First, students tend to lose interest in
whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up,
motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try
to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult
assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a
top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less
impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even
long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of
traditional grades.
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The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - 83 views
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Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)
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Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.
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the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
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intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
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they’re just being rational. They have adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see what they’re capable of doing.
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They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it.
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When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.
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It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.
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But even when better forms of assessment are used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less important than why she thinks she got that score.
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the punch line: When students are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
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In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability.
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When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.
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And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as "smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect on other kids.
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The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.
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if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
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As Martin Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence."
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Only now and then does it make sense for the teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in learning.
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the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.
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The underlying problem concerns a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and focusing on what you’re doing.
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The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
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But when we get carried away with results, we wind up, paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
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Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and design of the most common forms of assessment--both within classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous consequences.
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grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.
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research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.
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Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,
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Brief meditative exercise helps cognition - 5 views
www.sciencedaily.com/...100414184220.htm
meditation cognition exercise brain mindfulness psychology spirituality personal news
shared by Keith Rowley on 20 Jun 11
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"Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just 4 days of meditation training- are really surprising," Zeidan noted. "It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation."
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The meditation training involved in the study was an abbreviated "mindfulness" training regime modeled on basic "Shamatha skills" from a Buddhist meditation tradition
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"Findings like these suggest that meditation's benefits may not require extensive training to be realized, and that meditation's first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention,"
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seems to be strong evidence for the idea that we may be able to modify our own minds to improve our cognitive processing -- most importantly in the ability to sustain attention and vigilance -- within a week's time."
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Both groups also improved following the meditation and reading experiences in measures of mood, but only the group that received the meditation training improved significantly in the cognitive measures. The meditation group scored consistently higher averages than the reading/listening group on all the cognitive tests and as much as ten times better on one challenging test that involved sustaining the ability to focus, while holding other information in mind. "The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed," Zeidan noted. "In tasks where participants had to process information under time constraints causing stress, the group briefly trained in mindfulness performed significantly better."
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participants were instructed to relax, with their eyes closed, and to simply focus on the flow of their breath occurring at the tip of their nose. If a random thought arose, they were told to passively notice and acknowledge the thought and to simply let 'it' go, by bringing the attention back to the sensations of the breath."
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"The simple process of focusing on the breath in a relaxed manner, in a way that teaches you to regulate your emotions by raising one's awareness of mental processes as they're happening is like working out a bicep, but you are doing it to your brain. Mindfulness meditation teaches you to release sensory events that would easily distract, whether it is your own thoughts or an external noise, in an emotion-regulating fashion.
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"This kind of training seems to prepare the mind for activity, but it's not necessarily permanent," Zeidan cautions. "This doesn't mean that you meditate for four days and you're done -- you need to keep practicing."
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a-better-world - home - 49 views
a-better-world.wikispaces.com
better world global issue collaboration split dub video garageband audio rap movie
shared by Jennifer Garcia on 27 Sep 11
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Our 6th grade collaborative project with a focus on global issues. We are looking for schools to join us with the hopes of working on some collaborative lyrics in Google Docs, remixing audio tracks shared between schools and possibly a skype session. We are running the project 5 times this year for 6 weeks at a time. Email me if you are interested i taking part at one point. jennifergarcia@abc-net.edu.sv
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Current Bills in Congress | Votetocracy - 64 views
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Votetocracy was created by regular citizens who decided it was time for Americans to have a better, actionable and measurable way to interact with Congress. This is not just a blog with commenting forums. We are about action. By providing Americans the ability to vote on bills in Congress we create a measurable repository of citizens sentiment towards each bill. That's good for all Americans and good for Congress. Truth is - Congress wants to hear from you.
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Votetocracy was created by regular citizens who decided it was time for Americans to have a better, actionable and measurable way to interact with Congress. This is not just a blog with commenting forums. We are about action. By providing Americans the ability to vote on bills in Congress we create a measurable repository of citizens sentiment towards each bill. That's good for all Americans and good for Congress. Truth is - Congress wants to hear from you.
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Moving beyond technology in designing online learning - 70 views
www.tonybates.ca/...y-in-designing-online-learning
effective teaching screencast designing online learning
shared by Matt Claxon on 09 Feb 15
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Some loved them, some hated them, and few were indifferent.
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At the time (and for many years afterwards) researchers such as Richard Clark (1983) argued that ‘proper’, scientific research showed no significant difference between the use of different media. In particular, there were no differences between classroom teaching and other media such as television or radio or satellite. Even today, we are getting similar findings regarding online learning (e.g. Means et al., 2010).
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different media can be used to assist learners to learn in different ways and achieve different outcomes. In a sense, researchers such as Clark were right: the teaching methods matter, but different media can more easily support different ways of teaching than others
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Thus requiring the television program to be judged by the same assessment methods as for the classroom lecture unfairly measures the potential value of the TV program. In this example, it may be better to use both methods: didactic teaching to teach understanding, then a documentary approach to apply that understanding. (Note that a television program could do both, but the classroom lecture could not.)
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The use of different media also allows for more individualization and personalization of the learning, better suiting learners with different learning styles and needs.
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This of course is what we do with technology in education. We try either to incorporate new technology into old formats, as with clickers and lecture capture, or we try to create the classroom in virtual space, as we do with learning management systems. What we are still developing but not yet clearly recognizing are formats, symbols systems and organizational structures that exploit the unique characteristics of the Internet as a medium.
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Given the need to create and interpret meaning when using media, trying to use computers to replace or substitute for humans in the education process is likely to be a major mistake, at least until computers have much greater facility to recognize, understand and apply semantics, value systems, and organizational factors,
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it is equally a mistake to rely only on the symbol systems, cultural values and organizational structures of classroom teaching as the means of judging the effectiveness or appropriateness of the Internet as an educational medium.
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The Discussion Forum is Dead; Long Live the Discussion Forum - Hybrid Pedagogy - 74 views
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There are better forums for discussion than online discussion forums. The discussion forum is a ubiquitous component of every learning management system and online learning platform from Blackboard to Moodle to Coursera.
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as though one relatively standardized interface can stand in for the many and varied modes of interaction we might have in a physical classroom
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predetermined variables
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Most online learning platforms make customization slow or difficult enough to deter responsiveness or impulsivity
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which would never seem reasonable in our on-ground pedagogy
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Rather than hacking the system to fit our pedagogy, we can easily become the teachers the LMS wants us to be
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In a classroom, we work diligently to unify our students, to foster a supportive environment, and to encourage cooperation and collaboration
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While some might argue that the 140-character limit doesn’t allow for deep inquiry, we disagree. Twitter, rather, becomes a tool for a collective inquiry, creating depth through the metonymic relationship between tweets and between tweets and what they link to.
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Why A Badge Is Better Than an A+ - Getting Smart by Alison Anderson - badges, EdTech, I... - 61 views
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A traditional “A-F” report card doesn’t inspire that type of insight for the students or the people they need to share it with in order to get into high school or college or get a job. A collection of badges from classroombadges.com would be much more like sharing a personal “yearbook” of academic accomplishments. I love that idea.
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"I admit this title makes a pretty bold statement for a society that pretty much uses the first five letters of the alphabet to define every child from about age 5 until adulthood. But, I am hearing more and more about the use of badges in the classroom, especially in conversations about gamification and self motivation."
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I have been trying out some grading apps and am intrigued by ActivGrade because instead of being focused on a letter grade A-F, I could see students being more concerned with mastering a goal. Their "grade" is a color toward mastery of a standard. Red means I have a lot of work to do to master this, yellow means I'm making progress toward mastery and green means I've mastered this goal at this point. One grading algorithm to choose from in the app is a calculation which puts a 75% weight on the student's most recent assignment for a given concept. This means that as I get better at a skill, my most recent attempt at showing my mastery over the skill is worth more for my grade than my prior attempts. This seems like smart grading practice to me.
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Visible Thinking Project - 107 views
www.visiblethinkingpz.org/...VisibleThinking1.html
research protocols questioning questions strategies thinking
shared by Wes Bolton on 29 Aug 13
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Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle - Scott Edinger - Harvard... - 99 views
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Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle by Scott Edinger | 9:00 AM January 17, 2013 Comments (78) In my nearly 20 years of work in organization development, I've never heard anyone say that a leader communicated too much or too well. On the contrary, the most common improvement suggestion I've seen offered up on the thousands of 360 evaluations I've reviewed over the years is that it would be better if the subject in question learned to communicate more effectively. What makes someone a good communicator? There's no mystery here, not since Aristotle identified the three critical elements — ethos, pathos, and logos. — thousands of years ago. Ethos is essentially your credibility — that is, the reason people should believe what you're saying. In writing this blog I made an effort to demonstrate my ethos in the introduction, and here I'll just add that I have a degree in communication studies (emphasis in rhetoric for those who want the details) for good measure. In some cases, ethos comes merely from your rank within an organization. More commonly, though, today's leaders build ethos most
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American girls read and write better than boys - 3 views
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Oldest in class do better, even into university, study finds - 21 views
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"It's been known for years that the oldest children in class perform better in school than their youngest classmates. But according to a new study co-authored by University of Toronto Scarborough economist Elizabeth Dhuey, that gap can persist, with older children more likely to attend post-secondary school and graduate from an elite university."
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Attention Disorder or Not, Children Prescribed Pills to Help in School - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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New Learning Institute - 0 views
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"The New Learning Institute delivers engaging, personalized, project-based digital media programs to young people and educators. We work in classrooms, after-school centers, museums, and cultural institutions, or wherever learning takes place. Using the latest mobile technologies and digital media practices and tools, we help young people explore their interests, direct their own learning, and better prepare themselves for living and working in the 21st century."
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Motivation and Engagement: Hey Managers - Get Out of the Way - 56 views
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Unless you’re some kind of mentalist, you’re not going to know what motivates your employees unless you ask them.
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"The research Pink references shows that, once basic financial needs are met, autonomy, mastery and purpose - not money - are better motivators of performance. Pink points out that engagement and motivation come from a sense of self-direction - of trust, and of ownership. The message for managers here is that it's time to get out of the way."
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The Early Results Of An iPad Classroom Are In. - Edudemic - 80 views
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I’ve never observed anything else that has had the impact on teacher personal learning like the introduction of the iPad.
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students having their own highly engaging and personalized learning device and their own space to learn in. They share better, problem solve better and most importantly learn that there is more than one way to solve a problem
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I believe that the most successful of the students we are educating today will be those that can find information the fastest and know best what to do with that information.
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"Our school has been working with iPads for three years now and I can easily say that these have been the most exciting years of my educational career. While the decision to share these positive results is a direct result of the positive impact on student learning, it is also important to realize the impact this initiative is having with teachers"
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A change in teaching style Direct impact Maximizing Student Learning Time The Journey Continues...
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Sign In - 3 views
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Imagine exploring 13.7B years of history - from the Big Bang to modernity. Big history tells the complete story - with a goal of revealing common themes and patterns that help students better understand people, civilizations and our place in the universe. The Big History Project is a collaboration designed to bring big history to life for high school students.
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#betterbroadbandinINSOMNIAthanyourchildsschool - 25 views
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15 Lesson Plans For Making Students Better Online Researchers - Edudemic - 219 views
edudemic.com/...ents-better-online-researchers
lessonplans research lesson plans search Education google
shared by mswanty on 01 Dec 12
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