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Nils Peterson

National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment - 1 views

learningoutcomesassessment.org/occasionalpapertwo.htm

NILOA Trudy Banta

shared by Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Of the various ways to assess student learning outcomes, many faculty members prefer what are called “authentic” approaches that document student performance during or at the end of a course or program of study.  Authentic assessments typically ask students to generate rather than choose a response to demonstrate what they know and can do.  In their best form, such assessments are flexible and closely aligned with teaching and learning processes, and represent some of students more meaningful educational experiences.  In this paper, assessment experts Trudy Banta, Merilee Griffin, Theresa Flateby, and Susan Kahn describe the development of several promising authentic assessment approaches. 
  • Educators and policy makers in postsecondary education are interested in assessment processes that improve student learning, and at the same time provide comparable data for the purpose of demonstrating accountability.
  • First, ePortfolios provide an in-depth, long-term view of student achievement on a range of skills and abilities instead of a quick snapshot based on a single sample of learning outcomes. Second, a system of rubrics used to evaluate student writing and depth of learning has been combined with faculty learning and team assessments, and is now being used at multiple institutions. Third, online assessment communities link local faculty members in collaborative work to develop shared norms and teaching capacity, and then link local communities with each other in a growing system of assessment.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10
       
      hey, does this sound familiar? i'm guessing the portfolios are not anywhere on the Internet, but we're otherwise in good company
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Three Promising Alternatives for Assessing College Students' Knowledge and Skills
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10
       
      I'm not sure they are 'alternatives' so much as 3 elements we would combine into a single strategy
Theron DesRosier

The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy - The Conversation - H... - 3 views

blogs.hbr.org/...is_to_info_as_info_is_not.html

datainformationknowledgewisdom learning

shared by Theron DesRosier on 05 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 05 Feb 10
     
    "But knowledge is not a result merely of filtering or algorithms. It results from a far more complex process that is social, goal-driven, contextual, and culturally-bound. We get to knowledge - especially "actionable" knowledge - by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles."
  • Theron DesRosier on 05 Feb 10
     
    An interresting take on assumptions about knowledge.
  • Kimberly Green on 08 Feb 10
     
    Really interesting quote, Theron. I wonder if it's a chunk that could be used as a prompt for a faculty discussion, to open up the dialogue about what is learning. And then how does a program design a curriculum and syllabi / assignments to teach and assess, towards a much broader understanding of knowledge (and skills)?
Matthew Tedder

Turning Work into Play with Online Games | h+ Magazine - 0 views

hplusmagazine.com/...turning-work-play-online-games

education

shared by Matthew Tedder on 16 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Matthew Tedder on 16 Jan 10
     
    This is about games to improve employee work.
  • Matthew Tedder on 16 Jan 10
     
    This is about using online games to engage employees in work. This is very much the core of what I was talking about, except for education. For those more knowledgeable about software design: my thoughts so far were on using Google's V8 Javascript engine and a 3D engine, such as Ogre3D, perhaps wrapped by QT or SDL. The worlds would be managed on the server but code for each object type shipped to the clients and run, sychronized there. Everything would be an "object"--even a world itself (a container object). Each object would comprise of four code modules plus its media files (3D models, sounds, etc.): Affector -- this receives sensory input then filters and translates that to the object's internal properties. Intrinsor -- this is the object's behavioral programming. For example, it can be the functions of an espresso machine object or the AI and/or user-interface connector of an animate object, etc. Mitigator -- this is the code that controls the internal environment of any objects contained within this object. It mitigates the effects of contained objects to the affects of others. For example, a world object, a boat, a house, or a bag. The physics, weather, and such will depend on what they are contained within. The mitigator may also initiate effects to contained objects. Effector -- this provides the API for action attempts to the Intrinsor. It then filters and translates the action attempts to the objects actual action attempts that are read by this object's containor. (Yes--I mispelled some words above intentionally) This design provides a framework for a persistent world of decent individual performance. The V8 engine compiles to fast machine code (and caches). Only very minimal data need be communicated over the network. Objects can run in parallel precisely the same, so if a client fails the system continues. Updates of virtually any kind can be made on-the-fly without stopping the game. New object types will be relatively easy to b
Gary Brown

Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching - Curriculum - The Chroni... - 4 views

chronicle.com/...63718

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • "Without an unrelenting focus on quality—on defining and measuring and ensuring the learning outcomes of students—any effort to increase college-completion rates would be a hollow effort indeed."
  • If colleges are going to provide high-quality educations to millions of additional students, they said, the institutions will need to develop measures of student learning than can assure parents, employers, and taxpayers that no one's time and money are being wasted.
  • "Effective assessment is critical to ensure that our colleges and universities are delivering the kinds of educational experiences that we believe we actually provide for students," said Ronald A. Crutcher, president of Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, during the opening plenary. "That data is also vital to addressing the skepticism that society has about the value of a liberal education."
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But many speakers insisted that colleges should go ahead and take drastic steps to improve the quality of their instruction, without using rigid faculty-incentive structures or the fiscal crisis as excuses for inaction.
  • Handing out "teacher of the year" awards may not do much for a college
  • W.E. Deming argued, quality has to be designed into the entire system and supported by top management (that is, every decision made by CEOs and Presidents, and support systems as well as operations) rather than being made the responsibility solely of those delivering 'at the coal face'.
  • I see as a certain cluelessness among those who think one can create substantial change based on volunteerism
  • Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods.
  • The approach that makes sense to me is to engage faculty members at the departmental level in a discussion of the future and the implications of the future for their field, their college, their students, and themselves. You are invited to join an ongoing discussion of this issue at http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/forum/topics/addressing-the-problem-of
  • Putting pressure on professors to improve teaching will not result in better education. The primary reason is that they do not know how to make real improvements. The problem is that in many fields of education there is either not enough research, or they do not have good ways of evaluationg the results of their teaching.
  • Then there needs to be a research based assessment that can be used by individual professors, NOT by the administration.
  • Humanities educatiors either have to learn enough statistics and cognitive science so they can make valid scientific comparisons of different strategies, or they have to work with cognitive scientists and statisticians
  • good teaching takes time
  • On the measurement side, about half of the assessments constructed by faculty fail to meet reasonable minimum standards for validity. (Interestingly, these failures leave the door open to a class action lawsuit. Physicians are successfully sued for failing to apply scientific findings correctly; commerce is replete with lawsuits based on measurement errors.)
  • The elephant in the corner of the room --still-- is that we refuse to measure learning outcomes and impact, especially proficiencies generalized to one's life outside the classroom.
  • until universities stop playing games to make themselves look better because they want to maintain their comfortable positions and actually look at what they can do to improve nothing is going to change.
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jan 10
     
    our work, our friends (Ken and Jim), and more context that shapes our strategy.
  • Matthew Tedder on 26 Jan 10
     
    How about using examples of highly motivational lecture and teaching techniques like the Richard Dawkins video I presented on this forum, recently. Even if teacher's do not consciously try to adopt good working techniques, there is at least a strong subconscious human tendency to mimic behaviors. I think that if teachers see more effective techniques, they will automatically begin to adopt adopt them.
Gary Brown

Changing Higher Education: An Interview with Lloyd Armstrong, USC « Higher Ed... - 1 views

highereducationmanagement.wordpress.com/...rview-with-lloyd-armstrong-usc

outcomes change

shared by Gary Brown on 09 Mar 10 - Cached
  • There are obviously real concerns that outcomes measures are measuring the right outcomes.   However, those expressing those concerns seldom are ready to jump in to try to figure out how to measure what they think is important – a position that is ultimately untenable
  • Learning outcomes risk changing the rules of the game by actually looking at learning itself, rather than using the surrogates of wealth, history, and research.  Since we have considerable data that show that these surrogates do not correlate particularly well with learning outcomes (see e.g. Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges),
  •  As Bok pointed out, to improve learning outcomes, the faculty would have to learn to teach in new ways.  Most academic leaders would prefer not to get into a game that would require that kind of change!  In fact, at this point I believe that the real, critical, disruptive innovation in higher education is transparent learning outcomes measures.  Such measures are likely to enable the innovations discussed in the first question to transform from sustaining to disruptive.
  • Gary Brown on 09 Mar 10
     
    another executive source, but notes the critical underpinning reason we NEED to do our work.
Nils Peterson

Walmart's Growth: An Awesome Visualization Of The Retailer's Rapid Expansion (INFOGRAPHIC) - 3 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...growth-an-awesom_n_529037.html

walmart visualization

shared by Nils Peterson on 08 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Beginning with the first Walmart store, which opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, this incredible visualization -- put together by FlowingData, a data visualization website run by UCLA statistics doctoral student Nathan Yau -- traces the expansion of the seemingly omnipresent discount chain across America
  • Nils Peterson on 08 Apr 10
     
    an interesting visualization in its own right, perhaps another tool set we might use at "FlowingData"
Nils Peterson

Tech's 29 Most Powerful Colleges - Page 1 - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...echs-29-most-powerful-colleges

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 May 10 - Cached
  • which schools really represent a pipeline to the top jobs? To find out, The Daily Beast scoured the biographies of hundreds of key technology executives from the nation’s biggest companies and some of its hottest startups, too. Our goal was to identify which colleges, compared student-for-student (undergraduate enrollment data courtesy of the National Center for Education Statistics), have turned out the most undergraduates destined for high-tech greatness.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 10
       
      Post-hoc analysis. Who holds the job, where did they graduate?
  • some schools excel at inculcating a crucial skill for techland: dealing with uncertainty and making the right decision without taking too long to size up a situation quickly.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 10
       
      Rubric dimensions.
  • I want someone who’s quick and decisive and a good leader, like a graduate of' and then they'll name certain schools.” Champion says part of that stems from the competitive environment of the top schools, which vet their admittees so heavily. "Is the competition the only the reason they’re successful? No,” Champion says. “But is it the beginning of training in a process that helps them be successful? Yes.”
Nils Peterson

Edge: THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY By Don Tapscott - 1 views

www.edge.org/...tapscott09_index.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 Jun 09 - Cached
  • For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 28 Aug 09
       
      Hard to read because of the double negatives. He's saying there is lots of evidence of a new model in operation
  • It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 28 Aug 09
       
      and it has implications for assessment and vehicles for assessment (portfolios)
  • Theron DesRosier on 05 Jun 09
     
    "In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either. "
Nils Peterson

Stimulus Spot Check | ProPublica: Stimulus Chase - 0 views

projects.propublica.org/spotcheck

shared by Nils Peterson on 21 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Below is a random sample we assembled of 520 of the 5,800 stimulus-funded transportation projects nationwide, showing how much money to date the federal Department of Transportation has disbursed to individual transportation projects nationwide. We're asking you to help us figure out the status of these projects — whether the project has been started or has been completed, what company got the contract, and how many jobs the company says it retained or created for its stimulus contract.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 21 Jul 09
       
      A different approach to harvesting. In this case, the audit is being commissioned by a 3rd party, the auditors are the community. The assessment criteria are simple (another assessment should come from state & local inspectors). The interesting data are the presence or status of the projects compared to what is claimed by the funder.
Joshua Yeidel

Visual Studio Magazine Online | Data Driver: Bring On The Open Source Alternatives To S... - 0 views

visualstudiomagazine.com/...weblog.aspx

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 11 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 11 Apr 09
     
    Some alternatives focus on web content management (Nuxeo), others on collaborative application frameworks (MindTouch).
  • Joshua Yeidel on 11 Apr 09
     
    As Alfresco Software Inc. continues to emerge as the leading provider of open source software enterprise collaboration software, rival open source vendors are stepping up their efforts.
Gary Brown

Education Secretary Praises Teaching but Criticizes Teaching Programs - Government - Th... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...48779

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 09 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Colleges of education, the secretary will say, focus too much on theory and too little on developing knowledge in core areas and on clinical training. The colleges pay insufficient attention to student learning, and fail to train students to use data to improve their instruction.
  • Gary Brown on 09 Oct 09
     
    more fodder for Rain King principles and A of A.
Gary Brown

It's the Learning, Stupid - Lumina Foundation: Helping People Achieve Their Potential - 3 views

www.luminafoundation.org/...2009-10-14.html

learning accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 15 Oct 09 - Cached
  • My thesis is this. We live in a world where much is changing, quickly. Economic crises, technology, ideological division, and a host of other factors have all had a profound influence on who we are and what we do in higher education. But when all is said and done, it is imperative that we not lose sight of what matters most. To paraphrase the oft-used maxim of the famous political consultant James Carville, it's the learning, stupid.
  • We believe that, to significantly increase higher education attainment rates, three intermediate outcomes must first occur: Higher education must use proven strategies to move students to completion. Quality data must be used to improve student performance and inform policy and decision-making at all levels. The outcomes of student learning must be defined, measured, and aligned with workforce needs. To achieve these outcomes (and thus improve success rates), Lumina has decided to pursue several specific strategies. I'll cite just a few of these many different strategies: We will advocate for the redesign, rebranding and improvement of developmental education. We will explore the development of alternative pathways to degrees and credentials. We will push for smoother systems of transferring credit so students can move more easily between institutions, including from community colleges to bachelor's degree programs.
  • "Lumina defines high-quality credentials as degrees and certificates that have well-defined and transparent learning outcomes which provide clear pathways to further education and employment."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And—as Footnote One softly but incessantly reminds us—quality, at its core, must be a measure of what students actually learn and are able to do with the knowledge and skills they gain.
  • and yet we seem reluctant or unable to discuss higher education's true purpose: equipping students for success in life.
  • Research has already shown that higher education institutions vary significantly in the value they add to students in terms of what those students actually learn. Various tools and instruments tell us that some institutions add much more value than others, even when looking at students with similar backgrounds and abilities.
  • The idea with tuning is to take various programs within a specific discipline—chemistry, history, psychology, whatever—and agree on a set of learning outcomes that a degree in the field represents. The goal is not for the various programs to teach exactly the same thing in the same way or even for all of the programs to offer the same courses. Rather, programs can employ whatever techniques they prefer, so long as their students can demonstrate mastery of an agreed-upon body of knowledge and set of skills. To use the musical terminology, the various programs are not expected to play the same notes, but to be "tuned" to the same key.
Gary Brown

Scholars Assess Their Progress on Improving Student Learning - Research - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...48933

teaching learning assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09 - Cached
  • International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which drew 650 people. The scholars who gathered here were cautiously hopeful about colleges' commitment to the study of student learning, even as the Carnegie Foundation winds down its own project. (Mr. Shulman stepped down as president last year, and the foundation's scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning program formally came to an end last week.) "It's still a fragile thing," said Pat Hutchings, the Carnegie Foundation's vice president, in an interview here. "But I think there's a huge amount of momentum." She cited recent growth in faculty teaching centers,
  • Mary Taylor Huber, director of the foundation's Integrative Learning Project, said that pressure from accrediting organizations, policy makers, and the public has encouraged colleges to pour new resources into this work.
  • The scholars here believe that it is much more useful to try to measure and improve student learning at the level of individual courses. Institutionwide tests like the Collegiate Learning Assessment have limited utility at best, they said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Mr. Bass and Toru Iiyoshi, a senior strategist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's office of educational innovation and technology, pointed to an emerging crop of online multimedia projects where college instructors can share findings about their teaching. Those sites include Merlot and the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive.
  • "We need to create 'middle spaces' for the scholarship of teaching and learning," said Randall Bass, assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University, during a conference session on Friday.
  • "If you use a more generic instrument, you can give the accreditors all the data in the world, but that's not really helpful to faculty at the department level," said the society's president, Jennifer Meta Robinson, in an interview. (Ms. Robinson is also a senior lecturer in communication and culture at Indiana University at Bloomington.)
  • It is vital, Ms. Peseta said, for scholars' articles about teaching and learning to be engaging and human. But at the same time, she urged scholars not to dumb down their statistical analyses or the theoretical foundations of their studies. She even put in a rare good word for jargon.
  • No one had a ready answer. Ms. Huber, of the Carnegie Foundation, noted that a vast number of intervening variables make it difficult to assess the effectiveness of any educational project.
  • "Well, I guess we have a couple of thousand years' worth of evidence that people don't listen to each other, and that we don't build knowledge," Mr. Bass quipped. "So we're building on that momentum."
  • Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09
     
    Note our friends Randy Bass (AAEEBL) and Mary Huber are prominent.
Nils Peterson

Here, There, & Everywhere -- Campus Technology - 2 views

campustechnology.com/...ePortfolios.aspx

shared by Nils Peterson on 04 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Electronic portfolios can follow a student beyond graduation into careers and other life pursuits-- but not if the university can't guarantee access, or if the data won't transfer from one system to another. A look at how ePortfolios can be true repositories of lifelong learning.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 04 Nov 09
       
      despite this lead, it moves off to look at cloud-based portfolios in a pretty good fashion
Gary Brown

U.S. GAO - Program Evaluation: A Variety of Rigorous Methods Can Help Identify Effectiv... - 1 views

www.gao.gov/GAO-10-30

rcts alternative methodology

shared by Gary Brown on 01 Dec 09 - Cached
  • In the absence of detailed guidance, the panel defined sizable and sustained effects through case discussion
  • The Top Tier initiative's choice of broad topics (such as early childhood interventions), emphasis on long-term effects, and use of narrow evidence criteria combine to provide limited information on what is effective in achieving specific outcomes.
  • Several rigorous alternatives to randomized experiments are considered appropriate for other situations: quasi-experimental comparison group studies, statistical analyses of observational data, and--in some circumstances--in-depth case studies. The credibility of their estimates of program effects relies on how well the studies' designs rule out competing causal explanations.
  • Gary Brown on 01 Dec 09
     
    a critical resource
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