Writing scientific papers is rather like writing poetry in an ancient verse form. Everything you want to say has to be forced into predetermined sections: introduction, method, results, discussion. You must never say “I,” and the passive tense is preferred. Inevitably all the interesting things get left out.
![Say bye-bye to the Likert scale!
A really interesting research paper on an experiment comparing responses between a five-point Likert scale and a 250-value “visual analog scale.”
Randomly assigned participants spent the same amount of time on each, but those using the visual scale made finer adjustments to their responses, resulting in more precise data. If you have ever felt you’ve had to compromise between choosing a “3” or a “4” on a Likert scale, you can understand why this research matters.
Even more interesting is the description in the paper of a similar device from the early 19th century: “a metal plate […] had 10 scales, each marked off in 100 parts, and labeled […]. A system of sliding markers was provided so that a […] judged position on each scale could be graphically displayed.”
The authors of this paper argue that use of such visual scales permit the ”detection of small differences and far more possibilities for data analyses” through fine-grained web-based data collection.
Frederik Funke and Ulf-Dietrich Reips (In press). Why Semantic Differentials in Web-Based Research Should be Made From Visual Analogue Scales and Not From 5-Point Scales. (pdf)](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/visualturn/10590032374/1/tumblr_ls0o2tVGBR1qzowge)
Say bye-bye to the Likert scale!
A really interesting research paper on an experiment comparing responses between a five-point Likert scale and a 250-value “visual analog scale.”
Randomly assigned participants spent the same amount of time on each, but those using the visual scale made finer adjustments to their responses, resulting in more precise data. If you have ever felt you’ve had to compromise between choosing a “3” or a “4” on a Likert scale, you can understand why this research matters.
Even more interesting is the description in the paper of a similar device from the early 19th century: “a metal plate […] had 10 scales, each marked off in 100 parts, and labeled […]. A system of sliding markers was provided so that a […] judged position on each scale could be graphically displayed.”
The authors of this paper argue that use of such visual scales permit the ”detection of small differences and far more possibilities for data analyses” through fine-grained web-based data collection.
Frederik Funke and Ulf-Dietrich Reips (In press). Why Semantic Differentials in Web-Based Research Should be Made From Visual Analogue Scales and Not From 5-Point Scales. (pdf)
Pew: College students and technology
Community college students and device ownership:
- 67% have desktop computer;
- 70% laptop;
- 72% ipod/mp3 player;
- 94% cell phone.
So tell me again please why online courses and learning management systems are still designed around a desktop paradigm?
Working memory: "the bottleneck is not in the remembering, it is in the perceiving"
That quote is probably the most important sentence I have read in a year.
Working memory refers to the number of things a person can actively hold in memory at once, such as numbers or colors. Most people can remember about four things at once, and some can remember more.
MIT neuroscientists have found that the limitations on working memory do not come from limitations on remembering. Instead they come from how many things can be accurately perceived at once. We bump up against limits in visual perception in the process of encoding things into working memory even before we try to recall those things.
It gets better. The study also found that we do not have a working memory, but actually have working memories — two of them — one in each of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The researchers concluded that the typical limit of four items in working memory at once was actually a limit of two items in the working memory of each of the two hemispheres.
“The fact that we have different capacities in each hemisphere implies that we should present information in a way that does not overtax one hemisphere while under-taxing the other,” said Timothy Buschman, the researcher who conducted the study.
I’ve been aware of the limits of working memory, and how this impacts the design of learning content in instructional technology, from research by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. The two ideas from Buschman’s study, though, raise some interesting additional questions.
What does it mean to balance the cognitive load between the left and right hemispheres? How should the visual design of instructional content reflect this idea? What could be done in content presentation that might increase the capacity or accuracy for visual perception in each hemisphere? How does pedagogy change if we recognize that perception is more important than recall in the capacity of working memory?
We already know that content delivered simultaneously through multiple modalities — such as visual and auditory — can increase the capacity of working memory. Does working memory related to other modalities also function as a dual system? Could this mean we actually have four (or more) distinct working memories that operate as an integrated system?
Education focuses so heavily on recall and pays so little attention to perception. This suggests that we really ought to consider whether we have things backwards.
Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs Put to the Test
“Anyone who has ever completed a psychology class has heard of Abraham Maslow and his theory of needs,” said University of Illinois professor emeritus of psychology Dr. Ed Diener, who led the study. “But the nagging question has always been: Where is the proof? Students learn the theory, but scientific research backing this theory is rarely mentioned.”
re:design for learning: iPad interview software
Tagpad is an interesting proposition. It is an iPad app that records interviews, displays questions, allows note taking, and the use of checklists. In effect, it is an interviewing suite. At the moment, however, it seems to be most useful for very structured interviews. The creators…
Source: redesignforlearning
Just, at some point, acknowledge that our educational system won’t ever lift up every student until we allow ourselves the chance to make a mess of things – until we allow ourselves an educational framework that lets kids do work that holds personal meaning for them – until we allow ourselves professional standards that put kids before adults, relationships before test scores, and communities before polling points.
Emperors, clothe yourselves « Cooperative Catalyst
This is a really great piece! Click over read the whole thing and do comment, we want everyone to join and make the conversation and discussion deepr!
(via adventuresinlearning)
(via adventuresinlearning)
Source: coopcatalyst.wordpress.com
![“The watershed that demonstrated the Legion [of Decency]’s new commitment to mature works and forced the industry to abandon the [Production] Code was the most expensive non-spectacle film of its time, Warner Brothers’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With the appropriately brash ‘screw you,’ Martha and George not only ushered in Nick and Honey but dispatched a whole era of film censorship.”
“The necessary changes included, among other things, the elimination of over twenty ‘goddamns,’ seven ‘bastards,’ five ‘sons-of-a-bitch,’ and assorted anatomical phrases such as ‘right ball,’ ‘monkey nipples,’ and ‘ass.’ The [Warner Bros.] studio was confident that [Edward] ‘Albee is sufficiently inventive and creative to substitute potent and pungent dialogue that could prove highly effective, even though possibly reducing somewhat the ‘shock’ impact of this highly regarded play.’ “
Leonard J. Leff (1980). A test of American censorship: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Cinema Journal, 19(2), 41–45.
Leff cites Warner executive Steve Trillig in a letter to Albee’s agent regarding the necessary changes needed to the screenplay for it to pass the Production Code. The 1963 letter was found among 26 boxes of uncatalogued materials pertinent to Virginia Woolf in the Ernest Lehman Collection, Hoblitzelle Theatre Arts Library, Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
Goddamn, I love great scholarly research! —Visual Turn](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lijwwsmEY91qzowgeo1_500.jpg)
“The watershed that demonstrated the Legion [of Decency]’s new commitment to mature works and forced the industry to abandon the [Production] Code was the most expensive non-spectacle film of its time, Warner Brothers’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With the appropriately brash ‘screw you,’ Martha and George not only ushered in Nick and Honey but dispatched a whole era of film censorship.”
“The necessary changes included, among other things, the elimination of over twenty ‘goddamns,’ seven ‘bastards,’ five ‘sons-of-a-bitch,’ and assorted anatomical phrases such as ‘right ball,’ ‘monkey nipples,’ and ‘ass.’ The [Warner Bros.] studio was confident that [Edward] ‘Albee is sufficiently inventive and creative to substitute potent and pungent dialogue that could prove highly effective, even though possibly reducing somewhat the ‘shock’ impact of this highly regarded play.’ “
Leonard J. Leff (1980). A test of American censorship: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Cinema Journal, 19(2), 41–45.
Leff cites Warner executive Steve Trillig in a letter to Albee’s agent regarding the necessary changes needed to the screenplay for it to pass the Production Code. The 1963 letter was found among 26 boxes of uncatalogued materials pertinent to Virginia Woolf in the Ernest Lehman Collection, Hoblitzelle Theatre Arts Library, Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
Goddamn, I love great scholarly research!
—Visual Turn
Source: jstor.org
OECD: Train teachers to become education researchers
“The most successful countries educationally make teaching an attractive, high status profession, and provide training for teachers to become educational innovators and researchers who have responsibility for reform. These were among findings presented last week in New York at the International Summit on the Teaching Profession, the first of its kind, held to identify best practices for recruiting, training and supporting teachers.”
Will higher ed forfeit its teaching role to for-profits?
“For-profits are better placed to expand online because they do not have to worry about resistance from academic staff, nor about exploiting their earlier investment in campus facilities. A disruptive technology, which online learning may prove to be, rarely favours existing providers,” said [President of the Commonwealth of Learning, Sir John] Daniel.
That raised the question of whether higher education would split over the coming years into a public sector focused on research and a for-profit sector doing most of the teaching. Daniel said the recent dramatic funding cuts to UK universities was likely to significantly swing the balance in funding higher education towards research and away from teaching.
I’ve been arguing this for years, but I’m not sure the bulk of the teaching will necessarily go to for-profits. There’s a great role for undergraduate-focused teaching colleges in public higher ed, but community colleges are too stretched by their multiple missions, and faculty and administration at universities are much more interested in their research role than their teaching role.
Higher education is now at a crossroads. If public higher education forfeits its teaching role to more nimble for-profits, students will be the losers.
What’s wrong with this picture?
(Source: rizkyselma, via world-shaker)
However neat and tidy this image may be, we really need to put this sorry old chestnut to rest, and remind ourselves of the dangers inherent in citing secondary sources.
Will Thalheimer (2006) published a rather detailed and well-cited debunking of this oft-repeated learning myth. Thalheimer traced the concept to Dale’s Cone of Experience (1946), pointing out that Dale’s image contained no percentages. The percentages came from D.G. Treichler (1967), an oil company employee writing in a magazine about audio-visual communications, but without citing any research as a basis for the percentages. An organization called NTL Institute claims to have developed the Learning Pyramid in the early 1960s. Thalheimer presents one graph that includes a citation, but the cited article contains no such graph or percentages (meaning the citation was in error, or fraudulent). Thalheimer confirmed this with the author of the article the graph cited.
A report commissioned by Cisco from the Metiri Group (2008) goes into further detail. The report provides evidence of how this myth has been widely perpetuated — and manipulated — in the fields of education and training for several decades, despite the complete absence of empirical evidence supporting it. The report then goes on to summarize genuine research into multimodal learning, deriving information from fourteen published scholarly articles (based on twenty-three studies and meta-studies that together surveyed almost 6,000 students) to determine the best practices for multimodal teaching, whether or not it includes technology.
If you need any further evidence, try a Google image search for “Dale’s Cone of Experience” to see how these images endlessly ricochet around the web when a “reblog” is just a click away. If we see it repeated often enough, from otherwise reputable web sites for educators, why shouldn’t we take it as gospel? Limit your search to college and university web site (add “site:edu” to your search), and you may see that the echo is as loud in education as elsewhere.
One of the reasons this information has been endlessly repeated is that it “feels right.” It seems to fit rather intuitively with our perceived experiences, and meshes nicely with the preference many of us have (myself included) regarding active and experiential learning through multiple modalities. Somewhere along the way someone slapped some numbers on it, and suddenly it became credible, citable science. I can only wonder how many theses, dissertations, and peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals include this bogus information among their references, dutifully quoting a secondary source without ever checking the facts.
Ironically, this myth-busting does more than refute an old canard. It actually illuminates a very real research-based finding about learning: it is very much harder tounlearn something than to learn it correctly in the first place. Our brains, once “wired” into a familiar pattern, find it much easier to recognize and repeat the same pattern, and find it much harder to “rewire” to change the original pattern. Automaticity in learning has enormous benefits that allow the non-conscious aspects of our minds to repeat familiar patterns without taxing the precious resource of conscious thought. Yet that same automaticity can mask our perceptions and prevent us from even recognizing that the pattern we are repeating has little basis in reality.
Perhaps the bottom level of the Learning Cone should say, “People remember 100% of ideas that go unquestioned.”
Metiri Group, (2008). Multimodal learning through media: What the research says. http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/education/Multimodal-Learning-Through-Media.pdf
Thalheimer, W. (2006). People remember 10%, 20% … oh, really? Will at Work Learning. http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/05/people_remember.html
Source: rizkyselma
Two very different types of knowledge
There are as least three powerful insights from recent studies of the brain that support cognitive science research findings:
First, our brains learn and process two very different types of knowledge: non-conscious, automated knowledge, and conscious, controllable, declarative knowledge. Evidence also suggests that we believe we control our own learning by conscious choice, when in fact nearly all mental operations are highly automated, including learning and problem solving.
Second, human beings have a very limited capacity to think during learning and problem solving and when that capacity is exceeded, thinking and learning stop without us being aware. Thus instruction and self-managed learning must strive to avoid cognitive overload.
Third, nearly all of our instructional design and cyber-learning theories and models fail to account for the influence of non-conscious cognitive processes and therefore are inadequate to deal with complex learning and performance.
Clark, Richard E. (2010). Cognitive and neuroscience research on learning and instruction: Recent insights about the impact of non-conscious knowledge on problem solving, higher order thinking skills and interactive cyber-learning environments. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Education Research. http://www.aect.org/publications/whitepapers/2010/ICER3.pdf
Bibliographies for composition and rhetoric
Quite a rich collection of bibliographies on multiple topics related to composition and rhetoric. Can’t wait for the semester to be over to dig in! From Rebecca Moore Howard, The Writing Program, Syracuse University.
