As we emerge from the pandemic and head into our first post-pandemic school year, the results of our new survey of teachers gives us hope for a brighter future and, at the same time, reaffirms our deep commitment to staying laser-focused on recovery.
The findings show:
Nine out of 10 teachers say they’ve been able to identify learning gaps that need to be addressed.
84% of teachers believe…
Working with a client in the veterinary space here in New Zealand, I administer and then de-brief Ensize DiSC analyses of final year veterinary science students’ personal and work styles as part of the recruitment process.
It is just one part of the process to offer roles to the best of the graduates in their final year at vet school and it has highlighted one interesting aspect.
The Ensize…
Whenever I engage people in a practice activity (not role play, but practice) during a workshop, there is always someone who claims that the situation is contrived and that leads them to behaving in ways that are different from what they would normally do.
My response is simple and direct: “That’s the point.”
The purpose of such activities is to try out different and more effective ways of…
There are two quite different change situations I am working with currently, and although the scenarios are completely different, the change process and its impact are remarkably similar.
That should not be a surprise as we human animals undergo transitions whether it be a change in job, change in environment, change in relationships, change in skills and capabilities by working through a…
So you have just started your first job? What might you expect of a highly qualified new graduate entering the workforce, whether veterinarian, engineer or a host of other professions (those are the professions I have mostly worked with)?
Redesigning Education: Iterating towards Mastery I recently listened to a podcast with Scott Looney, Headmaster of the Hawken School in Cleveland, Ohio, and also the founder of the
Explanations from alleged masters of shape dissection
We’d just invited a few thousand students to try our latest experiment in online open-ended response activities—a controlled trial with pre- and post-test questions focused on concept transfer. We started reviewing their work, but the data from the control group stopped us in our tracks. We got page after page of responses like this:
This kind of answer wouldn’t be so surprising, except that all of these students had just solved four numerical “find the area of this polygon” problems perfectly, including one with exactly this shape.
We were testing an activity in which students would interact with each others’ open-ended explanations and ideas. They’d learn about finding the area of polygons by dissecting them into simpler shapes.
Our control group watched a video lecture on the subject, then worked through typical textbook-style exercises on the subject, like these:
Plenty of students solved every one of these exercises correctly. Typical standardized tests might suggest that these students had mastered shape dissection. But a third of those students couldn’t give even a partial answer to the “explain why” question above; another third gave poor or incomplete answers.
We didn’t design our experiment to look at this issue: we included these area-finding problems as a “dummy” activity to parallel the richer discussions in our experimental group. Maybe the issue is that the “explain why” prompt involves more algebraic knowledge. Besides, our experimental population is not necessarily representative.
But the intense gap between the procedural and conceptual assessments here still shook me.
Have you ever gotten an “A” in a class but felt you didn’t really understand the material? That seems to be exactly the disparity we’re seeing here. How many numeric-input or multiple-choice tests would exhibit the same problems?
We’ve long discussed our suspicions around scores taken from this kind of problem; we didn’t expect to confront such jarring examples so directly!
