Tag: The Reflective Educator (page 41 of 43)

November 15, 2010 / 19 Comments

Forget the future: Here’s the textbook I want now

The old paper form of a textbook is certain to die. I’m sure of it.

The new form of a "textbook" has a feature list that turns the textbook from something people read to something people experience. Note that this feature list isn’t fantasy, nearly all of these features already exist in some form.

Here are the features I think every textbook should have.

The textbook should be 100% searchable. No more wondering where eukaryotic appears in the text. You’ll just be able to quickly type in a search term and find all of the places it appears.
Key words in the text should be linked to explanations of these key terms. Click on the word, find out what it means in this context and what other resources exist to understand it.
The readability of the text should be individually customizable. Want to challenge yourself and improve your vocabulary? There’s a setting for that. Feel like taking it easy on the reading? There’s a setting for that too.
Everything in the textbook should allow annotations which should appear as a user generated summary of the textbook itself in another location.
Users should be able to add bookmarks and tag parts of the textbook with terms so they can self-classify the information. These tags should optionally appear for other users of the same textbook.
You should be able to comment on any part of the textbook. This could be used to flag out-of-date content or just to ask questions. Each user of a textbook should optionally be able to see everyone else’s comments on various sections of the text. These comments should happen in real time so that users can chat in real time about what they are examining.
Videos and other multimedia should be included in the textbook where appropriate. Want to talk about MLK’s I have a dream speech? You can include the entire video of his speech as part of the book.
The textbook should be customizable. Users should be able to edit the content of the textbook and share the updated version of the textbook with other users. When a customization occurs, the original author(s) of the textbook could optionally be notified so they can either accept or reject the changes to the original work.
The textbook needs to be open source and free. No longer bound by restrictive and antiquated licenses, institutions can create their textbooks and share them with the world.
Textbooks need to be translatable if they are really going to be free to use for everyone. No longer would the language learners in your class be forced to struggle in your subject just because of a lack of knowledge of the language of instruction. Optionally you could have the textbook display in the language of instruction and have real-time translation services available for any section on demand.
For any section of the text, real time search of other resources or references needs to be available. Instead of relying on just the opinion of the author(s) of the text, now you can look at other (optionally screened) resources that could help understand some perspective on the subject of the textbook.
The textbook should be device agnostic and mobile-ready. It shouldn’t matter if the person is reading it on an ereader, a netbook, an iPad, or a cell phone, the textbook should be available anytime, anywhere to anyone.
The textbook should be built with multiple models of pedagogy in mind. Instead of flatly stating the "facts" for the student reading the textbook, there should be opportunities for experiments, simulations, 3rd virtual worlds, or whatever other alternate forms of representation are available. Inquiry should be built into these textbooks.
Students should be able to click anywhere in the book and ask the question, "where is this used in the real world?" No more students asking why they are learning this stuff, because the entire learning process would be transparent.
You should be able to ask an expert on the topic from your textbook. Need more help with the topic than the textbook is providing, or have some more questions? You can call someone for help and ask for advice right through your textbook.
Your textbook could be a centre of a community of people who are all learning the same material. Not all of you need to be in exactly the same class, but as you work through the textbook and make comments, the textbook learns from you about your learning habits, strengths, and weaknesses, and connects you to the people and resources that you need to understand.
Any practice or other tasks that need to be done through the textbook should be included, if appropriate, and immediately assessed. No more waiting for feedback.
The textbook should be modular. This would allow for construction of textbooks from many different sources, potentially choosing the most effectively created resources for each section. Students could create their own textbooks for their personal study, selecting resources that they find to be the most effective for them. In fact, students could contribute modules to a textbook as part of a capstone project for their course.
The textbook content should include metatags, which should be searchable, so that over time related content can be found, and some of the connections between different content areas are made more clear.
Update: Thomas Baekdal reminded me of a couple of more important features: First that the textbook be non-linear so that the learner can access it in any order, and that the textbook should allow for embedding from sources anywhere on the web.
The most important feature I can think of in a textbook should be that it should be at most a place in the learning process, and help the learner develop further questions that they can explore for themselves. It should not be something that stops a learner from wondering.

What else would you like to see in a textbook?

October 23, 2010 / 21 Comments

25 Myths About Homework

Last night I asked people for help with my presentation on Myths about Homework which I am presenting today at Skeptic Camp in Vancouver. Within 15 minutes, we had 20 Myths, within another 15 minutes we had a total of 26 myths about homework with one duplication. Thanks for your help, I’ve turned these myths into a presentation you can view below. I think that homework may still be something which has value, but which probably needs to take a much different form than what it looks like now. Here’s the pretty plain version using Google Docs.

What was really neat about this experience was watching the ideas pour onto the page. I liked working with people, some of whom had other suggestions and ideas about how homework should be done. If your slide or work or idea didn’t make it into this presentation it is because this presentation was about the myths of homework rather than the benefits. I’m sure if I had started a similar project on the benefits of homework I could have had as much participation and good ideas about how to best implement homework.

Edit:

I’ve created a Prezi version which is the one I actually ended up using. It’s missing some of the myths from above but would probably look a bit nicer when it’s actually being used.

Myths about Homework on Prezi

October 8, 2010 / 2 Comments

Is Interactivity in Mathematics Important?

I was asked if I thought that including interactivity in a mathematics was important. The answer to me is most definitively YES! In fact, I believe that if your mathematics and science classrooms do not include at least some of the features that I will describe below then you are doing a great disservice to your students. It may not be possible to include all of these examples in every context, but at least some of them are crucial to a deep understanding of mathematics and a recognition of its importance in our lives.

Graphing

When I attended high school in the early 90s, every graph I had to produce I did by hand. As a result my graphs looked something the following.

The day I realized I could cook bacon whenever I wanted

image credit: http://xkcd.com/418/

Now the problem with this of course is that if I want to modify the graph above and compare my modification against my old graph, I need to redraw the entire graph from scratch every single time. While there is some merit in learning the skill of creating a crisp neat graph, it is difficult to progress to more advanced graphing concepts when it takes you 15 minutes a graph to produce something worth reading.

Imagine the situation today where I can produce a graph immediately and then modify it, add an extra graph to compare two graphs, save my graph to look at later, etc… This is what modern graphing software allows us to do. This kind of interactivity allows students to look at much deeper concepts involved with graphing and of functions. Look at this example graph.

Sorry, the GeoGebra Applet could not be started. Please make sure that Java 1.4.2 (or later) is installed and active in your browser (Click here to install Java now)

Multimedia

Imagine you are working on learning how to find the equation of a line from the graph. Which would you rather do; a worksheet with 20 different graphs on it, or would you rather look at a picture like the one below and find 20 lines first, and then find their equations. At least one of these examples involves recognizing that the lines come from nature.

Sailing ship

image credit: Toomas & Marit Hinnosaar

What if you are looking at the properties of quadratic functions? Do you want to stare at a bunch of graphs of quadratic functions, or do you want to look at video footage you created yourself? Here’s what that looks like. Now the students can collect data about the graph, learn about the relationship between thrown objects in our world and parabolas, and then finally they can analyze their data and come to a conclusion about the motion of thrown objects. Here’s what that kind of video looks like (this was video collected from a webcam, transparent graph paper over-laid on top of the video and the entire clip slowed down; all in iMovie).

Want students to create their own trigonometry word problems for practice? Maybe you’ve recognized that the best way to understand the formatting of a word problem is to create one for yourself. Instead of having students write out a word problem on paper, look at what happens when you have them create a story-line and video tape themselves performing their word problem.

Other ideas

In probability class you have them running simulations with dice (or even better playing a game involving dice). In calculus, have them compare the instantaneous speed versus the average speed as a homework assignment when they take a drive with their parents. In statistics class have them gather data from their peers and do the statistical analysis of information gathered from class. In geometry, have them prove the Pythagorean theorem by measuring out giant right triangles on a soccer field and compare the known length of the hypotenuse (which they measure) to the expected hypotenuse (which they calculate using the Pythagorean theorem). Use the last idea and talk about experimental error.

Summary

There are lots of other types of interactivity in the mathematics classroom that I haven’t shown here. Interactivity doesn’t have to include the use of technology, but at the very least you should have your students doing something each class, rather than sitting there and being passive recipients of the information.

September 19, 2010 / 0 Comments

What is the minimum number of facts needed to memorize the multiplication table?

If you look at a 10 by 10 multiplication table, you’d think there were 100 facts that need to be memorized.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

1. First important fact is that the order we multiply numbers doesn’t change the answer. So let’s remove all of the unnecessary facts to memorize because we can just remember this rule instead.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

Now we only have 55 facts to memorize. That’s a lot less than 100. I’m willing to bet that most people know this already.

2. We should take advantage of the fact that one times anything is the anything. That will remove 10 more facts from the table.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

3. And of course we should note that ten times anything and you just add a zero (which in later years should be changed to move the decimal place once students are aware a decimal place exists).

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

4. There is a great trick that is used in Stand and Deliver which can eliminate the nine times column. I couldn’t find the original clip from the movie, but here’s the same trick with a bit more explanation than he gave in the movie.

Let’s then cut out the nines times column from the table and look at what’s left.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

5, 6. The two times column and the five times column are just adding by twos and adding by fives, both of which are skills kids should have mastered by the time they are learning multiplication. If they haven’t mastered repeated addition, I would recommend pausing here and having them master it before learning multiplication.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

7, 8, 9, 10. We can also make multiplication by 6, 7, 8, and 9 much easier using the following tricks shown in the movie clip below. This works out to about 4 things to remember to be able to do this trick because of the complexity of this trick.

Now let’s look at what’s left to memorize.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

So now students only have 3 multiplications to remember. Even better, all of these are fairly small numbers so that if they get stuck, they can just count it out using repeated addition. For those of you keeping track, this means we can reduce the entire multiplication table to just 13 total facts to remember. Not bad!

References:

http://www.dadsworksheets.com/v1/Strategies/eight_rules_of_multiplication.html

http://www.redshift.com/~bonajo/mmathmult.htm

September 13, 2010 / 0 Comments

Using Glass in Education

Update: It looks like Glass has been discontinued.

Glass is a new web service which is opening up by invite only at this point. I just discovered it today, and I’m thrilled with the possibilities. Think of Glass as social bookmarking combined with a discussion forum embedded on every website you visit. You can share text comments, links to other websites, even videos on any web page.

Glass also allows you to create groups of users, and share a particular resource with a group. These groups could be useful as you could create a group of your students, and share a discussion about an online resource with an entire group of students.

The potential for collaboration and discussion using Glass is amazing. I wouldn’t use it to replace discussions that you can easily have in person, but it could be a great homework assignment. It can also be a way for students to ask questions with you about a website, and the comments themselves can be embedded within the context of the page as you can specify the location on the page you want the comment to be.

Teachers could use this to evaluate common resources and discuss ideas they have around a particular piece of content available on the web. Students could work in groups and comment on videos in a more private fashion as each comment is available only to the person that is part of the group.

It only works in Google Chrome or Firefox. Check out this video below for more details and here’s another post that discusses Glass in more detail.

September 10, 2010 / 5 Comments

Canadian Educators on Twitter

So a few weeks ago I started a list of Canadian Educators on Twitter using some fun code I found to create a Twitter list from a Google spreadsheet. I’ve created another list because the first list filled up to 250 educators. Links to both lists of Canadian educators are below. The reason why I created these lists in the first place is because Canadian Educators have some distinctly different issues to deal with in our education system than do our US counterparts although there are more similarities than there are differences.

In any case, please follow the educators on the lists below so we can collaborate and discuss Canadian education. Also, come and post information on the #CanEd stream on Twitter.

Twitter list: http://twitter.com/#!/davidwees/canadian-educator/members

If you want to add yourself to one of these lists, fill out this form.
You can view the list directly here as a spreadsheet: http://wees.it/eh or here as HTML: http://wees.it/canadians

Other useful Canadian Twitter hashtags:

#BCed – BC educators

#edtechbc – BC educators interested in educational technology

#ABed – Alberta educators

#MBedu – Manitoba educators

#SaskEd – Saskatchewan educators

#aimlang

(Please let me know if you know of more hashtags for Canadian educators to follow)

July 13, 2010 / 0 Comments

Working on a new podcast for educational reform

A Conversation With Educators This afternoon I had a great conversation with David Miles and Fred Mindlin. David works as an Academic Coordinator in a private school in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Fred works as an educational consultant for the Central California Writing Project.

Both of them are extremely articulate and intelligent people who have a lot to say about education. I’ve known David for about 5 years now ever since we worked together in London, and I met Fred for the first time this afternoon.

I asked David through Skype, and I invited Fred through Twitter, and we all met in a Skype group chat. We decided to continue the conversation from #edchat and talk about educational reform.

This idea for a Conversation With Educators is from the podcast @betchaboy does, The Virtual Staffroom and is something I hope more teachers do. Talking with educators from around the world about what we do is a terrific experience. I hope to chat with more of you next week.

For now you can listen to this podcast episode below, or subscribe to this podcast in iTunes here. This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license so please feel free to remix it and share it, so long as you give proper attribution to the original work.

Listen here: here

For those of you who are curious about the production of this podcast, it was recorded using a program called Skype Call Recorder on Windows, and slightly edited using Audacity.

May 1, 2010 / 0 Comments

How is Twitter better at search than Google?

Wordle - Twitter as Search

When you type in a search phrase in Google, you are relying on the search algorithm Google provides to give you the most relevant search results for your query. The problem is, people have learned how to game those search results, and quite often the best and most appropriate information isn’t going to show up in the top search results for your query.

You want proof of this? Do a search for "pills" on Google. I find it very unlikely that a website which exclusively sells male "enhancement" drugs should be so near the top of the list for Google results for this particular search. Obviously someone has done some trickiery to get their site to be ranked high. One of the most obvious tricks that is used to game Google is to add links to other people’s blogs, generally through spam comments. Another trick is to add referral links to other people’s legitimate sites, hoping these will be picked up by Google Adsense. Update: Apparently Google has found a way to suppress all of the "male enhancement" websites that used to show up for this particular search term. I’m looking for a replacement example.

However in Twitter, you can choose exactly which sources of information you want to include in your stream. You can even say hello to your sources of information and meet them in person at events called Tweet-ups! Instead of relying on a machine algorithm which can be manipulated by unscrupulous 3rd parties, you can have extremely recent and accurate information about the world delivered to you.

If you want evidence that Google is worried about this phenomena, check out their recent moves in terms of joining the "status update" wars. They have developed a new product called Google Buzz to try and draw people into their platform for delivering search, as well as adding recent upgrades to their established Google Reader product to perform the same functionality. They have even added "live search results" to their archived search results in their main ad engine.

Even Google has realized that data which is ranked by live human beings is much more valuable than machine sorted data. Until a machine can analyze two new math websites with no external links to either and tell me which is the best one for my 8th grade class, they aren’t going to be able to compete with a human being in terms of digesting and analyzing information.

You can even send out a question on Twitter and assuming you have enough people following you, you can get a response back. You may get multiple responses back, and get different perspectives on how your particular problem should be approached. One person I met described posting questions to Twitter as, "hundreds of grad students working on your individual problem." If no one knows the answer, or if your question is not interesting enough, you may even not get a response!

A further example of the power of Twitter is the ability of the people who form the Twitter network to self-organize. They can hold chats about specific topics (as is evidenced in the teacher #edchat on Tuesdays) or use Twitter to organize conferences (like the ISTE 2010 conference being organized on the #ISTE10 channel of Twitter).

Twitter is currently much more democratic than Google. You decide on who you follow, you decide on which filters you want to apply to their data, and you decide what information you share. I think that the internet needs to be fundamentally a democratic place in order to be successful as a source of reliable and accurate information.

As a search engine, Twitter is closer to the future and is an excellent way of learning about the world around you. I think that the number of Google searches I do each day has greatly decreased, largely because of this new way I have to collect information. Each person in my follower network does part of the job of checking if the information I would have found in a Google search is worth looking at, decreasing the amount of work I have to do to sift through Google’s endless pages of search results.

April 21, 2010 / 8 Comments

Using Google forms for a “Choose your own adventure” style story

Recently I noticed that Google forms has an option to add multiple pages to a form, and to go to pages based on the responses to multiple choice questions added to each page. It occurred to me that an immediate use of this would be to construct a "choose your own adventure" story which I always loved reading when I was a student.

The basic idea is, the students construct a story where the next page in the story depends on a decision made by the person reading the story. Generally in one of these books the reader flips to a different page depending on their decision and so create their own version of the story. With a sufficiently advanced plot, and a long enough book, there can be a very large number of ways a story can unfold.

To recreate this in Google docs, you have to first create a standard Google form. Navigate to http://docs.google.com and sign in, then click on "Create New" and select "Form". The title of the form will become the title of their book, and the first large textbook becomes the text of the first page on their book. Students may find creating a storyboard of their overall story first (including the various links between the pages) will make constructing the overall form easier. Once they have an idea of how their story will unfold, and what the connections between the pages will be, students should start working on the form.

Google Forms - Multiple choice While constructing your form, you are going to alternate between adding page breaks and adding multiple choice questions. Adding a page break separates the form into multiple pages, and allows you to add a new title for the page and new text for each page. Each page will also need a multiple choice question, unless the student only wants the reader to move onto the next page.

The crux of what makes this work is the ability to add pages, and the ability of a multiple choice question to "Go to page based on answer." In order for this to work, you have to check off this box for each multiple choice question, and link each option of the multiple choice question to the appropriate page (which appears as a drop down next to the option, if you check the box). Students may find that they need to go back and edit the multiple choice questions, as they may add pages after they have already created the questions, or at least I noticed myself doing this.

The very last page of the form will have a submit button. If after each student has created their form, they share it with their classmates, if their classmates click the submit button, the students will be able to see the final path through their book each of their colleagues used. They can then have fun discussing their stories with each other, and exploring ways to make their stories better. Students can also play with the theme of their forms and choose a theme which matches their story.

For a very simple example of what this looks like when it is completed, check this very short and simple story out:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dHhSd3hJcy1YVWdYRXNNQWF1NXNfSWc6MQ

March 31, 2010 / 0 Comments

The Role of Immediacy of Feedback in Student Learning

Update: There has been some recent research that suggests that while the timeliness of feedback is one aspect of good feedback, it may not be the most critical aspects of feedback. Awful feedback given immediately is much less useful than carefully constructed feedback given later.

Abstract

A review of the literature on the role of feedback in learning shows that student feedback is critical to student learning. Although different studies emphasis immediacy in feedback to different degrees, all of the studies reviewed agree that timeliness in feedback is important.

The Role of Immediacy of Feedback in Student Learning

Without feedback of any kind, we would not learn at all, period. We would end up doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, as the fable of Sisyphus (Camus, A. & O’Brien, 1975) demonstrates. As teachers then, one of our primary roles for our students is to provide opportunities for feedback, preferably in different forms. Examining the literature on student feedback, we can see that this claim is supported.

According to Nicol and Macfarlane (2006, p7), there are seven principles of good feedback practice. Good feedback:

1. helps clarify what good performance is (goals, criteria, expected standards);
2. facilitates the development of self-assessment (reflection) in learning.
3. delivers high quality information to students about their learning;
4. encourages teacher and peer dialogue around learning;
5. encourages positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem;
6. provides opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance;
7. provides information to teachers that can be used to help shape the teaching.

When Nicol and Macfarlane (2006, p9) clarify these expectations, they indicate that “high quality information” about student learning means “that feedback is provided in a timely manner (close to the act of learning production), that it focuses not just on strengths and weaknesses.” Quality feedback includes a provision that the feedback is provided close to when the students are learning the material.

Chickering and Gamson (1987, p2) also have seven principles of good practice in practice for education. They indicate that good practice in undergraduate education:

1. Encourages Student-Faculty Contact
2. Encourages Cooperation
3. Encourages Active Learning
4. Gives Prompt Feedback [emphasis mine]
5. Emphasizes Time on Task
6. Communicates High Expectations
7. Respects Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning

Note that here, Chickering and Gamson have indicated that feedback needs to be prompt to be included in their list of good practice for undergraduate education. It is fair to assume that good educational practices at an undergraduate level of schooling are also good practices at any level of schooling.

Learners themselves have an understanding of the importance of feedback in learning. According to a study done on the expectations of students as to levels of support provided by the educational service provider, Choy, McNickle, and Clayton (2009, p8), found that the services found most highly regarded were:

1. clear statements of what I [the learner] was expected to learn
2. helpful feedback from teachers [emphasis mine]
3. requirements for assessment
4. communication with teachers using a variety of ways, for example, email,
5. online chat, face to face
6. timely feedback from teachers [emphasis mine]

Note that feedback from the teachers was listed twice with the qualifiers of helpful and timely. Clearly the students in this study felt that feedback was important enough to mention twice.

McTighe and O’Connor (2005, p5) reiterate from Wiggins (1998) that “To serve learning, feedback must meet four criteria: It must be timely [emphasis mine], specific, understandable to the receiver, and formed to allow for self-adjustment on the student’s part.” They have only four requirements for feedback, and the first of these they list is how timely the feedback must be.

One could argue that timely feedback is most critical in student learning. “[T]imely, detailed feedback provided as near in time as possible to the performance of the assessed behavior is most [emphasis mine] effective in providing motivation and in shaping behavior and mental constructs” (Anderson 2008). Students need the feedback for learning to happen near to the event of learning, according to Anderson (2008), in order to learn effectively, which is what he means by “providing … mental constructs.”

If we view the analogy of learning a physical act, we can see how obvious it is that timely feedback is important. Although feedback from the learning of sport, or even the act of walking is not necessarily directed by teacher, the very world around us provides us with feedback. If we fail to walk properly, we fall down! Kick the ball with your toe, and it is sure to go over the goal. We learn physical actions very quickly because we receive lots of timely feedback about everyone of our actions. The only physical actions which are difficult to learn for some people, assuming capability of performing the action, are the ones where the feedback is delayed.

It is clear that any informed educational practice should take into account how feedback will be provided to the students. Feedback needs to be timely and relevant to the learner’s needs in order to be effective. Educators must therefore provide assessment opportunities for students with timely and relevant feedback built into the assessments or these assessments are limited in value.

References

Anderson, T. (2008). “Teaching in an Online Learning Context.” In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University.

Camus, A. & O’Brien, J., (1975). The myth of Sisyphus, published by Penguin books

Chickering, A. & Gamson, Z., (1987) Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education, AAHE bulletin, 39, 3-7

Choy, S.; McNickle, C. & Clayton, B., (2009). Learner expectations and experiences. Student views of support in online learning, National Centre for Vocational Education Research

Higgins, R.; Hartley, P. & Skelton, A., (2002). The conscientious consumer: reconsidering the role of assessment feedback in student learning, Studies in Higher Education, Routledge, 27, 53-64

McTighe, J. & O’Connor, K., (2005), Seven practices for effective learning, Educational Leadership, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. 63, 10-17

Nicol, D. & Macfarlane-Dick, D., (2006). Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice, Studies in Higher Education, Routledge, 31, 199-218

Wiggins, G., (1998). Educative Assessment. Designing Assessments To Inform and Improve Student Performance. Jossey-Bass Publishers