Way back in 1984, psychologist Benjamin Bloom reported some shocking study results: Students who engaged in individualized tutoring with a teacher scored 98 percent better than the average performance of students in the traditional classroom. This led Bloom to propose his famous “2 Sigma Problem”: How can we accomplish the same results using methods other than peer tutoring, which are “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale”? If Bloom were alive today, he’d surely be astonished—and encouraged—by the mass-market, loss-cost and, perhaps most strikingly, engaging possibilities
Via Nik Peachey
Your new post is loading...
Well not quite living up to the title, but a good general read about some things that have been bubbling up for a while.
I definetely like this approach to accessing students performance..
No Wrong Answers
As he noted in his TEDGlobal talk, Schocken believes that the traditional grading system is “degrading”—and he’d rather talk about a more positive approach to teaching that he calls “upgrading.” This means rejecting the traditional focus on correct answers. Instead, Schocken thinks we should encourage mistakes. In his app-based learning environments, if you give the wrong answer, nothing horrible happens. “We never say ‘incorrect,’ ‘wrong,’ and so on. Instead, when students give answers that aren’t the right ones, we use a non-verbal and neutral visual gesture, like vibrating the image a little,” Schocken said. This implies something like “nice try, keep trying, I’m waiting patiently, take your time.” And, after two wrong answers are entered in a row, the program gives a tip leading to the correct direction.