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Gary Brown

Struggling Students Can Improve by Studying Themselves, Research Shows - Teaching - The... - 3 views

  • "We're trying to document the role of processes that are different from standard student-outcome measures and standard ability measures,
  • We're interested in various types of studying, setting goals for oneself, monitoring one's progress as one goes through learning a particular topic."
  • Mr. Zimmerman has spent most of his career examining what can go wrong when people try to learn new facts and skills. His work centers on two common follies: First, students are often overconfident about their knowledge, assuming that they understand material just because they sat through a few lectures or read a few chapters. Second, students tend to attribute their failures to outside forces ("the teacher didn't like me," "the textbook wasn't clear enough") rather than taking a hard look at their own study habits.
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  • That might sound like a recipe for banal lectures about study skills. But training students to monitor their learning involves much more than simple nagging, Mr. Zimmerman says. For one thing, it means providing constant feedback, so that students can see their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • or one thing, it means providing constant feedback, so that students can see their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • "The first one is, Give students fast, accurate feedback about how they're doing. And the second rule, which is less familiar to most people, is, Now make them demonstrate that they actually understand the feedback that has been given."
  • "I did a survey in December," he says. "Only one instructor said they were no longer using the technique. Twelve people said they were using the technique 'somewhat,' and eight said 'a lot.' So we were pleased that they didn't forget about us after the program ended."
  • "Only one instructor said they were no longer using the technique. Twelve people said they were using the technique 'somewhat,' and eight said 'a lot.' So we were pleased that they didn't forget about us after the program ended."
  • And over time, we've realized that these methods have a much greater effect if they're embedded within the course content.
  • "Once we focus on noticing and correcting errors in whatever writing strategy we're working on, the students just become junkies for feedback,"
  • "Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection," Mr. Zimmerman says. "We're trying to help instructors and students see errors not as an endpoint, but as a beginning point for understanding what they know and what they don't know, and how they can approach problems in a more effective way."
  • Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection,"
  • Self-efficacy" was coined by Albert Bandura in the 1970's
  • "Self-efficacy" was coined by Albert Bandura in the 1970's,
  • The 1990 paper from _Educational Psychologist_ 25 (1), pp. 3-17) which is linked above DOES include three citations to Bandura's work.
  • The 1990 paper from _Educational Psychologist_ 25 (1), pp. 3-17) which is linked above DOES include three citations to Bandura's work.
  • What I am particularly amazed by is that the idea of feedback, reflection and explicitly demonstrated understanding (essentially a Socratic approach of teaching), is considered an innovation.
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    selected for the focus on feedback. The adoption by half or fewer, depending, is also interesting as the research is of the type we would presume to be compelling.
Matthew Shirey

Issue 1948 - fbug - AJAX callback not fired in Firefox 3.5 + Firebug 1.4b3 - Google Code - 0 views

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    There are some work arounds cited in the bug tracker referenced but they include shutting off critically useful parts of Firebug. This is only an issue for people using recent Firefox and Firebug versions. I'm keeping a close eye on this one and will keep you all updated.
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    A bad bug I've run into and am tracking. Basically if you combine the latest Firefox with recent Firebug you can get some rather nasty looking errors.
Theron DesRosier

Searching for India's Hole in the Wall | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education - 2 views

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    "The contrast here was for me pretty stark: One the one hand, you had two computers set up outside which received minimal maintenance, and which anyone could use from 9-5 each day. There was no direction on how to use this equipment, but that didn't stop kids from figuring it out via trial and error (or, more often, from other kids). On the other hand, you had a dozen computers locked up in a school just a short walk away, gathering dust for lack of 'qualified teachers' to use them, and direct their use."
Nils Peterson

Excerpt from Informal Learning - 2 views

  • WORKERS LEARN MORE in the coffee room than in the classroom. They discover how to do their jobs through informal learning: asking the person in the next cubicle, trial and error, calling the help desk, working with people in the know, and joining the conversation.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Jay Cross, _Informal Learning_ ca 2003
  • Training programs, workshops, and schools get the lion’s share of the corporate budget for developing talent, despite the fact that this formal learning has almost no impact on job performance. And informal learning, the major source of knowledge transfer and innovation, is left to chance. This book aims to raise your consciousness about informal teaming. You will discover that informal learning is a profit strategy, that it flexes with change, and that it respects and challenges workers. You will see how hard-nosed businesses use organizational network analysis, conversation space, and communities of purpose to fuel innovation and agility.
  • Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, “to learn” is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.
Gary Brown

Researchers Criticize Reliability of National Survey of Student Engagement - Students -... - 3 views

  • "If each of the five benchmarks does not measure a distinct dimension of engagement and includes substantial error among its items, it is difficult to inform intervention strategies to improve undergraduates' educational experiences,"
  • nly one benchmark, enriching educational experiences, had a significant effect on the seniors' cumulative GPA.
  • Other critics have asserted that the survey's mountains of data remain largely ignored.
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    If the results are largely ignored, the psychometric integrity matters little.  There is no indication it is ignored because it lacks psychometric integrity.
Gary Brown

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

  • "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."
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  • 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.
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    our work, our friends (Ken and Jim), and more context that shapes our strategy.
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    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

Discussion: Higher Education Teaching and Learning | LinkedIn - 2 views

  • Do you have ideas or examples of good practice of working with employers to promote workforce development? UK universities and colleges are under pressure to do "employer engagement" and some are finding it really difficult. This is sometimes due to the university administrative systems not welcoming non-traditional students, and sometimes because we use "university speak" rather than "employer speak". All ideas very welcome. Thanks. Posted 7 hours ago | Reply Privately /* extlib: /js_controls/_dialog.jsp */ LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-closeWindow', 'Close this window' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-or', 'or' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-cancel', 'Cancel' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-submit', 'Submit' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-error-generic', 'We\'re sorry. Something unexpected happened and your request could not be completed. Please try again.' ); LI.Controls.addControl('control-7', 'Dialog', { name: 'sendMessageDialog', type: 'task-modeless', content: { node: 'send-message-dialog', title: 'Reply Privately' }, extra: { memberId: '19056441', fullName: 'Anita Pickerden', groupId: '2774663', subject: 'RE: Do you have ideas or examples of good practice of working with employers to promote workforce development?' } });
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    We should respond to this query with examples from a few of our programs--and write a baseball card or two in the process.
Gary Brown

Outsourced Grading, With Supporters and Critics, Comes to College - Teaching - The Chro... - 3 views

shared by Gary Brown on 06 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.
  • She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.
  • The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail.
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  • The company argues that professors freed from grading papers can spend more time teaching and doing research.
  • "This is what they do for a living," says Ms. Whisenant. "We're working with professionals." 
  • Assessors are trained in the use of rubrics, or systematic guidelines for evaluating student work, and before they are hired are given sample student assignments to see "how they perform on those," says Ravindra Singh Bangari, EduMetry's vice president of assessment services.
  • Professors give final grades to assignments, but the assessors score the papers based on the elements in the rubric and "help students understand where their strengths and weaknesses are," says Tara Sherman, vice president of client services at EduMetry. "Then the professors can give the students the help they need based on the feedback."
  • The assessors use technology that allows them to embed comments in each document; professors can review the results (and edit them if they choose) before passing assignments back to students.
  • But West Hills' investment, which it wouldn't disclose, has paid off in an unexpected way. The feedback from Virtual-TA seems to make the difference between a student's remaining in an online course and dropping out.
  • Because Virtual-TA provides detailed comments about grammar, organization, and other writing errors in the papers, students have a framework for improvement that some instructors may not be able to provide, she says.
  • "People need to get past thinking that grading must be done by the people who are teaching," says Mr. Rajam, who is director of assurance of learning at George Washington University's School of Business. "Sometimes people get so caught up in the mousetrap that they forget about the mouse."
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