Group items tagged

Duolingo for schools offers a window into the future of education technology. It shows us how interactive digit

It can also be used to redesign systems so that they’re easier to navigate in the first place.

A nudge, like the text-message reminders that helped students make the transition to college, offers a workaround to help people get through a complex system,

A nudge, they explained, encourages — but does not mandate — a certain behavior: think putting healthier options at eye level in the cafeteria.

The Measuring College Learning project, which Arum has helped lead, seeks to change that dynamic by putting faculty members in charge of determining how to measure learning in six academic disciplines.

continuing development of new knowledge, making it difficult to compress all that learners need to know within the limited time span of a post-secondary course or program.

ncreased emphasis on skills or applying knowledge to meet the demands of 21st century society, skills such as critical thinking, independent learning, knowing how to use relevant information technology, software, and data within a field of discipline, and entrepreneurialism.

developing students with the skills to manage their own learning throughout life

Typically, polyphonic music is seen as having developed from a set of fixed rules and almost mechanical practice. This changes how we understand that development precisely because whoever wrote it was breaking those rules.

Campbell also said that the project will be much more significant if it ultimately shows whether students' skills improve over time. "If you don't have some kind of comparison of change, showing what they could do when they came in and when they left," she said, "it may do exactly what the rankings do: reinforce the reality that great students produce great work, and great institutions have great students."

Arum said the AAC&U/SHEEO approach has the potential to be one of "multiple indicators" that higher education institutions and policy makers eventually embrace to understand student learning. "No one measure is going to be sufficient to capture student learning performance outcomes," he said. "Responsible parties know there's a place for multiple measures, multiple approaches." Campbell, of Teachers College, agrees that "because [student learning] is such a complicated issue, any one method is going to have complications and potential limitations"

The Results The faculty participants scored the thousands of samples of work (which all came from students who had completed at least 75 percent of their course work) in three key learning outcome areas: critical thinking, written communication and quantitative literacy. Like several other recent studies of student learning, including Academically Adrift, the results are not particularly heartening. A few examples: Fewer than a third of student assignments from four-year institutions earned a score of three or four on the four-point rubric for the critical thinking skill of "using evidence to investigate a point of view or reach a conclusion." Nearly four in 10 work samples from four-year colleges scored a zero or one on how well students "analyzed the influence of context and assumptions" to draw conclusions. While nearly half of student work from two-year colleges earned a three or four on "content development" in written communication, only about a third scored that high on their use of sources and evidence. Fewer than half of the work from four-year colleges and a third of student work from two-year colleges scored a three or four on making judgments and drawing "appropriate conclusions based on quantitative analysis of data."