1/24/10 How do we measure “Hard Data”

Posted by on January 24, 2010 
Filed under Reading logs

Hey Everyone,

The first idea that I found very interesting was from the “course anatomy” article. As the title foreshadows, the article describes each part of a course as its anatomy. I thought this was a great analogy! Making sure that a course’s readings, activities, discussions, assignments, etc. all fit together is vital. I also like the idea of thinking about teaching a class as a research experiment. It just makes sense to me. You design it, you expose students to it, you check to see if you are meeting learning objectives (which is the tricky part for me), you modify the course, and you repeat it.

I also agree that teaching needs to be public. However, it still seems to be mostly private. In my field we have the journal “teaching sociology” which is an attempt to go more public with techniques shown to work. I’ve picked up some really useful activities from it. It would be great if it included entire course designs, or more examples of quality assessment techniques. I loved the quote “An account of teaching without reference to learning is like a research report with no results.” But I still struggle with how to best measure “learning”.

The “Learning that Lasts a Lifetime” article dealt with this on a theoretical level. I agree that we need to stop reinforcing “shallow types of learning that cannot be used in life”, but I am still searching to find a way to measure “deep learning that can be used in life”. We tend to measure memorization because it’s cheap and easy. The author calls it “leaving out the hard data”. But that hard data is what we need to measure, because it is the goal of education.

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