Learning is more than earning an A says Cathy N. Davidson, the professor, who recently returned to teach English and interdisciplinary studies after eight years in administration. But students don't always see it that way. Vying for an A by trying to figure out what a professor wants or through the least amount of work has made the traditional grading scale superficial, she says."You've got this real mismatch between the kind of participatory learning that’s happening online and outside of the classroom, and the top-down, hierarchical learning and rigid assessment schemes that we’re using in the classroom from grades K through 12 and all the way up to graduate school," Ms. Davidson says. "In school systems today, we’re putting more and more emphasis on quantitative assessment in an era when, out of the classroom, students are learning through an entirely different way of collaboration, customizing, and interacting."

That "better way" will begin this fall, when Kent State faculty members have the option of submitting their dossiers electronically; digital dossiers will very likely become the only way to go in a year.

A big attraction of digital dossiers, some professors note, is that it's easier to include elements of scholarship and research that couldn't be captured as well in a binder. "You can post video and audio of your teaching. You can take pictures of art and include it," says David W. Dalton, an associate professor of instructional technology at Kent State. "You can hyperlink to things. You can really tell your story in new ways."

It is crucial that we also develop a wider and deeper body of scientifically valid higher-learning theory. The boom years actually put colleges behind elementary and secondary schools in the development of learning science: how the brain functions, how students learn, what teaching tools work best, how to help all students—not just those who are already academically accomplished—succeed, and the like. I hear calls everywhere for better teaching in higher education, but that is hard to accomplish when the science of higher learning remains relatively primitive.

d yfd found one awesome data tool Alan Levine aka CogDog barked this July 29th, 2009 9:42 pm http://cogdogblog.com/3986

grades have little correlation with adult life achievement, or accomplishment, with postgraduate earnings (at least for the first three years), with actual learning, even with future employment in many fields. In the latter case, they are used mostly as a screening device rather than as an indicator of merit. The screen has expanded for the same reasons that professional sports have expanded their pools of playoff teams (think major league baseball "wild cards", or soccer teams that finish 3rd and 4th place in their national leagues qualifying for (and recently winning) the UEFA Champions League). Grades are also in their present state because their original purposes are no longer valid (assuming that they ever were, which is in itself dubious). The need is no longer to extract the cream and exclude the rest; it is to figure out how to effectively educate as many learners as possible.

For me, the biggest challenge in teaching a course like this is getting students engaged in the difficult task of analyzing the exercises

The deeper institutional issue is granting credit to graduate students for such a course

A Method for Collaboratively Developing and Validating a Rubric Sandra Allen (Columbia College Chicago) & John Knight (University of Tennessee at Martin)

Digital Identity; benwerd's page Web-based portfolios are establishing themselves as a way to present a student's learning and offer opportunities for reflection and dissemination. The web, meanwhile, is moving from a site based model to one that centers around digital identities: web-based representations of ourselves and our work.This page is a work in progress that aims to introduce educators to some of the issues and resources relating to web-based identity.

School of the Future: Lessons in failure How Microsoft's and Philadelphia's innovative school became an example of what not to do By Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor   Primary Topic Channel:  Tech Leadership   Students at the School of the Future when it first opened in 2006. <script language=JavaScript src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vj?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=6&abr=$scriptiniframe"></script><noscript><a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/cc?z=eschool&pos=6"><img src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vc?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=6&abr=$imginiframe" width="300" height="250" border="0"></a></noscript> Also of Interest Cheaper eBook reader challenges Kindle Carnegie Corporation: 'Do school differently' Former college QB battles video game maker Dueling curricula put copyright ed in spotlight Campus payroll project sees delays, more costs <script language=JavaScript src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/vj?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=2&abr=$scriptiniframe"></script><noscript><a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/cc?z=eschool&pos=2"><img src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/vc?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=2&abr=$imginiframe" width="300" height="250" border="0"></a></noscript> When it opened its doors in 2006, Philadelphia's School of the Future (SOF) was touted as a high school that would revolutionize education: It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement. But three years, three superintendents, four principals, and countless problems later, experts at a May 28 panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) agreed: The Microsoft-inspired project has been a failure so far. Microsoft points to the school's rapid turnover in leadership as the key reason for this failure, but other observers question why the company did not take a more active role in translating its vision for the school into reality. Regardless of where the responsibility lies, the project's failure to date offers several cautionary lessons in school reform--and panelists wondered if the school could use these lessons to succeed in the future.

“The new focus will help close the gap between theory and practice, and assure that teacher education program candidates are able to help diverse students be successful learners,” says NCATE president James G. Cibulka. “In the past, accreditation wrapped clinical experience around coursework. This approach reverses the priority, encouraging institutions to place teacher candidates in year-long training programs and wrap coursework around clinical practice.”

“However, regardless of pathway, all candidates should meet the same set of high standards.”

Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults' inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.

ts most distinctive feature is that it would clearly separate "compliance" from "improvement." Colleges would be required to build "portfolios" of data and materials, documenting (through more frequent peer reviews) their compliance with the association's many standards, with much of the information being made public. On a parallel track, or "pathway," colleges would have the flexibility to propose their own projects or themes as the focus of the self-improvement piece of their accreditation review, and would be judged (once the projects were approved by a peer team) by how well they carried out the plan. (Colleges the commission deems to be troubled would have a "pathway" chosen for them, to address their shortcomings.)

educe the paperwork burden on institutions (by making the portfolio electronic and limiting the written report for the portfolio to 50 pages), and make the process more valuable for colleges by letting them largely define for themselves where they want to improve and what they want to accomplish.

"We want to make accreditation so valuable to institutions that they would do it without Title IV," she said in an interview after the presentation. "The only way we can protect the improvement piece, and make it valuable to institutions to aim high, is if we separate it from the compliance piece."

Which measure(s) of intercoder reliability should researchers use? [TOP] There are literally dozens of different measures, or indices, of intercoder reliability. Popping (1988) identified 39 different "agreement indices" for coding nominal categories, which excludes several techniques for interval and ratio level data. But only a handful of techniques are widely used. In communication the most widely used indices are: Percent agreement Holsti's method Scott's pi (p) Cohen's kappa (k) Krippendorff's alpha (a)

5. Which measure(s) of intercoder reliability should researchers use? [TOP] There are literally dozens of different measures, or indices, of intercoder reliability. Popping (1988) identified 39 different "agreement indices" for coding nominal categories, which excludes several techniques for interval and ratio level data. But only a handful of techniques are widely used. In communication the most widely used indices are: Percent agreement Holsti's method Scott's pi (p) Cohen's kappa (k) Krippendorff's alpha (a) Just some of the indices proposed, and in some cases widely used, in other fields are Perreault and Leigh's (1989) Ir measure; Tinsley and Weiss's (1975) T index; Bennett, Alpert, and Goldstein's (1954) S index; Lin's (1989) concordance coefficient; Hughes and Garrett’s (1990) approach based on Generalizability Theory, and Rust and Cooil's (1994) approach based on "Proportional Reduction in Loss" (PRL). It would be nice if there were one universally accepted index of intercoder reliability. But despite all the effort that scholars, methodologists and statisticians have devoted to developing and testing indices, there is no consensus on a single, "best" one. While there are several recommendations for Cohen's kappa (e.g., Dewey (1983) argued that despite its drawbacks, kappa should still be "the measure of choice") and this index appears to be commonly used in research that involves the coding of behavior (Bakeman, 2000), others (notably Krippendorff, 1978, 1987) have argued that its characteristics make it inappropriate as a measure of intercoder agreement.

5. Which measure(s) of intercoder reliability should researchers use? [TOP] There are literally dozens of different measures, or indices, of intercoder reliability. Popping (1988) identified 39 different "agreement indices" for coding nominal categories, which excludes several techniques for interval and ratio level data. But only a handful of techniques are widely used. In communication the most widely used indices are: Percent agreement Holsti's method Scott's pi (p) Cohen's kappa (k) Krippendorff's alpha (a) Just some of the indices proposed, and in some cases widely used, in other fields are Perreault and Leigh's (1989) Ir measure; Tinsley and Weiss's (1975) T index; Bennett, Alpert, and Goldstein's (1954) S index; Lin's (1989) concordance coefficient; Hughes and Garrett’s (1990) approach based on Generalizability Theory, and Rust and Cooil's (1994) approach based on "Proportional Reduction in Loss" (PRL). It would be nice if there were one universally accepted index of intercoder reliability. But despite all the effort that scholars, methodologists and statisticians have devoted to developing and testing indices, there is no consensus on a single, "best" one. While there are several recommendations for Cohen's kappa (e.g., Dewey (1983) argued that despite its drawbacks, kappa should still be "the measure of choice") and this index appears to be commonly used in research that involves the coding of behavior (Bakeman, 2000), others (notably Krippendorff, 1978, 1987) have argued that its characteristics make it inappropriate as a measure of intercoder agreement.