Author: David Wees (page 44 of 97)

I think most learning opportunities through computers can be broken down into one of three basic modalities. These modalities may be mixed (as is the case when one uses adaptive assessment, for example) or they may be a stand-alone use.
 

1. Computers as assessment
   
   This is the lowest level of computer use, in my opinion, although it is probably the most attractive for many education policy makers. The ability to automate assessment, and to take assessment out of the hands of teachers is pretty powerful, for people who view students and teachers as inputs in an education machine.

   One issue is that even the best computer based assessments that exist are not able to examine student learning in any form useful enough for deep learning to occur. They also assume that tacit knowledge has no place in education, and that with enough information, we can peer inside the brains of our students to see what they are thinking.

   For obvious reasons, no educator should rely solely on computer based assessment for all judgements of students’ learning. They may be useful in some formative assessments.

    

2. Computer as content delivery
   
   This use of a computer as a content delivery tool is seductive. After all, we consume a lot of content via computers as adults, and we certainly feel like we are learning effectively. Much of the learning we are consuming, however, is in the form of stories, which is a bit different than learning concepts via media. Derek Muller has a lot to say (and some research to support his perspective) about how effectively people learn science via videos.

   Content delivery is useful, no doubt, but the instructional model of "here is some information, now you know it" is problematic. It’s hard to tell if the person who has been exposed to knowledge has actually learned it, and in many cases, what they have is a shallow shell of knowledge. There are some attempts to address this issue, including implementing versions of learning which use computers as assessment and computers as content delivery together. So far, the research on these attempts is mixed.

    

3. Computer as programmable tool
   
   
   In this model, the computer is a tool to be programmed, and the user is in charge of the output of the computer. This allow students to be in control of the computer, and therefore their own learning. They can turn the computer into a tool which serves their exploration, rather than the student being at the mercy of the designer of the software running on the computer in the first two modalities described.

   Programming should be thought of as in general, any process through which the student controls the output of the computer. Under this definition, any use of the computer where the use of the computer is not predetermined by an body external to the student could qualify as programming. Broadly defined, programming is the process of design and debugging, which is very much like the process that happens during science.

   Games fall into one these three categories. Some games allow for more exploration and programming of the environment of the game, and some games as merely vehicles for computerized assessment. Some games are intended to deliver content to the learner, and have merely disguised the learning environment from the user. To be clear, there is a certain amount of blurring between these three different modalities, and some activities involve all three.
    

I find that the third modality is the most powerful of the three, and the most likely to develop powerful learning opportunites for the student. Unfortunately, it is the most terrifying of the three, since the outcome of the process of using the computer seems to be the least certain. This may be why many educators shy away from this use of the computer. It can be frightening to let go of the learning process, and trust that, given some suitable boundaries and expectations, students will learn.

Just watched this video thanks to Deven Page of Richard Feynman talking about algebra.

“They had invented a set of rules, which if you followed them without thinking you could produce the answer…” ~ Richard Feynman

When I think of the conversations we have on Twitter about the use of technology in education, I wonder why we don’t have this conversation more often; it is not okay to hit children, especially when those children are not your own (I don’t like this qualifier, but I recognize that parents have more rights than we do as teachers, whether or not I agree with what they do with those rights).

We need to get the places in red below to codify this in law ’cause for some reason, they haven’t yet.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Just thought I’d share. I wonder, could students construct something like this?

h/t Open Culture blog

Educators make mistakes when grading. It happens. Sometimes we mark a student’s work lower than we should, compared to their peers, and sometimes we mark it higher than we should. The question is, what effect does this have on a student’s overall mark?

Here are some sample grades. The sample column is the original grade, the low column is a mark 1 lower than the sample, the high column is a mark 1 higher than the sample.

The overall grade was calculated here by finding the averages of the three categories (quizzes, homework, and tests – standard categories in many classes) with quizzes worth 20%, homework worth 20%, and tests worth 60% of the overall grade. These aren’t particularly unusual grades. Note, however, how wide the possible error is in the final grade, which could potentially actually range from 55.9% to 82.5%, which is a 26.6%, or a HUGE amount in any grading system.

Of course, teachers aren’t likely to mark everything low, or everything high. One could make an assumption that both of these cases are equally likely, and then instead of using the likely minimum mark, and the likely maximum mark, we could try and aim for 2 standard deviations from the mean of the possible grading outcomes. In other words, what’s a likely range?

I created a script (warning: takes a while to run in some browsers) which randomly generates a sample of 10,000 overall grades, starting with the baseline above, and randomly adding errors in grading for each assignment, assuming that teachers were equally likely to assign a lower grade as a higher grade, and as getting the grade exactly correct (this assumption is probably false, but I had to start somewhere). For one sample of 10,000 grades, the minimum grade is 60.2, and the maximum grade is 77.5, suggesting that the distribution of grades isn’t symmetrical (teachers are more likely to assign a grade which is too low to students who are at above 50% overall, and too high for students who are at below 50% overall). The standard deviation of these scores is 2.32, which means that 95% of the time, the grade will fall between 64.6% and 73.9% (the mean of the data set was 69.2). This is a range of likely values of over 9%!

Note that this script doesn’t account for a host of other reasons that the grades for this individual student could be in error. It doesn’t account for lost assignments, misread names, addition errors, etc…

How many teachers know that there are error bars on the percentages they are expected to give to students? Maybe if we reported this student’s grades as 70.1% ± 4.6%, students and parents might recognize that grading is more subjective than they realize? Maybe we could stop the practice of assigning letter grades to students work based on strict boundaries?

I remember than in grade 12, I was assigned a grade of 84% overall in English 12, with an A being an 86% in my school. This meant that I missed out on a major award at university (it was my only B in grade 12) and that I had to write an entrance exam to get into my first year English course (I passed). I’ve obviously done fine despite this grade, but I remember it often, and it is a reminder to me of the often arbitrary nature of teacher assigned grades.