Appendix
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Healthcare swallows everything
Healthcare swallows everything Government spending as a percentage of GDP This is basically the story all over America: John Arnold, director of the Office of Strategic Planning and Budgeting, said that Medicaid and other health-care expenses are predicted to grow to as much as 40 percent of the state budget by 2015. That will force… Continue reading
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The Edupunk’s Guide to a DIY Credential: A Review by Someone Else
Part of the reason I started Hapgood was to try to break the habit of wasting time engaging in Big Rhetorical Debates about Stuff That Capital-M Matters. Hapgood is largely about me getting back to the research and implementation focus that grounds me, and keeping the rhetorical stuff intermittent and focused on pressing concerns. I’m… Continue reading
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Increased Course Structure Improves Performance in Introductory Biology
Increased Course Structure Improves Performance in Introductory Biology Lots of interesting (and maybe dubious?) methodological stuff in this. Its primary value for me was articulating a complex structured design fully, and testing that full design (rather than one or two smaller interventions). If you want to restructure your class like this, you could do it… Continue reading
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Do pre-tests boost achievement in online courses?
From an older paper which found that online courses involving pretests outperformed F2F instructions, but that online courses with no pretest showed no difference: There exists a possibility that a pre-test works as a moderator affecting teaching and learning processes of ODE settings. For example, a pre-test might provide information for the online instructors to… Continue reading
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Why Self-Reported Evaluations Are Evil
Well, not quite. But this from Mazur is pretty depressing (though thoroughly expected if you read the literature on this sort of thing): These are two concepts from physics, and as you can see the students who say they were confused on a concept score significantly higher than the students that say they are not… Continue reading
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Publishing Gives Hints of Revival, Data Show
Publishing Gives Hints of Revival, Data Show The “buggy-whip” theory of industry collapse has never really sat well with me. You know, the idea that the buggy-whip producers couldn’t see that cars would collapse their industry, etc. Here’s the problem — did anyone back then really produce (and only produce) buggy-whips? I imagine most “buggy-whip… Continue reading
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Stat Lit Chart of the Day
Stat Lit Chart of the Day This chart could mean that the more education you get, the more you drink. How many of your students know what else could it mean? Continue reading
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Generational Learning Styles Are Bunk, Part 28
Via Downes, this 2008 summary of the research on whether today’s students really do learn differently. The answer is probably best summed up in these two excerpts: “In contrast to the dubious bromides provided by the “experts” quoted above, a review of educational research reveals that there are virtually no research-based findings or evidence drawn from robust… Continue reading
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Spaced retrieval: Absolute spacing enhances learning regardless of relative spacing.
Spaced retrieval: Absolute spacing enhances learning regardless of relative spacing. Sorry, no online version. But the abstract says it all — spaced retrieval matters, but these systems to perfectly control the spacing (through gradually increasing it) may be hooey: Repeated retrieval enhances long-term retention, and spaced repetition also enhances retention. A question with practical and theoretical significance… Continue reading
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Great base rate fallacy explanation
From (what else?) a debunking of one of Gladwell’s heroes: In statistics, you can’t judge the predictive oomph of anything without knowing the population prevalence of the event or condition you’re studying. Here’s a simple way to see how easy it is to fall into what they call, in the field, “base-rate neglect”: Suppose you’re… Continue reading
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