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She looks first to the core competencies—critical thinking, empathy, persistence—that she wants to test, then breaks them down into smaller goals

student's grasp of systems thinking—understanding the complex relationships among parts of a whole—might ask players to complete tasks that show information gathering, developing hypotheses, and tracing causal relationships.

If instructors know where students need the most help, they can quickly tweak their courses—and their games

Taiga Park requires players to look for the cause of a widespread fish die-off in a virtual river by "interviewing" park rangers, environmental scientists, and the owners of a logging company. While students learn about pH levels and runoff, they also come away with lessons on data analysis, complex cause-and-effect relationships, and communication.

found that she could use routine assignments—like peer reviews and summaries of research material—to analyze her students' higher-order thinking skills. All assignments can be linked back to a larger skill, she says. "Evidence is everywhere."

But liberal arts colleges are reluctant to expand in size out of fear of diminishing the quality of their experience. Their small-class and residential-campus models are expensive to provide, as are the financial aid programs they deploy to ensure diverse student bodies. Administrators fear breaking down the four-year, full-time model, which they believe is crucial to developing well-rounded students. And the liberal arts curriculum isn’t necessarily tied to preparing students for a specific career, and certainly not a single job

Despite significant looming challenges related to affordability, access, public skepticism about value, changing student demographics, and the influence of technology on students and education -- which all the attendees readily acknowledged -- most of the presidents of the liberal arts colleges here this week aren’t planning on substantively changing to how their institutions operate or their economic models.

Nightingale’s famous “coxcomb” chart from 1858 demonstrated that improving hygiene in British military hospitals slashed mortality rates. She said its design was intended “to affect thro’ the eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.”

Twenty years later his word-proof students would get something altogether more dynamic than Nightingale’s pie charts to demystify global socioeconomic trends.

“It was a conscious intent to make the data look alive,”

“Statistics constitute a bulk of information that is surprisingly badly organised,”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation demands that every research project it funds has to make its full data set freely available, like open-source software code.”

“While nothing now can stop the surge to 9 billion, if the poorest 2 billion get improved child survival and the ability to buy bicycles and mobile phones, population growth will stop.

The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

when one is a novice in a field, you have limited working memory about the topic. This means there is little space to do hard, unfamiliar work. It’s quite possible that working with others,

dmit that time alone is a problematic measure for any study because “what takes one student ten minutes to complete may take another student twenty”), three of which I have included here.

Third, “requiring student interaction just for the sake of interaction may lead to diminished completion rates. Again, standards for online teaching should not contain arbitrary thresholds for required interaction.”

This doesn’t mean we should discourage interaction, but it does mean we should not measure the quality of a program based on inputs like seat time.