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Archive of ‘student-centered learning’ category
peer review in class
categories: student-centered learning
Frame Your Feedback: Making Peer Review Work in Class
By: Christina Moore
Instruct students to include a brief memo of guidance with the work they would like others to review. The memo includes two components: a context paragraph and a list of questions.
Recommendations for Revitalizing the Student Peer Review Process
- Have a candid discussion about students’ experiences with peer review.
- Emphasize the broad range of peer review.
- Make students accountable for accurate, useful feedback.
- Model these practices in your feedback to students.
- Require students to write memos when they ask for your feedback.
- Every professional needs feedback to succeed in their work. These skills can set the foundation for how to ask for, receive, and provide useful feedback.
References
Simmons, J. (May 2003). Responders are taught, not born. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 46(8), 684–693.
VanDeWeghe, R. (September 2004). “Awesome, dude!”: Responding helpfully to peer writing. English Journal 94(1), 95–99.
how teachers use data
The Three Ways Teachers Use Data—and What Technology Needs to Do Better
By Karen Johnson May 17, 2016
After surveying more than 4,650 educators, we learned that teachers are essentially trying to do three things with data—each of which technology can dramatically improve:
1. Assess
2. Analyze
3. Pivot
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What’s At Risk When Schools Focus Too Much on Student Data?
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/06/07/whats-at-risk-when-schools-focus-too-much-on-student-data/
The U.S. Department of Education has increasingly encouraged and funded states to collect and analyze information about students: grades, state test scores, attendance, behavior, lateness, graduation rates and school climate measures like surveys of student engagement.
The argument in favor of all this is that the more we know about how students are doing, the better we can target instruction and other interventions. And sharing that information with parents and the community at large is crucial. It can motivate big changes.
what might be lost when schools focus too much on data. Here are five arguments against the excesses of data-driven instruction.
1) Motivation stereotype threat.
it could create negative feelings about school, threatening students’ sense of belonging, which is key to academic motivation.
2) Helicoptering
Today, parents increasingly are receiving daily text messages with photos and videos from the classroom. A style of overly involved “intrusive parenting” has been associated in studies with increased levels of anxiety and depression when students reach college. “Parent portals as utilized in K-12 education are doing significant harm to student development,” argues college instructor John Warner in a recent piece for Inside Higher Ed.
3) Commercial Monitoring and Marketing
The National Education Policy Center releases annual reports on commercialization and marketing in public schools. In its most recent report in May, researchers there raised concerns about targeted marketing to students using computers for schoolwork and homework. Companies like Google pledge not to track the content of schoolwork for the purposes of advertising. But in reality these boundaries can be a lot more porous. For example, a high school student profiled in the NEPC report often consulted commercial programs like dictionary.com and Sparknotes: “Once when she had been looking at shoes, she mentioned, an ad for shoes appeared in the middle of a Sparknotes chapter summary.”
4) Missing What Data Can’t Capture
Computer systems are most comfortable recording and analyzing quantifiable, structured data. The number of absences in a semester, say; or a three-digit score on a multiple-choice test that can be graded by machine, where every question has just one right answer.
5) Exposing Students’ “Permanent Records”
In the past few years several states have passed laws banning employers from looking at the credit reports of job applicants. Employers want people who are reliable and responsible. But privacy advocates argue that a past medical issue or even a bankruptcy shouldn’t unfairly dun a person who needs a fresh start.
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more on big data in education in this blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=big+data+education
quantile measurements in education
Quantile Measures for Math Added to Kansas Student Assessments
By Dian Schaffhauser 05/27/16
There are two types of Lexile measures: a person’s reading ability and the text’s difficulty. Students who are tested against state standards receive a Lexile reader measure from the Kansas Reading Assessment. Books and other texts receive a Lexile text measure from a MetaMetrics software tool called the Lexile Analyzer, which describes the book’s reading demand or complexity. When used together, the two measures are intended to help match a reader with reading material that is at an appropriate difficulty or will at least help give an idea of how well a reader should comprehend text. The reader should encounter some level of difficulty with the text, but not enough to get frustrated. The Lexile reader measure is used to monitor reader progress.
My note: is this another way / attempt to replace humans as educators? Or it is a supplemental approach to improve students’ reading abilities.
mindful tech
Mindful Tech: Establishing a Healthier and More Effective Relationship with Our Digital Devices and Apps
Tuesdays, June 7 and 14, 2016, 1:00 – 2:30 pm Central Time
David Levy, Information School, University of Washington
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to attend these personally helpful sessions.
Register Now for this 2 part webinar
“There is a long history of people worrying and complaining about new technologies and also putting them up on a pedestal as the answer…
As a society, I think we’re beginning to recognize this imbalance, and we’re in a position to ask questions like “How do we live a more balanced life in the fast world? How do we achieve adequate forms of slow practice?”
David Levy – See more at: http://tricycle.org/trikedaily/mindful-tech/#sthash.9iABezUN.dpuf
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xiv. fast world and slow world practices. always-on lifestyle.
p. 3. our devices have vastly extended our attentional choices, but the human attentional capacity remains unchanged. how to make wise choices and figure out what constitutes a wise choice, so we can use our digital tools to their best advantage and to ours.
by paying attention how you use your cellphone, how you handle email, how you feel when you are on FB or Pinterest, or when you multitask, you will be able to see which aspects of your current online practices are working well and which aren’t. seeing these will clearly will allow you to make constructive changes.
premise: we function more effectively and more healthfully online when we are more attentive, relaxed, and emotionally balanced. Also stated as negative: we function less effectively and less healthfully online when we are distracted, physically uncomfortable, and emotionally upset. that happens often when we are online. Good news – we can do something about it.
P. 4 engage and strengthen two forms of attention : 1. the ability to stay focused on what you are doing at the moment. 2. self-observation / self-awareness
p. 24. each excercise follows the same six-part structure
step 1: perform primary practice (email, FB etc)
step 2: observe what are you doing and feelig, paying special atention to what is happening in your mind and body as you engage in your primary practicestep 3: log your observation, in written form
step 4: consolidate observations by summarizing
step 5: formulate personal guidelines based on consolidated observatins
step 6: share and discuss with others
p. 25-26. mindfulness: the ability to direct your attention where you want it to go – to have a choice. in a world, where we are surrounded by advertisements, sales pitches, the biggest, best, and brightest promised of happiness and fulfillment that money can buy, not to mention the clear constant information overload of emails, status updates, tweets, photo albums, Netflix queues, RSS feeds, playin whack-a-mole with phone notifications. I wish I could say that we, could get away, but i don’t think that as a society we can, or even that we should (this is where Turkle cannot help).
p. 27 two modes of attention
p. 27 one is like a flash light in a dark room: you see a chair; move to the left, you see something else.
p. 28 the other mode is to go beyond focusing on a single object, but opening up to the surrounding environment. like the same flash beam, but instead intense narrowed one, this is a diffused allowing to cover more, but with less visual acuity.
p. 29 both modes can exclude each other
p. 30 attentional shift, attentional choice
how to deploy our task focus (focused attention) to our self-awareness (open attention)
the brain has two different attentional systems: one is top-down and is under conscious control. the bottom-up system, an earlier evolutionary development, is completely automated. scanning the enthronement for potential threats, alerting us to them whether we want or not, since it is hard wired.
p. 31-32 interruption have two varieties: external ones: sounds, smells, movements, physical contact. internal interruptions are: hunger, mental activity (remembering late appointment).
we cannot turn alerting mechanisms, but we can minimize distractions.
we cannot turn everything off and eliminate all interruptions. what we can do is to notice them as they arise and make a decision how to proceed and face them – whether to respond in the moment or ignore them.
32. multitasking
it is now clearly established that we can mainly focus on only one thing at the a time. thus we have the ability to prioritize and focus on only one task.
34. emotions and the stress response
p. 40 strengthening task focus
mindful breathing – optional
simplest and most widespread form of attention training uses the breath as the object of focus. when mind wanders, bring back focus on your in- and out-breath: focusing, opening (noticing) and choosing. focus on your breath, notice when you have strayed and choose to come back to the breath
p. 41 strengthening self-observation / awareness
p. 42 Exercise 1. Observing email
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more on mindfulness in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mindfulness
more on the contemplative practices, contemplative computing specifically in this IMS blog
Mindfulness and Achievement
Can Research Prove Ties Between Mindfulness and Achievement?
The Flanker test, which helps give researchers a sense of cognitive flexibility
More on mindfulness in this IMS blog:
gen z coming to campus
Survey: What Gen Z Thinks About Ed Tech in College
A report on digital natives sheds light on their learning preferences.
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more on Gen Z in this blog:
proctoring
Clemson University’s Centralized Proctoring Story
http://marketing.softwaresecure.com/acton/fs/blocks/showLandingPage/a/10395/p/p-002f/t/page/fm/0
e-Campus news offers a proctoring model: http://www.ecampusnews.com/whitepapers/5-step-guide-to-how-clemson-university-online-is-centralizing-online-proctoring/ conveniently presented in a 5-step outline, webinar and “case study” paper.
According to them, you just “Follow their story and learn how the team at Clemson Online implemented RPNow, and how they’re planning to centralize remote proctoring to increase student convenience, faculty efficiency and reduce the costs of exam administration.”
It is, of course, sponsored by the company, who will be paid for the proctoring
http://www.softwaresecure.com/product/remote-proctor-now/
Here are my issues with the proposal:
- step 5 of the five-step outline: “Take control of the payment model. Institutional payment (as opposed to student pay) creates a better experience for the student and cost savings for all.”
so, if the institution pays, then student don’t pay? I find this and illusion, since the institution pays by using students’ tuition. which constantly grows. so, the statement is rather deceptive. - As with the huge controversy around Turnitin (e.g., this 2009 article, and this 2012 article), “mechanizing” the very humane process evaluation is outright wrong. The attempt to compensate the lack of sufficient number of faculty by “outsourcing” to machines is en vogue with the nationwide strive of higher ed administration to create an “assembly line” type of education, which makes profit, but it is dubious if it teaches [well].
- Pedagogically (as per numerous discussions in the Chronicle of Higher Education and similar sources), if the teaching materials and exams are structured in an engaging way, students cheat much less. The “case study” paper claims reduction of cheating, but it is reduction based on fear to be caught, not based on genuine interest in learning.
Inquiry-Based Classroom
categories: Project Based Learning, student-centered learning
10 Tips For Launching An Inquiry-Based Classroom
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/09/21/10-tips-for-launching-an-inquiry-based-classroom/
1. Don’t teach the content standards; help kids find their own path towards the information they need to know.
2. Don’t tell students what they should know; create the structure for them to experience it on their own.
3. Use class time to make connections between pieces of information.
4. Many kids struggle with reading, so hook them with the non-written word.
5. Stop giving struggling kids the most boring version of the work to repeat over and over again.
6. Surprise students.
7. The traditional model of imparting knowledge isn’t working very well, so don’t be afraid to try out inquiry.
8. Find the “bend” in the outcomes and abandon the prescriptive path.
9. Indulge interesting student questions even if it doesn’t fit the pacing guide.
10. Approach the practice of teaching with inquiry and use that meta-practice to improve.
fit game education
The Fit Children of Seinäjoen
My note: the Spiegel article is about obesity and fitness, but I see if very congruent with gamification
But what are the Finns doing right? The answer is multifaceted and likely has something to do with the Finnish mentality, which tends to take an uncomplicated, pragmatic approach to problems.
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More on the Finland phenomenon in this IMS blog: