Readings: Week 5

I feel like a broken record saying this, but this week's readings again left me grasping for more practical details to fill in what sounded like very reasonable, well thought-out theories about how people learn.

I particularly felt this way about Wiggins and McTighe's article.  The idea that teaching for understanding and transfer should be the focus of education is not a radical concept after the other readings and discussion from this class, and it's certainly a noble concept. The first thing that bothered me, though, was that the authors seemed to discuss this as the purpose of high school specifically. I know there are differences at different levels, but I would think that these would be laudable goals for teaching at any level. In particular, if you start implementing these methods in high school and your students don't really have experience with this type of learning for understanding and transfer before that level-- which would surely be the case for most schools in this country-- students are going to be confused and unclear about what's going on, because this type of teaching is so different from everything they've dealt with before.

The thing that really got me about this article, though, was the proposed "meaningful sequence" for teaching about measures of central tendency. It was a lovely plan for how to teach this concept in a way that promotes real understanding, and would probably work quite well in doing so provided the teacher really understood how to implement it. But... it just kept going on and on! The whole sequence had 12 steps, many of which were quite involved and would obviously take quite a bit of time. Now, I've never been a teacher, but the normal class period for high schools is 50 minutes, I believe. I can't ever imagine being able to accomplish everything this plan laid out in that amount of time with a group of 15-25 fifteen-year-olds. The science example discussed following the math one seemed more reasonable, but still like a lot to pack into 50 minutes when you want to get real understanding out of it. Like I said, I've never been a teacher; maybe I'm way off base here. But this really bothered me when it came to the applicability of that article.

This week's chapter of How People Learn was, as usual, a lot to take in. One big thought that crossed my mind as I read about all the ways transfer is important and how to encourage learning for transfer was the issue we talked about last week: assessment. How do you assess transfer of knowledge? Obviously, the article notes various ways that this is done, generally summatively, by asking students to solve some "real-world" problem that requires knowledge they have but have learned in a different context. But this still is a formulaic, plotted situation. The real test of transfer of knowledge is going to be when students have to get into the real world and solve real problems that depend on the knowledge they've gained through education. In those situations, the factors and context involved are almost always going to be more complicated than anything you deal with in school, as are the conditions under which you work. The chapter got at this to some degree, noting that in the "real world" collaboration and using tools are much more common and important. As an educator, you're never going to be able to actually see if the students you teach really effectively transfer those skills to the real world; you can only hope to emulate "real-world" conditions as best as possible.

I was glad that the chapter acknowledged that you have to be able to strike a balance between higher-level, abstract conceptualizations of concepts and actual "real-world" examples and problem solving when teaching; too much of one or the other isn't going to be effective. I think that's probably the hardest part of teaching for transfer, though; how do you strike this balance effectively, especially when your students have wildly different backgrounds and quite possibly wildly different futures?

Class in Review: Week 4

So I had to go look through the slides to remember what content we actually talked about in last week's class, because all I remember is looking at lots of different types of survey questions! Ha.

After pondering everything we discussed about summative and formative assessment, I'm left again with the thought that this stuff is really hard to get right. As librarians, we really want a lot of feedback on how well we're doing what we're doing from our patrons, and we really do want to use that feedback to make things better in the future. But looking at all those different types of survey questions, and debating the pros and cons of each, just sort of overwhelms me. In every situation, it seems like a different approach might work best, and when you have a lot of different stakeholders to please (your boss, the people giving you money, etc.) it makes things even more complicated.

Formative assessment is even trickier, though. As we noted in class, librarians tend to be pretty good at giving formative assessment-- offering advice about what people are doing as they're doing it and observing patrons to find areas they need additional help with. And I was really intrigued by the suggested methods for library-friendly formative assessment strategies. Many of them are strategies that I think would work really well in most educational environments, not just libraries, but are never implemented!

As usual, I kept thinking about how to apply this all to the archival world, since that's where I want to make my career. And as usual, my thoughts boil down "archivists really need to figure this stuff out." When it comes to getting feedback from users, archives are light-years behind libraries. Even getting users to offer summative assessment of their experience in archives and with archival instruction is not something that usually happens. And though archivists are often just as good as librarians at giving formative assessment, getting users to offer formative assessment almost never happens, unfortunately. Part of this has to do with the lack of formal instruction about information literacy in archival settings at all. As the articles I read two weeks ago pointed out, archives still haven't really developed a coherent framework for teaching the sort of skills needed to effectively use archives-- to actually find information and do archival research. Archival instruction focuses almost entirely on how to use primary sources, ignoring how to actually find relevant primary sources that you can use to begin with. If archives actually started teaching, on a large scales, how to utilize the multitude of resources out there for finding materials, I think we could implement these formative assessment strategies, and there would be a lot learned about how people do research, people's knowledge of archival resources, and what we need to be doing as archivists to help the situation. But there's a long way to go to get to that. I can only hope these are the sort of problems I can help fix in my career.