• Just-in-Time Teaching: An Interactive Engagement Pedagogy | Edutopia

  tags: pedagogy educational reform strategies

  • main features
  • • Students are presented with a slightly provocative and memorable statement that is open to a considerable amount of interpretation.

     

    • Students rephrase the question in their own words. The responses tell the instructor how students interpreted the assignment.

     

    • Students must take a stand and justify their position. They must examine prior knowledge, consult the course resources, and perhaps discuss the issue with classmates.
  • To be actively involved, students must engage in such higher-order thinking tasks as analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Within this context, it is proposed that strategies promoting active learning be defined as instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing

• Save Us From the SAT – NYTimes.com

  tags: SAT testing educational reform

  • the College Board announced this week that it was rolling out a complete do-over of the SAT

  • All in all, the changes are intended to make SAT scores more accurately mirror the grades a student gets in school.

    The thing is, though, there already is something that accurately mirrors the grades a student gets in school. Namely: the grades a student gets in school. A better way of revising the SAT, from what I can see, would be to do away with it once and for all.

    The SAT is a mind-numbing, stress-inducing ritual of torture. The College Board can change the test all it likes, but no single exam, given on a single day, should determine anyone’s fate. The fact that we have been using this test to perform exactly this function for generations now is a national scandal.

  • I sympathize with college-admissions deans who want a simple, accurate measurement of student potential. But no such measurement exists
  • The only way to measure students’ potential is to look at the complex portrait of their lives: what their schools are like; how they’ve done in their courses; what they’ve chosen to study; what progress they’ve made over time; how they’ve reacted to adversity

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.