Always Learning

Posts for February, 2012

Dennis Spisak Joins Pearson Learning Solutions

by admin
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Pearson Welcomes Dennis Spisak

Pearson Learning Solutions is honored to welcome industry veteran Dennis Spisak, one of the 25 Most Influential People in the Career College Sector, according to Career College Central magazine.

Dennis has been in publishing since 1981, and has worked directly with the career college sector of postsecondary education since 1983.  He began his career in publishing as a sales representative for the Gregg Division of McGraw-Hill in PA.  He held several sales management positions with McGraw-Hill and for the past eight years was the VP of Sales, National Sales Manager for the Career Education Division of McGraw-Hill.  He is currently Senior Consultant for Pearson Learning Solutions.  Dennis graduated from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, and holds a B.S. degree and Masters degree in Business Education.  He taught business and office education for ten years at the secondary and postsecondary levels in Pennsylvania.  He has also implemented, conducted, and evaluated programs in industry, and has taught in federal programs dealing with Vietnamese refugees.

Dennis has spoken nationally on such topics as “Using Humor to Retain Students”, “Utilizing Technology as a Retention Tool”, “Teaching the Net Gen Student”, “Teachers—The Lost App”, several topics involved with teaching the adult learner and other general methodology of teaching topics.

Dennis was named one of the 25 Most Influential People in the Career College Sector by Career College Central magazine, and currently serves on the executive board of the Imagine America Foundation as Vice-Chairman.

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Instructor’s Tip: Gaining Diagnostic Insight

by Rachel Cubas
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

By Rachel Cubas, Academic Trainer & Consultant

Knowing what you’ll cover in a lesson, unit or course is critical to the way you develop your course content. You put great effort into ensuring students know the topics that will be covered in each week and that their reading and assignments align with those topics, so as to aid their learning along a logical sequence. This design, albeit purposeful for the learning experience and effective for course organization, can fail to provide us with the knowledge of our student’s current understanding of the subject matter. In other words, we might set forth the outcomes at which we desire our students to arrive, but we don’t often have a great deal of insight as to their starting point, to what they already know (or don’t know). This is a critical piece of information if we intend for their learning to truly build from each course experience. After all, if we consider the essential idea espoused by Vygostsky with the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), we can entertain that knowing how much a student already knows (or does not know) about a subject is an important factor in the greater learning equation.

We’ve established that knowing what our students know about our course topics can be valuable information for us as educators. How can we collect this information on an individual student basis and then translate that into insight across all of our students? Certainly, there are many ways in which we can garner diagnostic information about our students’ knowledge. Let me share just one possibility:

In their book, Classroom Assessment Techniques, authors Angelo and Cross proffer the suggestion to design “Background Knowledge Probes” as a means to assess prior knowledge, recall and understanding. As you may have gained from its title, a background knowledge probe seeks to query each student on their current knowledge. This could include prompting students to self-assess their exposure and even current comfort level with a general topic, an event in history, a technology or tool, a mathematical theorem or virtually any other idea or concept related to the course. The idea is to gather feedback from students on what they already know (or don’t know) about the concepts that will be critical in your particular course. Would knowing what students already know (or don’t know) about your course topics be helpful to you as you facilitate your course?

If you use Pearson LearningStudio to deliver all or a portion of your course, you could build a background knowledge probe using the system’s Exam tool. To do this, you might review your course and select those ideas, concepts, theories, etcetera that are most important for the context of the course. Next, create an exam with each of those critical items and ask students to self-assess their current knowledge and comfort level with each item. Using the Pearson LearningStudio system, provide students with multiple choices/possible answers where they can select the statement that best describes their individual situation. You could offer statements such as “Know about this” “Know how to do this” or “Never heard of this” as choices in each test item. By offering pre-designed choices, you can create a consistent framework of responses that allows for student’s individual assessment on a Likert-scale. As a bonus, you can then set the Pearson LearningStudio system to auto-grade each item and tabulate results to produce Exam Statistics. Once at least two of your students have completed the exam, you can run Exam Statistics to gain comprehensive and item-level insights for all of your students.

Here are a few additional tips you might consider:

  1. Remember that a background knowledge probe needn’t be a comprehensive exam of everything the student does (or does not) know about a concept. Rather than starting with a 50 question exam, for example, select the top 5-10 most important concepts, theories, ideas or topics and begin with those. Of course, some disciplines/courses may differ on the breadth and depth of topics covered, but narrowing the items to the most important ones for your course serves to let students know which concepts will be most important in the course.
  2. Consider requiring the diagnostic exam but not penalizing the student for what they report they do not know. You might let students know they will receive credit for the assignment by simply taking the diagnostic exam, regardless of their actual answers for each item.
  3. Try naming your Exam content item something that minimizes the anxiety or feeling students can have if they see it as a high-stakes exam. After all, you want their self-assessment to be an accurate picture of what they already know, without the threat of penalization. A name such as “Getting Started with ____ (course title or main idea, i.e. Social Psychology)” or “Knowledge Survey” can let students know that you’re interested in their current knowledge on the subject, without it appearing like a high-stakes exam.
  4. Consider taking your background knowledge probes into more granular areas of your course. You might have brief diagnostic exams in each unit or major course section. Or, you might include a diagnostic exam when making major transitions from one topic/area in the course to another.
  5. Utilize the Path Builder tool to require students to complete their diagnostic exam prior to entering the course or unit content.
  6. Utilize tools at your disposal such as Exam Statistics to help you turn individual entries into insights across your students and test items. If you can use Exam Statistics to help you efficiently analyze results across students in your course, you can maximize the benefit of a diagnostic activity without feeling overwhelmed with the time required to elicit, tabulate and analyze diagnostic information in the absence of tools to support you.
  7. Consider “closing the loop” with students near the conclusion of the course by providing an opportunity for review and reflection. If you used the Exam tool to launch a background knowledge probe, ask students to review their diagnostic exam results (stored in the LearningStudio Gradebook). Next, ask them to assess their own learning on those same key course topics now that the course is complete. Finally, ask them to reflect on what they’ve learned and on their learning process/journey (thoughts, surprises along the way, most valuable takeaways, etc). This end-of-course activity can be a qualitative reflection assignment based on a quantitative evaluation (re-issue the same diagnostic exam or review original results) or it can be a quantitative re-assessment using the original diagnostic exam questions. By “closing the loop”, both you as the instructor as well as your students, would have the opportunity to review starting points, assess current conditions and observe any progress made toward the intended outcomes for the course. That’s valuable feedback!

The strategic and progressive design of our courses relies on the intention to see student growth through (and as a result of) the course experience. Knowing what a student already knows about a subject, theory, idea, and etcetera can prove invaluable in helping us evaluate our course content in light of our audience and observing progress in what they know (and don’t know) as it relates to the course. Armed with insight across all of our students, we as educators can be better prepared to make the necessary adjustments to our course delivery as we seek to create meaningful learning experiences.

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From the Desk of Dr. Jeff Borden: College Readiness

by Dr. Jeff Borden
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

For the next 10 months or so we are going to hear a LOT about education in the news.  That’s because it’s an election year and every candidate who wants your vote will have a position on something that is very important to you and I – how we educate our people.

To that end, one of the dozens of concepts that will be discussed, debated, and spun is that of college readiness.  The Obama administration really highlighted American deficiencies in college graduation rates (among many other issues) several years ago and committees were formed, panels were created, and commissions were…well, commissioned to determine how bad the problem truly was and, more importantly, what we might do about it.  One such policy group, the College Board Advocacy and Policy Center (APC) identified 10 things we must do in order to meet the new achievement goal which reads:

“Increase the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds who hold an associate degree or higher to 55 percent by the year 2025 in order to make America the leader in educational attainment in the world.”

In other words, if we want to lead the world again, we need to move from (roughly) 40% of our population graduating with a college degree to 55%, so as to overtake Russia, Canada, Israel, Japan, and New Zealand who all have a higher percentage of college graduates than the USA.  Of course, this number is fluid and we may also have to stave off other countries like Finland, Korea, and Norway, but for now, the mark is 55%, a 15% increase from today.

And so, the College Board APC (like other groups) crafted 10 “Recommendations So Important They Cannot Be Ignored” in order to start fixing the issues and problems they believe are keeping us at unacceptable levels.   Essentially, their 10 recommendations boil down to this:

  1. Available preschool education for all.
  2. Improved academic counseling (P-20).
  3. Improved dropout prevention.
  4. Align K–12 & college standards / outcomes.
  5. Improve teacher quality, recruitment, and retention practices.
  6. Easier admission processes.
  7. More / easier grants & financial aid options.
  8. College must be more affordable.
  9. Increase college completion rates.
  10. Make postsecondary opportunities essential.

Over the past few years, I have heard a lot of educators and visionaries talk about some of these suggestions.  Some suggest that we (the USA) simply don’t have the infrastructure to handle the number of extra students required to meet these numbers.  Others suggest that the research “proving” some of these connections (like pre-school and college graduation) are flawed.

At the same time, I have been part of conversations around creating a $10,000 baccalaureate degree.  I have heard speakers talk about upping the standards for professional development and even certification for all teachers, P-20.

So, while some are talking about whether the question is the right one or if the goal is too lofty and others are focusing on potential solutions, many are left wondering what is going to happen.  Because regardless of your feelings on the desired outcome, I think it is difficult to say that the status quo is ok.  And while fixing the problems that face education are broad, wide, and deep, from politics to unions to certification to measurement and far beyond, I believe it is worth the pain and effort it will take to fix it.

As I look at what it’s going to take, I absolutely have thoughts on all 10 of the recommendations presented here.  But, with a limited amount of time and space, I want to make just a single suggestion that could help fix several of the issues.

A few years ago I was approached by a state Department of Education to lead their online education initiative.  For various reasons not important here, I (obviously) did not take the job, opting to stay with Pearson where I believe my ability to change education is much more far-reaching.  However, during the conversations I had with the Commissioner and various departments I asked a single, simple question for which the answer was the same as (I believe) every DOE in the country.  The conversation went something like this:

Question – “So, would you consider moving to a single system for learning management, a single system for student information, etc., across the state?  This of course would give you significantly more transparency into the habits, behaviors, deficits, scores, outcomes, etc., for every student, at every level of education.”

Answer – “No, that’s likely not going to happen.  There are simply too many districts in our state with too many disparate systems, some of which are home grown, that an effort like that would be impossible.  It’s too political and too expensive.”

I’ve heard this before.  I have witnessed this before!  After all, I work for a company that provides an LMS.  At any given time, especially when I was doing more solutions consulting (sales aid), trying to get a group of faculty at X University to adopt a new LMS, when it didn’t have the ONE, single most significant, deal-breaking functionality of all time, was almost impossible.  (“How can any instructor teach without the ability of a system to randomly assign group members?  It can’t be done!”)

These kinds of arguments, which I realize are extremely important to the individual, really take away from the greater good when it comes to education.  I truly do get it.  There are certain pieces of functionality that I use in my online classes every term that I have come to really appreciate.  And if they went away, it would mean revamping, rethinking, and sometimes even changing assignments, assessments, etc.  However, if the school told me that they would have more insights into student behaviors, student success, at-risk reporting, etc., then that would be different wouldn’t it?  I know that it’s never easy to change policies, process, or technologies, but ROI changes drastically when the entire institution can save time, make more money, have better transparency into data, etc, right?  Unfortunately, often times the answer to that question is simply, “No.”

And then there is the financial part.  “It’s too expensive…” just doesn’t hold water.  Anyone who understands the economies of scale knows why Walmart is able to offer such low prices.  When every school in a state uses the same system, you get the same thing.  Paying for 30-50 different systems on a smaller scale is MUCH more expensive than a single system on a larger scale.  (If it’s not, the bid is bad…)

So, this is the message I have for all 50 states and all educational organizations therein.  The same message would apply to your province, territory, district, country, or any other clustering you are responsible for.  One system.  Go to a single system.  Will it be hard?  Change always is.  Will some people resist?  Sure, there are always some who do.  But here is the better question…will it change education?  Not in and of itself, but the potential outcomes from it should.  How, you wonder?  Just think about it for a sec…

Every student record from every pre-school to every high school to every college funneling into one set of data allowing for trending, scoring, monitoring, etc. – how powerful is that?  As systems get more and more capable and evolve to include outcomes management, financial aid management, learning path creation for truly personalized learning, etc., wouldn’t it be amazing to see students go through that system with complete transparency, continuity, and measurability?  Wouldn’t that be the start of serious change?  As an instructor, I would LOVE the ability to see how my students did at various stages of their educational careers.  It would help me understand when to remediate, when to motivate, and when to hold them accountable.

Specifically, look at numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9 above.  One set of data powering teaching, learning, assessment, financial aid, transcripting, and beyond could powerfully impact advising, retention, completion rates, at-risk reporting, transparency of standards alignment, one click admissions options, etc.

Of course, as an employee of Pearson, I would love for people to include us in this conversation.  I believe that we can provide more single-system options AND far better data collection & analysis than anyone else; all in the cloud, without the need to incur infrastructure costs.  But as I simply look at the issues facing our nation with regard to college readiness and graduation, there are some legitimate tools that can provide answers.  Every day we wait just makes it that much harder to fix…

Good luck and good teaching.

Dr. Jeff D Borden
Chief Academic Officer, Pearson eCollege

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Educator’s Voice: The Testing Effect-Improving Long-Term Retention of Information by More Frequent Testing

by Gail E. Krovitz
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

By Gail E. Krovitz, Ph.D. , Director of Academic Training & Consulting

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3… The idea of testing in education brings out mixed feelings in many of us. We think of excessive standardized testing in K-12 education, or instructors in higher education who assess a semester of content with only a scantron final test. But what if the act of testing is misunderstood and can actually provide an opportunity for learning instead of just assessing learning gained elsewhere? Research on the testing effect shows just that. The testing effect is the “finding that retrieval of information from memory [i.e., as during a test] produces better retention than restudying the same information for an equivalent amount of time” (Roediger and Butler, 2011: 20) and is supported by a strong series of experiments in laboratory settings as well as classroom studies. “In education today, people tend to think of tests as dipstick devices… you stick it in to measure what people know. But every time you test someone, you change what they know” (HL Roediger III, as quoted in Glenn).

Many laboratory studies that examine the testing effect are set up as follows:

“One group of students studied some set of materials and then was given an initial test (or sometimes repeated tests). Retention of the material was assessed on a final criterial test, and the tested group’s performance was compared with that of one or two control groups. In one type of control, students studied the material and took the final test just as the tested group did, but were not given an initial test. In a second type of control (a restudy control), students studied the material just as the tested group did, but then studied the material a second time when the tested group received the initial test; in this case total exposure time to the material was equated for the tested and control groups. The typical finding throughout the literature is that the tested group outperforms both kinds of control groups… on the final test” (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006b: 182).

So in summary, taking a test provides better preparation for future retention of material than does repeatedly studying or re-reading the same material (see studies reviewed in Roediger and Karpicke, 2006b, and Roediger and Butler, 2011). This is particularly true if the final test is delayed, compared to immediately taken after the studying (otherwise known as cramming in educational circles!).

This result may seem counter intuitive – how can taking a test provide better preparation for retention of information on a delayed test (i.e., long-term retention), compared to continuing to study or re-read the same material? But this is actually not surprising if you think about it terms of learning the skills needed for a task: exactly practicing the skill during learning (i.e., taking a practice test), helps you perform better when being assessed on that skill later (i.e., taking a follow up or final test) (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006a). If I want to learn to play tennis, I’m best served by actually practicing the skills needed to play tennis instead of reading about it. Also, research on how memory works shows that retrieving information during a test is not a “neutral event,” but actually impacts the ability to retrieve that information in the future. “People usually imagine memory as a storage space, as a space where we put things, as if they were books in a library. But the act of retrieval is not neutral. It affects the system” (JD Karpicke, as quoted in Glenn).

We might want to chalk these findings up to so-called “mediated” (or indirect) effects of testing. Mediated effects would include that frequent testing encourages students to study more throughout the class rather than cramming right before one or two large tests, or that tests give students feedback about what they do or don’t know so they can refine their future studying efforts (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006b: 182). With mediated effects of testing, “it is not the act of taking the test itself that influences learning, but rather the fact that testing promotes learning via some other process or processes” (Roediger and Kapicke, 2006b: 182). While these mediated effects are certainly valuable, and could lead to recommendations for more instructors to use low-stakes formative testing in their classes, this research focuses on direct or unmediated effects of the tests, something intrinsic to taking a test that helps future knowledge retrieval. “Testing not only measures knowledge, but also changes it, often greatly improving retention of the tested knowledge” (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006b: 181). Unfortunately, researchers don’t currently know why the testing effect works (see Roediger and Karpicke, 2006b for discussion of the theoretical studies investigating this), but the testing effect has been strongly shown in many studies.

Some other interesting findings from this research involve whether or not to give feedback (the correct answers) and what test format is most effective.

Feedback: It is important to give students the correct answers (or “feedback” as it’s called in these studies), as presenting students with the correct response after the test is more effective than simply telling them that a particular question is correct or not (Butler et al., 2007). It is also best to give this feedback after the test as a whole (delayed feedback) rather than right after answering each question (immediate feedback) (Butler et al., 2007). A laboratory study by Butler and Roediger (2008) illustrates the testing effect, as well as the importance of feedback, and of delayed feedback. The experiment yielded the following results for students who did not have a chance to read (study) the assigned passages they would be eventually be tested on (2008: 609):

No study, no initial test: 10% correct on final test

No study, initial test, but no feedback given: 18% correct on final test

No study, initial test, immediate feedback given: 42% correct on final test

No study, initial test, delayed feedback given: 57% correct on final test

Similar patterns were observed in each experimental set up, illustrating the importance of the initial test and the use of delayed feedback.

Interestingly, Butler et al. (2007) mention other studies showing that immediate feedback might be more effective in actual classroom settings (rather than laboratory experiments), and they suggest that this might be due to students not going back after the test to process the delayed feedback (both correct and incorrect questions) since they are not forced to do that as part of an experimental set up. Thus recommending that students make an effort to view the feedback and read correct and incorrect questions and answers after the test might be helpful.

Test format: Studies reviewed here suggest that if the initial test is short answer or essay format (a “free-recall” or “production” type test) it contributes to a larger test effect than if the initial test is multiple-choice (a “recognition” type test); the follow-up test format (whether short answer or multiple-choice) does not matter as much (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006b). However, recognition type tests do still show a strong test effect, so it’s probably still advantageous to use them in educational settings (like if the class size is too large to make manual grading of free-recall tests realistic).

Another potential issue of using multiple-choice or true/false questions on tests is that students are exposed to incorrect answers during the testing process. Therefore, “students may sometimes endorse false items as being true and thereby learn erroneous information,” or “even if they read a false item and know it is false, the mere act of reading the false statement may make it seem true at a later point of time” (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006b: 203). This is called the negative suggestion effect (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006b). To counterbalance this, providing feedback is extremely important on recognition type tests, and research shows that “if feedback is provided after a multiple-choice test, the negative effects are completely nullified” (Roediger and Butler, 2011: 23).

So far much of this discussion has focused on results of laboratory studies on the test effect, but what about studies in actual classrooms? Classroom findings might differ because students are responsible for more information in the classroom than in a laboratory setting, the material is presented in a variety of ways, and “students also differ greatly in the amount of studying they do before tests, in how soon they begin studying (relative to when tests occur), in their interest in the course material, and in their motivation to learn” (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006b: 195). However, studies in classroom settings also demonstrate a test effect. In a study looking at frequent quizzes given in a middle school science class, McDaniel and Agarwal found that frequent quizzing increased student performance on unit tests from 79% correct (for material not previously tested with a quiz) to more than 90% correct (2011: 403). The quizzing effect persisted until end of semester test (79% on what was quizzed vs. 72% on non-quizzed content) and an end of school year test (68% for quizzed vs. 62% non-quizzed content) (2011: 403). The quizzes were low stakes, less than 10% of students’ grades. In another example, one section of a statistics for psychology course included a test of four short answer questions at the end of each lecture period (totaling around 8% of the final grade), while another section of the same class taught by the same professor did not use these end of class tests. Students in the section using the end of class tests scored significantly higher on the exams (mean score of 86% versus 78%), and fewer students overall earned mean exam scores lower than 70% (5.4% of class versus 27.1% of class in comparison section), compared with students in the course section not using the tests (Lyle and Crawford, 2011).

All in all, research on the testing effect is compelling, and suggests that testing (or information retrieval practice) has a greater effect than studying on long-term retention of information, so more frequent “retrieval practice” (i.e., testing/quizzing) in the classroom should help increase long-term retention of information (Roediger and Butler, 2011). This research should hopefully allow us to see tests as opportunities for learning, instead of just instruments that assess learning acquired place by other means, and maybe it will inspire some of us to include more frequent testing in our own classes.

Sources:

Butler, A.C., J.D. Karpicke, and H.L. Roediger, III (2007). The effect of type and timing of feedback on learning from multiple-choice tests. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 13(4): 273-281.

Butler, A.C., and H.L. Roediger, III (2008). Feedback enhances the positive effects and reduces the negative effects of multiple-choice testing. Memory and Cognition 36(3): 604-616.

Glenn, D. (2007). You will be tested on this. Chronicle of Higher Education 53(40): A14. Accessed online on January 10, 2012 at http://chronicle.com/article/You-Will-be-Tested-on-This/14732

Lyle, K.B. and N.A. Crawford (2011). Retrieving essential material at the end of lectures improves performance on statistics exams. Teaching of Psychology 38(2): 94-97.

McDaniel, M.A., and P.K. Agarwal (2011). Test-enhanced learning in a middle school science classroom: the effects of quiz frequency and placement. Journal of Educational Psychology 103(2): 399-414.

Roediger, H.L., III, and A.C. Butler (2011). The critical role of retrieval practice in long-term retention. Trends in Cognitive Science 15(1): 20-27.

Roediger, H.L., III, and J.D. Karpicke (2006a). Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science 17(3): 249-255.

Roediger, H.L., III and J.D. Karpicke (2006b). The power of testing memory: basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science 1(3): 181-210.

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