A Powerful Learning Environment

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A Powerful Learning Environment

• Professor David Lines
• The Robert Gordon University

2
Two Cultures of Assessment

• Assessment of Education
• Assessment for Education
• The first has crowded out the second

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The Void theory Instructional Approach

• The students brain is an empty vessel into which
  facts can be poured.
• Result
• Encourages superficial (rote) learning
• Regurgitation of facts
• Lazy teaching?

4
Constructivism

• Essentially (but not uncontroversially) learner
  has to make his or her own sense of the
  information supplied.
• Teacher supplies scaffold for learning
• i.e. provides support on which learning rests,
  rather than the learning itself (which the
  student has to construct internally).

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Scaffolding

• Teacher has to build in Gardners notion of
  multiple intelligences, Ebbinghaus curve of
  forgetting, Tony Buzans mind maps, ShÖn etc in
  building the scaffold, hence
• Case studies, role-plays, memory games and so on.
• Thus, learning (and the learner) becomes active.

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Active LearningDrefus (1986) described a
pattern. We

• Observe (parents, peers, teachers employers)
• Copy (but mediated by our personal experiences)
• Use heuristics (rules of thumb)
• Use intuition and pattern recognition, until
• As experts we develop short-cuts.

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Assessment Active Learning

• The teacher becomes more a mentor or critical
  friend and given this change in the teaching and
  learning environment, the assessment regime must
  change as well.
• Learners must self-discover in a safe
  environment (i.e. where mistakes are accepted)
  and assessment must provide feed-forward.

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From Testing to Assessment

• Assessment must shift from pass/fail notions,
  from high-stakes to low(er), from end-of course,
  from summative to formative
• in other words, from testing to (true)
  assessment.

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Constructive alignment

• Unless assessment changes in this way all else
  will fail
• Dochy (2001) describes the Backwash effect
  the educational equivalent of Greshams Law.

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A Powerful Learning Environment(Direick Dochy,
2001)

• Teaching, learning and assessment are carefully
  aligned
• The student is an integral part of the process
• Both the outcomes and the process of achieving
  them are assessed
• The assessment process uses a variety of
  approaches, including real-life scenarios that
  require decisions to be made

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A Powerful Learning Environment

• 5. Evidence for success is presented in a
  portfolio a shift from quantification to a
  portrayal (Birenbaum, 1996 Palomba Banta,
  1999). Possibly not time constrained
• 6. The process of learning involves tasks that
  engage the student, are meaningful, challenging
  and authentic
• 7. A reflective diary is maintained by the
  student and is central to the learning process.

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Pie in the Sky?

• What are the alternatives
• Throwing books off the bridge?
• or
• Shifting the paradigm?