Some days, the internet gods are kind. On April 9th, I wrote, We want talking about educational efficacy to be like talking about the efficacy of Advil for treating arthritis. But it’s closer to talking about the efficacy of various chemotherapy drugs for treating a particular cancer. And we’re really really bad at talking about […]
AAC&U GEMs: Exemplar Practice
A while back, I wrote about my early experiences as a member of the Digital Working Group for the AAC&U General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs) initiative and promised that I would do my homework for the group in public. Today I will make good on that promise. The homework is to write-up an exemplar […]
Disclosure Update
We are disclosing the end of our grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Efficacy, Adaptive Learning, and the Flipped Classroom, Part II
In my last post, I described positive but mixed results of an effort by MSU’s psychology department to flip and blend their classroom: On the 30-item comprehensive exam, students in the redesigned sections performed significantly better (84% improvement) compared to the traditional comparison group (54% improvement). Students in the redesigned course demonstrated significantly more improvement […]
AAC&U GEMS Exemplar Practice Update
A few weeks ago, I gave my example of the homework assignment for the AAC&U GEMS digital working group and invited you all to submit your own. Carrie Saarinen has written up her example of using blogging for essay writing—it happened to be medical students in her study, but it could just as easily have […]
Efficacy, Adaptive Learning, and the Flipped Classroom
Speaking of efficacy and the complexity of measuring it, I had an interesting conversation the other day with Danae Hudson, a professor of Psychology at Missouri State University, about a course redesign effort that she participated in. The initial contact came from a P.R. firm hired by Pearson. Phil and I get a lot of […]
Efficacy Math is Hard
David Wiley has a great post up on efficacy and OER in response to my original post about Pearson’s efficacy plan. He opens the piece by writing about Benjamin Bloom’s famous “2 sigma” problem: The problem isn’t that we don’t know how to drastically increasing learning. The two-part problem is that we don’t know how […]