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Teaching Workshops Fail to Spur Learner-Centered Teaching
Teaching Workshops Fail to Spur Learner-Centered Teaching New article to be published in BioScience. Ebert-May and her five coauthors examined data from two multi-day programs, one of which occurred over several years and one of which was repeated annually. Both programs led to participating faculty knowing more about inquiry-based teaching, as expected, and a large Continue reading
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Don’t Show, Don’t Tell? Direct Instruction Can Thwart Independent Exploration
Don’t Show, Don’t Tell? Direct Instruction Can Thwart Independent Exploration New study, to be published in Cognition. Far from being a salvo in the never-ending direct instruction vs. discovery learning war, this a cautionary tale about the subtleties of presentation, especially with small children: So what’s a teacher or parent to do? Schulz is quick Continue reading
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The Great Threat to Higher Education is Medical Costs, Not Bubbles
To be clear about my last post, there are some catastrophic economics of higher education down the pike; they just aren’t bubbles. The biggest one? Rising health costs for seniors and the disabled. As health care takes bigger and bigger chunks out of the GDP it is going to crowd out spending on a lot Continue reading
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The “Tuition Bubble” and Degree Oversupply
There’s a lot of neat stuff in Carnevale and Rose’s The Undereducated American (and if you can’t read the whole thing, the first ten or so pages are essentially a Powerpoint of the findings — they will take you all of two minutes to flip through; you have no excuse). One of my favorite pieces Continue reading
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OER and Sandra Lee’s 70/30 Semi-Homemade Cooking
I’d never heard of the IKEA effect, the tendency of people to overvalue work done themselves, but it seems really pertinent to OER (and OpenCourseWare). As an example, Dan Ariely points out when cake mixes were first introduced, you just added water. Simple! And no one bought them. After focus groups they found the problem Continue reading
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Sharing and Collaborating with Google Docs: The influence of Psychological Ownership, Responsibility, and Student’s Attitudes on Outcome Quality
Sharing and Collaborating with Google Docs: The influence of Psychological Ownership, Responsibility, and Student’s Attitudes on Outcome Quality I haven’t been able to go over the methodology closely, but this finding fascinated me: Participants in all groups believed that collaboration improved the document quality. However, evaluation of the real contribution of collaboration was asymmetrical – Continue reading
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U.S. says colleges with big tuition hikes must explain
U.S. says colleges with big tuition hikes must explain This is almost sadly funny. So there’s all these tuition hikes, particularly at state colleges. It’s out-of-control spending, right? So the DoEd is asking colleges that have the sharpest hikes to explain why they are being so profligate with money. Except, as everyone knows who actually Continue reading
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Plan to Restructure British Higher Ed
Plan to Restructure British Higher Ed I wish I knew more about the British educational system to say for sure, but this sure looks like the voucher slide to me: Willetts, the universities and science minister, said the “conceptual shift” was that the whole framework of regulation needed to focus on “the student in receipt Continue reading
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Serious Discussion About Constructivist Pedagogy
I agree with this, I think: “The constructivist-direct instruction characterization is a false dichotomy, and trying to operationalize something as complex and contextually varied as teaching in such simplistic terms seems to me a mistake. What is needed is not coarse labeling of artificially grouped approaches to instruction; but an iterative program of studies that Continue reading
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