Learning how to learn

Author: Rui

  • Schraw , 2001

    Epistemological theoretical framework used in my dissertation kinda evaluates or even judge faculty members. I feel it will be difficult to investigate on this aspect, and it will be embarrassing to ask faculty members questions like that.
    Anyhow, it is really embarrassing to use faculty members as the participants in my study…
    Unless, I use them as clients and to ask to evaluate certain CMSs.
    So, what is the theoretical framework behind this?????

    P458
    “A fourth area of future research is to investigate the stability of beliefs across a variety of demographic variables such as age, gender, culture, and academic domain… Jehng et al. (1993) also reported that epistemological beliefs differed across academic domains. Those in the hard sciences, such as physics and engineering, reported more sophisticated beliefs than those in education and the humanities.”

    p460
    “School shape and change beliefs, both as purveyors of knowledge and as epistemological training grounds for developing students. The existing research invites the conclusion that schools should make the effort to change beliefs in positive ways, although it is less clear how those changes should occur”.

    Possible research question: which dimension of epistomological belief influence faculty members’ decision of assessment practice?

    P456
    “There is widespread agreement among researchers that epistemological beliefs develop over time, particularly as a function of college and graduate education”.

    p460-461
    “Third, for better or worse, teachers model their beliefs for students. It makes sense to help teachers become more aware of their own beliefs, how they model those beliefs, and how their beliefs affect students’ own beliefs and learning”.

    P461
    “These include helping teachers to understand their own beliefs, understanding factors that impact students’ beliefs, promoting a critical thinking pedagogy, and introducing conceptual change into the classroom.”
    Possible research question:
    To what extent are faculty members aware of their own epistemological beliefs?
    To what extent are faculty members aware of the way to model their own beliefs and how their beliefs affect students’ own beliefs and learning?
    To what extent do faculty members understand factors that impact students’ beliefs? (To what extent do faculty members agree that their assessment practice influence their student’s epistemological beliefs?)

    P. 463
    “Indeed, social activities may be ideally suited to develop what Tishman et al. refer to as a “thinking dispositions” that promote deeper learning and critical reasoning”.

    “Reading the second questions, we must focus more attention on developing a guiding model of epistemological beliefs and to use this model to change educaitonal practice”.

  • The call for change in assessment (Delandshere, 2002)

    The call for change in assessment is in part a call to move aways from simple, mechanistic behaviorist notions of leawrning toward cognitives, constructivist, and situative representations(pp.1469-1470).

    Can we imagine evaluative judgments of learning that are dialogic and the result from the interactions among participants in the activity of learning (p. 1480)?
    Can teacher and students communicate their opinions about the assessment process when the teacher is grading the students’ works?

  • Assessment theoretical framework

    Brookhart, S.M. (2004) p442
    Thomas and Oldfather (1997) pointed out the logical connections between individual teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their assessment practices. If one believes knowledge is static, it follow that assessment should focus on scoring content. If one believes knowledge is dynamic, it follow that assessment should focus on constructing a narrative about process. If one believes knowledge is transmitted from experts, it follows that assessments should be individual and focus on cognition, and assessment of parts or subskills assessment should be encouraged. If one believes knowledge is actively constructed and reciprocal, it follows that there should be both individual and group assessments to assess where one performs alone and with scaffolding( )and outcomes of interest should include not only performance but also interest in the subject , risks taken, and attitude. If one believes that the teacher is the keeper and provider of knowledge, it follows that the teacher should be responsible for grades. If one believes students are coconstructors, it follow s that students and teacher should be responsible for assessment. Each of these choices has implications for students’ perceived automomy, self-determination, and self-efficacy.

    Kusch (1999) found some evidence that if this logic does play out in practice. Student teachers who studied reflective practice in mathematics methods assessed during the lesson and asked pupils to participate in their assessment. Student teachers who studied conventionally assessed after the lesson.

    Research question:
    There are logical connections between individual teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their assessment practices in classroom assessments. Do these connections retain in online assessments?
    What are else variables influencing instructors’ decisions of using different types of assessment practices in online assessments?

    Brookhart, S.M. (2004) p.435
    Teachers from different disciplines do use different assessment practices in traditional k-12 classroom (Stiggins & Bridgeford, 1985)

  • Reflection Models

    From
    Thorpe, K. (2004). Reflective learning journals: From concept to practice. Reflective Practice, 5(3), 327-343.
    Page. 329

  • First experience of American K-12 classroom

    The past Friday, I went to Greene County Middle school with Z and S. The teacher was doing a wireless grant in her classroom, and she hoped we went there to observe her and give and some suggestion.
    We went to two classes. The first one was 4th grade, the seconde one was 6th grade. I was more interested in the seconde one, because that was a special education class, which means some of kids in that class were with some kind of disabilities, either mentally or physically.
    Both class sizes were smaller than those in China. I remember when I was in middle schoo, I had 45 classmates. And the alignments of the classroom were different. There were sinks at the back of the classroom and two cabinets. One lecture station and one teacher desk with a computer on it. Each student was using a Gateway laptop. Z explained when we were on the way to the school: this school is poor and many students can’t afford a laptop. So the grant is to assure each kid have access to the computer and internet.
    The teacher applied a lot of activities in the class.
    In the first class, she asked students to look some web resources first, then look at a slide on the wall. Then she asked students find out some features between the earth and the Mars which is like or unlike. Then she review the previous class content. The last part was a quick quiz.
    For the second class, the special education one, she adpoted different activities. Kids were asked to read the internet resources first. During that time, another male teacher came in and sit down beside kids to help them review the resouces. Then they were given a quiz and they were asked to finish the quiz with the book and the internet. The teacher walked around in the classroom to help kids.
    Those kids did look a littel bit different. One little boy was kind of like irretated and anoying. He was lying on the desk and not willing to finish the test. Several other kids also shew different kinds of unstable. But, anyway, I like them a lot, and I think they are so cute, even each of them looked so serious.

  • Why do we need involve students into summative assessment?

    I have been suspicious, even I myself conducted a survey about this topic, and I read an article about involving students into summative assessment. Because almost al people who heard this idea responded negatively.
    They think:

    • Teacher get paid, so it’s teacher’s job to grade.
    • Students don’t know the topic as much as the teacher does.
    • Students don’t know what the teacher is looking for.
    • Students might not be honest when they are peer reviewing others’ work because
      • they don’t want to offend
      • they tend to be biased like
        • give a higher grade to their friends or a popular person
        • give a lower grade to someone they dislike (?)

    But today when I am reading Davies & Wavering (1999), I read this: “Robert Claser’s term “assessments of enablement” (Wiggins, 1989) aptly describes the shift in focus generated by using alternative assessments”.

    This inspires me think my topic from a new angle: to involve students into the summative assessment is to shift their focus from get a higher score to something else. But what is the “something else”? What can attract students’ attention from their final credits to something elase that interests them??
    Engaging them into the learning?
    How the summative assessment could engage them into learning??
    No, I think the possible benefits would be engage them thinking into their future professional development after this summative assessment for this course/program.

    Then maybe we could involve oCategoriesthers, but not students, into the final assessment, like teachers, administrators, student teachers, from local school. Actually, there has been someone who have already done this. Foote and Vermette (2001) did this in their article…

    Can we recruit some outsiders from internet to review students’ e-portfolio as part of summative assessment? The thing is , summative assessment is really about accountability, so it would be hard to control its validity and reliability, especially validity, when outsider’s evaluation is included.

    Then, let me think from another angle: if one of the purposes of alternative assessment is to shift students’ focus, how ?

  • Technology Competitive Grant Application

    I am helping with evaluating these applications from k-12 schools of GA. This process teaches me a lot. I know what this type of application should look like now. I know how different those application proposals could be when they are written by different teams of different school, even they are writing under exactly the same proposal writing rubric…
    Some proposals are really good, but these proposals are usually from schools with a well-trained team, and they usually are wealthy, which means, they might not need this grant , or they might need it, but not as much as those poorer schools.
    On the contrary, there was a poor-written article. It was short, unlogical, not having enough evidence, not persuading… But there was one thing which made me want to recommend them: their data indicating they are really not a rich school and with outdated computers and software. I wished to recommend this school, but my mentor colleague, J, thought they should not be recommended, because they don’t have a good plan of how to use the grant, how to evaluate the implementing results and how to disseminate. These, are really important things to decide if they should get the grant, she said. I had to agree with her, because she was professional at this point. But I still feel… maybe those schools really in need won’t get grants because they don’t have a good writing team…

  • The motivation of performance

    I am rereading the book of Educative Assessment: DesigningAssessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance by Wiggins, Grant. P.  He is talking about the difference between  a traditional unauthentic assessment and an assessment for a real world. One of the biggest differences is that in a traditional inauthentic assessment, students need not to face the real effect of their sloppy, ineffective or incomplete work at school.  On the contrary, the same student might work like a dog, just to assure a public play during the weekend successful.

    At this point, I start to connect the web portfolio in the class which I amteaching: students are required to develop a web portfolio, using Google pages creator, to demonstrate the projects they learn during this class, and to reflect on their learning process and the learning objects.  Students from formal semesters of this class shew nagative attitude toward the reflection part. They felt that work was laboring and boring. Some students complained that part was meaningless since it was just repeating what they have already done.  Based on these situations, Wiggins’ opinions are important at motivate students to reflect in their portfolio: 1.  students need to realize that this portfolio is public . Instructors need to enlarge the publicity of their portfolios. Peers, mentors, and other stakeholders need to be invited to visit these students’ ongoing portfolios, and make comments and give feedback; 2. students need to understand and keep in their mind of the purposes and audience  of their portfolios.  Do I intend to develop this portfolio just to meet the class’ requirements? Could I use it for future job hunting?  Who are and will be my portfolio’s audience? What do I want to demonstrate in my portfolio?  What is the most important part in my portfolio? Students need to keep these in their mind when they are planning and developing for their portfolios.

  • Balance between e-Portfolios’ using for summative and formative assemssment

    I just finished reading Dr. Helen Barrett and Joanne Carney’s paper of Conflicting Paradigms and Competing Purposes in Electornic Portfolio Development.

    It is really a good paper for me because it answered many of my questions.

    I have been always wondering why many people gave up updating their electronic portfolios after the class or the program as I saw. Also, when I went to EDIT2000 e-portfolio showcase, I talked to two students and they shew me their artifacts. But one of the students forgot what she did and how to demonstrate the power point slides.

    Maybe it was just because she was not familiar with her works. But what is the reason behind these phenomenons? We usually look E-portfolios in Eudcation as :

    • an assemssment tool
    • a tool to help life-long learning.
    • Marketing goal to show the author’s accomplishment to get a job

    Barrett’s paper answered my question: There are conflicts when e-portfolio serves both as assessment tools for institutions and story-telling tool to help life long learning. Barrett said, “Portfolios are considered products, and are evaluated summartively to hold teacher candidates accountable for demonstrating particular levels of achievement. Assessment data from portfolios used for this purpose are aggregated to reflect the performance of a particular educational or professional organization. While administrators often implement electronic portfolios for this assessment purpose, students usually view this type of portfolio as something “done to them” rather than something they WANT to maintain as a lifelong learning tool…”

    Barret and Wilkerson then put forward a new taxonomy to support institution need for an assessment system and learner needs for a reflective portfolio to support deep learning:

    Barret--Balancing Assessment Tool and Reflection learning

  • Learning by design VS Design based research

    My advisor suggested me use learning by design as my theory framework of my research on e-p.

    Meanwhile, we will have the class of Design based research.

    I know they are different things because design based research is more like a research methodology when learning by design is a learning theory.

    But today maybe we can combine both . Because my intentional research participants, the doctoral student in instructional technology program, are people who are doing or will doing research by themselves.

    When I apply blog into e-p of the first year review, it will be a strategy of learning by design for the first year doctoral students.  Meanwhile, that will be a design based research because this e-portoflios research is based on design an innovation on the current e-portfolio base.

    I am still not sure whether my though is correct. I need read more.