Well, I've blogged a lot less but managed to spit out some kidney stones, so there may be something in that. It looks like publishing the study guides my also be helping the grades (slightly) on the end of the week quizzes, too. I've stopped with quizshow b/c it was underused. Anyway, I've been thinking more about small-scale experiments and the next thing to bug Examview about is rubric grading. See, what other program is even close to collecting enough information about performance to think about isolating the components of a larger assignment - writing, project, lab, whatever - and collecting the grade. That way teachers can see specifically how activities in and out of class affect elements of a large assignment rather than just the overall assignment grade.
All of this is the child of my doubts. Specifically, I was concerned that too much of my focus is on computer-based curricula and that I wasn't questioning the quality of such material. This criticism is and is not true - I do use a lot of computer-based or at least technology-enhanced curriculum - but not because I don't doubt its value from time to time. Rather, this whole year seems an experiment in experimentation. Huh? I mean that I'm using technology to exploit applications that have the potential to measure incremental improvements in students skills and knowledge. Presumably, once I can figure out how to automate the isolation and measurement of specific goals then I can transfer that ability to more creative lessons. You see, I was thinking back to my days in George Hillocks' MAT program at the U of C and a specific experiment that another student and I conducted. We identified specific, goal-oriented lessons and tried to measure the effectiveness of each lesson. Then, we surveyed students on their enjoyment and the utility of each of those lessons. So, we ended up being able to compare/contrast the students' perceptions of the usefulness of a lesson with the actual usefulness in terms of increases in their scores. But, at that time, everything was hand-coded in Excel and we could only run an experiment like this because
1. we were young
2. we had to conduct research projects
3. we were only teaching 1 class a day for four weeks
4. we were teaching that class in teams of four people
5. we did not have families or other major responsibilities
6. we were surrounded by intelligent people whose abilities challenged and inspired us.
Not that I'm not surrounded by intelligent... But most teachers, like myself, have family obligations, clubs or teams, five classes, various school committees, and stuff going on that precludes private research studies. So - what do we know? My answer, unsatisfying, was that I know what I think I know. I blindly trust perception. So all this technology in my class has made me curious because I can run some small scale experiments relatively easily to see if specific interventions change students' scores. It's, perhaps, not as fun as conducting sound and vision lessons and seeing what the incremental change in the use of sensory details is during a unit on writing personal narratives. But I do begin to see ( or perhaps smell) how that could also be automated with good coding, and I never could have thought of that without the raw data of grammar and vocabulary lessons (which aren't exactly pointless, anyway. Especially with ACT's in the PSAE.
Well, gotta go.
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