate Learning Objectives - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 4 views

  • Brottman's essay is a dangerous display of educational malpractice. Those who argue that principles of good assessment intrude upon teaching and learning disclose the painful fact that many educators are not adequately prepared to teach.
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    Read it and weep.
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    I think this reader comment captures it: Right--it's not about the students learning anything--it's about YOUR learning, and you let them come along for the ride. How could you fit that into learning objectives? Please. This is why people think all of us are navel-gazing, self-indulgent mopes.
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    Doesn't it depend on the nature of the learning objectives? I mean, you could list a set of facts and skills levels students should have attained. You could specify a number of discrete facts and skills to be attained within certain areas of the course curriculum. Or, you could do something more creative such as measure the number of claims with evidence in student writing that is within the subject matter of the course to demonstrate a level of articulation.

    At CTLT, I never did become fully settled on certain subject types though, like mathematics and natural sciences. Depending on the subject matter, specific facts like natural laws and methods must be discretely learned and learned perfectly. And, indeed in some subjects, there is such a thing as perfect understanding where anything even slightly less is failure to learn. This is rigid, yes.. But I do not see the alternative in some subjects and teachers of those subjects certainly don't either. I do think that sometimes there can be more flexibility in the order of learning of discrete fundamentals. Learning out of order often convinced me of the importance of things skipped, causing me to go back and study more comprehensively on my own, in my own time, and according to my own interest.
Gary Brown

News: Assessing the Assessments - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

  • The validity of a measure is based on evidence regarding the inferences and assumptions that are intended to be made and the uses to which the measure will be put. Showing that the three tests in question are comparable does not support Shulenburger's assertion regarding the value-added measure as a valid indicator of institutional effectiveness. The claim that public university groups have previously judged the value-added measure as appropriate does not tell us anything about the evidence upon which this judgment was based nor the conditions under which the judgment was reached. As someone familiar with the process, I would assert that there was no compelling evidence presented that these instruments and the value-added measure were validated for making this assertion (no such evidence was available at the time), which is the intended use in the VSA.
  • (however much the sellers of these tests tell you that those samples are "representative"), they provide an easy way out for academic administrators who want to avoid the time-and-effort consuming but incredibly valuable task of developing detailed major program learning outcome statements (even the specialized accrediting bodies don't get down to the level of discrete, operational statements that guide faculty toward appropriate assessment design)
  • f somebody really cared about "value added," they could look at each student's first essay in this course, and compare it with that same student's last essay in this course. This person could then evaluate each individual student's increased mastery of the subject-matter in the course (there's a lot) and also the increased writing skill, if any.
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  • These skills cannot be separated out from student success in learning sophisticated subject-matter, because understanding anthropology, or history of science, or organic chemistry, or Japanese painting, is not a matter of absorbing individual facts, but learning facts and ways of thinking about them in a seamless, synthetic way. No assessment scheme that neglects these obvious facts about higher education is going to do anybody any good, and we'll be wasting valuable intellectual and financial resources if we try to design one.
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    ongoing discussion of these tools. Note Longanecker's comment and ask me why.
Gary Brown

WSU Today Online - Current Article List - 1 views

  • National and state agencies have renewed accreditation for WSU's College of Education, which earned praise as “a standout institution.” The ratings came after voluntary reviews by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and Washington State’s Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB). Both accreditation teams, which work cooperatively, visited WSU last spring.
  • accredited institutions must: * Carefully assess this knowledge and skill to determine that candidates may graduate. * Have partnerships with schools that enable candidates to develop the skills necessary to help students learn. * Prepare candidates to understand and work with diverse student populations. * Have faculty who model effective teaching practices. * Have the resources, including information technology resources, necessary to prepare candidates to meet new standards.
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    Note the criteria as it pertains to NWCC&U
Gary Brown

News: Fans and Fears of 'Lecture Capture' - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • “Well-attended lectures were well-watched; poorly attended lectures were not watched,” Stringer said, pointing to research she had conducted at Stanford. "If you’re bad, you’re bad. If you’re bad online, you’re bad in lectures, students don’t come.”
  • Our students at Berkeley tell us that this is supplemental material, and it doesn’t affect their decision to attend class,” said Mara Hancock, director for educational technologies at the University of California at Berkeley
  • The faculty’s general unwillingness to work with lecture capture technology prompted Purdue to enlist the educational technology firm Echo360 to formulate a work-around solution that would require minimal cooperation from professors.
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    I have nothing to add to this.
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