10.15.08+King's+Cup

King's Cup!
from [|Wikispaces : scied552 - all changes] by sbmcdon Here are out very scattered notes/thoughts from this week!

In relation to testing for learning.... We talked about gains and using them to determine if tests are valid: multiple choice tests don't determine what you know, maybe okay to use as a crude measuring stick of what you learned. near zero or negative gains I don't know what they're thinking or how they got there or what

Assess the person's current state via interview; and particular questions would let you know what the student did and didn't know about the concept. So you'd need both pre and post interviews.

How in educational research do you reduce the "noise" of students who don't care about the assessment (ex.pre and post exams for concept change with Phys 250)? How do you explain negative gains; are they just people who filled in bubbles at random?

Testing for knowledge versus testing to see whether the person has learned Cognitive: Could learn by interacting, or by your own Situated: Even if you read a paper your interacting socially, all learning is social-- are they just cognitive but more encompassing?

If things aren't suppose to be simple, then why is simplicity so lauded in scientific theories?

Could you design a situative and then a cognitive learning experiment and then compare? how could you remove the social aspects from the experiment? It would involve pre and post-tests and two groups. One group taught individually, and one group that did social-group work. Which group had better gains would indicate which group learned more? But this isn't really testing learning,it's probably testing something else...so what if you measured neuron connections?

Greeno's claim that even reading a book is social: There's no interaction between the individual and a book, not like a conversation. To Scotts response about how observing a coral reef is/isn't social... So if you write down a note to yourself of something that no one else taught you (i.e. an observation) (imbue that paper with meaning if you will), then forget the information that you wrote (the observation/sketch etc), then come back later while re-reading your notes and are reminded/retaught that information, then what is that? Cause your past self just taught you something so is that a social interaction? If i talk to myself am I self-teaching (independently not talking)

In educational research things are so over-simplified and decontextualized that they have very little meaning or they have such small sample sizes and are so specific that they can't be generalized. The argument that there is no such thing as generalizable educational research unless it's on a very superficial level came up. Multiple choice testing will tell you that someone learned something, although what they learned is unclear, and //how// they learned is certainly unclear.

On emergence theory: So in Physics, there are some macroscopic events that are irreversible: you drop a cup off a table and it breaks, it can't spontaneously go back together. But on an atomic level, everything is reversible, there is nothing that can't be undone. So how can things on a very small level be reversible and act in one way, but when you zoom out be totally different? So if we apply this to learning, maybe learning is a very large thing, and when we try to piece things out individually and pin them down with definitions, we end up with something that looks nothing like learning. Like a pointillist art piece, where up close it's unrecognizable but from far away it resembles something familiar.