Alfie Kohn: Do Tests Really Help Students Learn or Was a New Study Misreported? The relationship between educational policies and educational research is both fascinating and disturbing. Sometimes policy makers, including those who piously invoke the idea of "data-driven" practice, pursue initiatives that they favor regardless of the fact that there is no empirical support for them (e.g., high-stakes testing) or even when the research suggests the policy in question is counterproductive (e.g., forcing struggling students to repeat a grade).
Sometimes insufficient attention is paid to the limits of what a study has actually found, such as when a certain practice is said to have been proved "effective," even though that turns out to mean only that it's associated with higher scores on bad tests. Sometimes research is cited in ways that are disingenuous because anyone who takes the time to track down those studies often finds that they actually offer little or no support for the claims in question. What interested the two Purdue University researchers, Jeffrey D. Curso de didactica. Cómo enseñar. Is Memorization Bad for Learning? Making kids memorize too much is the problem with U.S. schools, according to a new movie documentary, "Race to Nowhere. " This movie, produced by a housewife and first-time film maker, is being embraced all across the country by teachers and parents . It is a hot item, especially in New Jersey, where the teacher's union is using the movie as a propaganda weapon against Republicans and Governor Christi.
This movie is called "a must-see" by the . Schools, especially in New Jersey, are helping to arrange public showings. Parents, teachers, and educational policy makers are urged to join this propaganda campaign and shown how to do so on the movie's web site. assistant editor, James Freeman, has done us all a favor by challenging the merits of this movie. I am not a uninformed housewife. I wrote a book recently, (available at Amazon), that focuses on the damaging consequences of misplaced blame. For example, the movie places blame on George Bush for the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law.
Learning: No Pain, No Gain. The "best" teachers are the one's who make learning easy. At least that is what the poorer students say. They may be wrong. The popular belief that it is easier to learn things that are easy rather than harder is also probably wrong. Easy material may not elicit enough attention and engagement to produce lasting learning. So, educators may need to re-think the whole notion of what makes a teacher effective. Making learning easier makes the teacher more popular, but that does not necessarily translate to real student achievement. Kent State psychology professors have just reported a study of this matter with college students. Other research that I have summarized elsewhere shows that students likely do not know material as well as they think they do.
Easy learning, as in a single cramming session, is deceptive. In the Kent State studies, college-aged students were asked to study for a week a pack of 48 flashcards that paired Swahili vocabulary words with their English translations. Problem-based learning. Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy in which students learn about a subject through the experience of problem solving. Students learn both thinking strategies and domain knowledge. The PBL format originated from the medical school of thought, and is now used in other schools of thought too. The goals of PBL are to help the students develop flexible knowledge, effective problem solving skills, self-directed learning, effective collaboration skills and intrinsic motivation.[1] Problem-based learning is a style of active learning. Working in groups, students identify what they already know, what they need to know, and how and where to access new information that may lead to resolution of the problem.
Meaning[edit] Barrows defines the Problem-Based Learning Model as:[4] 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. In order to instill a project based learning environment into a classroom, the teacher must revolve his or her teaching style around five main criteria. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. History[edit] Promoting lifelong learning in psychology. The learning that takes place after a psychologist earns a doctoral degree is a crucial but often-overlooked part of the field’s educational continuum, APA Executive Director for Education Cynthia D. Belar, PhD, said kicking off APA’s 2010 Education Leadership Conference on Sept. 11. The annual meeting, during which psychologists visit policymakers on Capitol Hill to advocate for psychology’s educational priorities, focused this year on lifelong learning in psychology. “We have paid more attention to undergraduate and graduate education in psychology than to professional development and lifelong learning — despite the fact that much more time is spent in the course of one’s career than in the preparation for that career,” Belar told more than 130 representatives of psychology education and training groups, psychological membership organizations, APA divisions and APA governance groups.
Although there’s evidence that CE works, she said, the research base is not yet strong enough. Making e-learning work. It’s 10 a.m. on a Monday. Do you know where your Psych 101 students are? It’s becoming more likely that they aren’t in your classroom. Nearly 30 percent of higher education students now take at least one course online, and that number is on the rise, according to a College Board survey.
It found that more than 5.6 million students took at least one online course in fall 2009, a 21 percent increase over the previous year. As the technology advances, chances are most psychology educators will be asked to teach an online course at some point. . • Promote schedule flexibility. Now, researchers are even finding that this flexibility may spur more critical thinking. . • Get to know your students. “On average, blended approaches combining online and face-to-face instruction had better student outcomes than conventional instruction,” says educational psychologist Barbara Means, PhD, director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International and a coauthor of the meta-analysis.
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom. More on Jazz-band Teaching and Learning. I probably need to explain a couple of learning principles mentioned in the original post on jazz-band teaching and learning. One principle is operant conditioning, which is inherent in band classes. It will truly pay off to find creative ways to employ operant conditioning in academic-course classes, because it is the most powerful teaching technique I know of. I assume they teach this in colleges of education, because kindergarten teachers do a version of it all the time with the “gold-star” reward paradigm.
Fully implemented, the idea is that little successes bring little rewards, and as the desired behavior becomes established, the bar is raised for further reward, or positive reinforcement as the psychologists call it. The reward in jazz-band, and that includes orchestra band class, is the immediate gratification a student gets when playing a few new notes or chords, for example. Learning occurs in small successive steps with each step the student DOES something feedback is immediate. Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning.