Blog Post 6
Last week in class, we discussed assessment, specifically looking at the formative and summative evaluations of students and teachers. In addition to talking about the differences, we spoke about how current technology, or software, integrates these types of assessments in their platform. Turnitin, a site for checking plagiarism, commonly used by high schools and colleges, helps teachers and students by identifying areas of the paper that may not be original. However, one pitfall of this software is that the assessment it returns is summative, meaning students are not being evaluated as they progress through their paper. Rather, the students find out about how they did at the very end of the process, often too late to learn from mistakes or even correct them. While Turnitin may do a poor job of formative assessment, software like Grammarly might be doing a better job. Grammarly continuously updates its results (ie grammar, spelling, and plagiarism check) as the student or user types. This means that while some users may just copy and paste a paper in Grammarly to receive a score at the end, the software was designed for summative assessment.
This week for class, we were asked to read Chapter 3 of How People Learn, a section focused on transfer, a process all people take to apply knowledge from one subject area to another. Transfer is one of the key goals of education - to get students to be able to take what they learned in school and use this in everyday life, work, jobs, and other areas of their life. While transfer might seem like it is obviously occurring in school, such as how we use techniques in a writing class to help a history paper, measuring transfer in subjects and in the real-world is challenging. First, we must set the stage for transfer by considering how we teach information to students. For transfer to occur, we must be sure to not overly contextualize knowledge. This means information taught in one subject like Math should not be so specific to a certain situation that students do not even see how it might be applied to another subject. Transfer must also be seen as a process that occurs through time, not one that can be measured at one point in time. This relates closely to the growth mindset - we should help students see their learning as continuous and active, not fixed, to facilitate learning across subjects.
Transfer can only be expected when students view knowledge as a learning experience as continuous and something we can strive to get better at. For transfer to be successful a sufficient level of mastery in the original subject must be obtained. We learn that becoming a master can take 50,000-100,000 hours of practice (in the context of chess), a much larger amount of time that Malcom Gladwell estimates. Studies of transfer must consider how skills change, and the more practice we receive in one domain the better we will be at transferring those skills to new situations. Scratch, for example, a tool to help younger students learn to code, encourages a process of computational thinking. This way of thinking is important for students in subjects like math, science, and computer science. The more students use Scratch, the more experience they will have with computational thinking, making it easier for them to transfer these skills. One nice functionality of Scratch is that it is not language-dependent, meaning the software is not overly contextualized. Programming skills obtained from Scratch can be applied or transferred to many programming languages. This leads us to believe transfer should be measured over time, looking at how speed changes during tasks, rather than a one-time measurement. Skills and experience develop over time, as does transfer of particular knowledge domains.
This week for class, we were asked to read Chapter 3 of How People Learn, a section focused on transfer, a process all people take to apply knowledge from one subject area to another. Transfer is one of the key goals of education - to get students to be able to take what they learned in school and use this in everyday life, work, jobs, and other areas of their life. While transfer might seem like it is obviously occurring in school, such as how we use techniques in a writing class to help a history paper, measuring transfer in subjects and in the real-world is challenging. First, we must set the stage for transfer by considering how we teach information to students. For transfer to occur, we must be sure to not overly contextualize knowledge. This means information taught in one subject like Math should not be so specific to a certain situation that students do not even see how it might be applied to another subject. Transfer must also be seen as a process that occurs through time, not one that can be measured at one point in time. This relates closely to the growth mindset - we should help students see their learning as continuous and active, not fixed, to facilitate learning across subjects.
Transfer can only be expected when students view knowledge as a learning experience as continuous and something we can strive to get better at. For transfer to be successful a sufficient level of mastery in the original subject must be obtained. We learn that becoming a master can take 50,000-100,000 hours of practice (in the context of chess), a much larger amount of time that Malcom Gladwell estimates. Studies of transfer must consider how skills change, and the more practice we receive in one domain the better we will be at transferring those skills to new situations. Scratch, for example, a tool to help younger students learn to code, encourages a process of computational thinking. This way of thinking is important for students in subjects like math, science, and computer science. The more students use Scratch, the more experience they will have with computational thinking, making it easier for them to transfer these skills. One nice functionality of Scratch is that it is not language-dependent, meaning the software is not overly contextualized. Programming skills obtained from Scratch can be applied or transferred to many programming languages. This leads us to believe transfer should be measured over time, looking at how speed changes during tasks, rather than a one-time measurement. Skills and experience develop over time, as does transfer of particular knowledge domains.
I had never heard of or used Grammarly before, so I think it's interesting that it has summative assessment in mind. I'm also only a little familiar with Scratch, but it sounds like it is an important tool because of its potential to result in transfer. As you point out, knowledge that is not overly contextualized leads to better transfer later on. From my brief experience with it in 549, I remember that it was fairly easy to figure out on my own and wasn't tied to any one particular subject like math or science. I like this because school often seems to segregate subjects so much that there is hardly any overlap. I feel like Scratch and other similar tools blur the traditional subject distinctions and let students use the tool however they want.
ReplyDeleteIf you like Grammarly or want to explore some more similar tools, there are a few that do a good job with summative assessment. WriteLab for example allows students to adjust feedback based on the type of paper they are writing and their style. It allows users to visualize their mistakes over each draft to help them see what they are struggling with most.
DeleteI completely agree with your assessment of Scratch. In fact, there are a number of other reasons Scratch is so well suited to teaching youngsters coding besides not being language dependent. One of those reasons is that learning on Scratch is based around completing projects. Learning to code on scratch isn't put in dull, disconnected bits of code to accomplish tiny functions, but as parts of a whole to create a personalized and fun product. Additionally, Scratch has an incredibly active community in which the children themselves create tutorials or "worked problems" for other children to use. Basically, a kid can borrow another kids project, change some variables, and make it their own. That process is called "worked problem instruction" which has been proven to be one of the more successful methods for introductory learning. I suppose the real question is how could we start using worked problems in information literacy instruction?
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that Grammarly also checked for plagiarism - I've never used it before, but I've seen advertisements for it and I thought it was just some kind of browser extension that checked the grammar in your emails. I didn't know it had many more capabilities. I know that in class we talked about the potential ethical issues of Turnitin and other similar sites because they keep the papers they receive, use it feed their algorithm, and hold on to the thing you've created for their own benefits. Do you think Grammarly has a similar system? If so, do you think those practices raise ethical concerns?
ReplyDelete