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First-time graduation rates from university education
(1995, 2012)
Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Education at a Glance, 2014, Fig. 2.3, p. 31.
Available: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/9614031e.pdf?expires=141
4445035&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=E674716540E1A1218056429DF174DD
AE
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/business/economy/why-federal-aid-for-highereducation-is-missing-the-mark.html?_r=0
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TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING
Transformative Learning Assessment: What Happens After Class?
The Transformative Learning article in the December 2012 issue of Transformative
Teacher-Scholar included this quote from an article by Sinatra, Brem, & Evans
(2008) as a goal in biology education concerning evolution:
“. . . helping [students] see the world in new and different ways.” (p. 189)
Harvard’s Steven Pinker counters that
Biology educators appreciate the challenges inherent in helping
students see the world and the way it came to be differently and without
misconception. Effecting a change in a student’s worldview such that she
sees the world differently results in Transformative Learning by the student.
How do biology educators assess the degree to which this happens?
First,
they
as
in
cannot
any
discipline,
biology
make
Transformative
educators
Learning
understand
happen:
Science educators cannot directly cause transformative experiences,
but they may play a critical role in inspiring them. Expanding our
understanding of transformative experiences can help achieve this goal.
(Pugh, Linnenbrink-Garcia, Koskey, Stewart, & Manzey, 2010, p. 21)
But knowing they can inspire transformative experiences, and that such
experiences are necessary for some students to change their perspectives
sufficiently to engage with concepts like natural selection and evolution, biology
educators are very interested in learning how well they inspire TL.
Pugh, et al. (2010) posited that transformative experiences often lead to some
change in what the student does outside of class (p. 4). The authors define the
qualities of a transformative experience thusly:
. . . transformative experience can be conceptualized as a continuum
ranging from in-school engagement to out-of-school engagement. Thus,
the qualities of motivated use, expansion of perception, and experiential
value may first emerge as in-class forms of engagement. . . . Over
time, these in-school forms of engagement may develop into the out-ofschools forms of education envisioned by Dewey (1938). (Pugh, et al.,
2010, pp. 4-5)
The authors’ research study involved a pre/posttest design, and because they
were seeking information about the degree to which students moved along
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their theorized continuum for transformative learning, they had to use some
sort of scale to track that student movement. A survey previously devised by
two of the authors was the instrument used (Pugh, Kleshinski, Linnenbrink, &
Fox, 2004).
Because “expansion of perception” is one of the characteristics of Transformative
Learning as discussed here at UCO, readers may find the questions in the
survey’s “Expansion of Perception Items” category of interest. Though these
questions are targeted to elicit student perceptions about biology as related
to the concepts of adaptation and natural selection, their wording is evocative
for considering how one might gauge student perceptions of other concepts in
other disciplines.
Expansion of Perception Items
13During science class, I see things in terms of adaptation and/or
natural selection.
14When I am working on a class assignment about certain animals
or plants, I tend to think of them in terms of adaptation and/or natural
selection.
15I notice examples of adaptation and/or natural selection during
science class.
16If I see a really interesting animal or plant (either in real life, in a
magazine, or on TV) then I think about it in terms of adaptation and/or
natural selection.
17I notice examples of adaptation and/or natural selection outside of
class.
18I look for examples of adaptation and/or natural selection outside of
class.
19 I can’t help but see animals and/or plants in terms of adaptation and/
or natural selection. (Pugh, et al., 2010, pp. 21-22)
This study involved 9th- and 10th-grade biology students at two schools, one a
public school and one a religiously-affiliated school. Using pre/posttest survey
results and applying regression analysis and Rasch analysis methodologies,
the authors state:
With respect to students’ conceptual change as a function of transformative
experience, transformative experience predicted conceptual change
with respect to the natural selection misconception at both the posttest
and follow-up assessments. These results are consistent with prior
experimental studies . . . (Pugh, et al. 2010, p. 19)
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It’s interesting to consider the authors’ contention that a transformative learning
experience likely means students have out-of-class thoughts about the
conceptions they’ve wrestled with in class. For out-of-class TL experiences
themselves, such as a study tour or the Asian Moon Festival or being a member
of an athletic team, the “out-of-class” aspect simply means after the event or
experience.
But it makes sense. If a student’s perception of herself and her relationship
with others has been expanded as a result of something that happens in your
classroom, she’s just about guaranteed to think about it outside of your class.
References
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: MacMillan.
Pugh, K. J., Kleshinski, O., Linnenbrink, E. A., & Fox, C. M. (2004, April).
Transformative experiences in science: Using Rasch to develop a
quantitative measure. Paper presented at the American Educational
Research Association Annual Conference, San Diego, CA.
Pugh, K. J., Linnenbrink-Garcia, L., Koskey, K. L., Stewart, V. C., Manzey, C.
(2010). Motivation, learning, and transformative experience: A study of deep
science engagement. Science Education, 94(1), 1-28.
Sinatra, G. M., Brem, S. K., & Evans, E. M. (2008). Changing minds? Implications
for conceptual change about teaching and learning about biological
evolution. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 1(2), 189–195.
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GREAT TEACHING
Can Your Students Judge Your Teaching Effectiveness in the Blink of an Eye?
Yes, but it would have to be a very long blink — six seconds, to be exact.
Before getting to the research about accuracy of students’ estimation of teachers
based on first class meeting, let’s start with a resource that’s made it more
broadly into the social fabric, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005), a book about the
inner pattern- and rule-making intelligence that operates below consciousness
and so immediately that our unconscious “knows before we know.”
Attendees at last March’s Transformative Learning Conference will connect
another body of research to this concept: Dr. Melissa Peet’s work with making
tacit knowledge explicitly available to the conscious mind (Peet, et al., 2011).
So what do your students (and you) do “in the blink of an eye,” that impacts
teaching and learning in your classroom?
Gladwell (2005) opens his book with a description of a card game with
unexplained rules:
. . . what does the Iowa experiment tell us? That in those moments our
brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of the situation.
The first is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s the conscious strategy.
We think about what we’ve learned, and eventually come up with an
answer. This strategy is logical and definitive. But it takes us eighty cards
to get there. It’s slow. It needs a lot of information. There’s a second
strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly. It starts to kick in after
ten cards, and it’s really smart because it picks up the problem with
the red decks almost immediately. It has the drawback, however, that it
operates–at least at first–entirely below the surface of consciousness.
It sends its messages through weirdly indirect channels, like the sweat
glands on the palms of our hands. It’s a system in which our brain reaches
conclusions without immediately telling us that it’s reaching conclusions.
(Gladwell, 2005, p. 10)
In other words, there’s an “unconscious knowing” that operates on behalf of
each of us. It learns rapidly. We may name it “gut instinct,” which turns out to be
an entirely apt metaphor physiologically — ask your neurogastroenterologist.
We may name it “intuition” or “precognition” or simply “unconscious knowing.”
By whatever name, there are many studies verifying its existence and
characteristics.
The experiment to which Gladwell refers concerns card players’ ability to act
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on rules they’re not aware of consciously until long after their “unconscious
knowing” has figured out those rules and begins sending messages such as
sweaty palms meant to have the player act appropriately — again, all long
before the player has consciously learned that choosing cards from a certain
deck, for instance, is a bad strategy.
This kind of research has been replicated in many ways. As far back as 1956,
Ericksen and Kuethe reported on research showing we learn quickly and
unconsciously and do not have conscious access to that learning. Instead of
a card game with hidden rules, though, Ericson and Kuethe administered an
electrical shock to their subjects whenever a certain syllable was used in a
word. Quickly (thank goodness!), subjects began unconsciously avoiding the
syllable in any word but had no conscious idea what they were doing or why.
Fast forward to the more recent work of Nalini Ambady. She was interested
in finding out whether first-impression judgments of teachers correlated with
longer-term judgments (e.g., end of term survey results). In a clever research
design, she videotaped graduate teaching fellows teaching classes then
randomly selected three 10-second segments from the tape, concatenating
them into a 30-second “snapshot” of the fellows teaching class. Students not
in the class then rated the fellows’ performance on a 13-item questionnaire
that asked things like whether students believed the fellows were competent,
confident, accepting, etc.
The correlations between judgments based on the 30-second clips and the
end-of-term surveys were shockingly consistent:
On the basis of observations of video clips just half a minute in length,
complete strangers were able to predict quite accurately the ratings of
teachers by students who had interacted with them over the course of a
whole semester! Furthermore, these predictions retained their accuracy
after we adjusted for physical appearance of the teachers, indicating
that the judges were picking up very subtle nonverbal cues. (Ambady &
Rosenthal, 1993, p. 435)
Intrigued, Ambady shortened the video snapshots, wondering how short a
clip students could view yet still retain high correlations to the assessments
students would make at the end of the term. In those subsequent experiments,
she had students in the class view the videotaped segments of the teacher
before the first day of class when students actually met the teacher in person
for the first time.
And that’s when she discovered that students form an opinion of teachers in,
relatively speaking, the blink of an eye — all of six seconds, and that these
opinions are borne out in how those students rate the teachers after being in
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their classes for the entire term (Winerman, 2005).
But what about learning? Do “thin-slice” impressions (what Ambady came to
call these unconsciously and rapidly formed impressions) correlate with student
learning?
If students take six seconds to size you up as a teacher, and that estimation is
favorable, do they earn higher grades?
In short, yes:
. . . thin-slice ratings of teacher effectiveness, Ambady says, significantly
predicted students’ performance on the test.
“Students learned more from teachers who were seen in the thin slices
as having the qualities of a better teacher,” Ambady says. (Winerman,
2005)
The thick and the thin of it, then, is that the unconscious, nonverbal signals you
broadcast are received by your students’ unconscious minds, where something
magical happens that results in their “feelings” about you as a teacher on the
first day of class. Those feelings correlate with their consciously thought-out
assessments of you after sixteen weeks of a semester.
The first seconds of the first day of class — literally — are so important. In
additional research, Ambady tracked students’ thin-slice impressions on
constructs such as warmth, dogmatism, condescension, hostility, clarity, and
physical energy and found that student impressions on these constructs
correlate with students’ subsequent ratings on the same constructs (Ambady,
Bernieri, & Richeson, 2000).
The take-away?
A non-condescending, welcoming teacher who presents ideas clearly and who
is energetic and passionate about her subject resonates with students. They
quickly form opinions that such a teacher will lead a class they’ll enjoy. Most
important, though, is that Ambady’s research shows such teachers are the ones
who produce more student learning compared to teachers not possessing such
characteristics.
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References
Ambady, N., Bernieri, F. J., & Richeson, J. A. (2000). Toward a histology of
social behavior: Judgmental accuracy from thin slices of the behavioral
stream. In Zann, M. (Ed.). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology,
32 (pp. 201-271). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Ambady, A., & Rosenthal, R. (1993). Half a minute: Predicting teacher
evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical
attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(3), 431441.
Ericksen, C. W., & Kuethe, J. L.. (1956). Avoidance conditioning of verbal
behavior without awareness: A paradigm of repression. Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology, 53, 203-209.
Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. New York,
NY: Little, Brown & Co.
Peet, M., Lonn, S., Gurin, P., Boyer, P., Matney, M., Marra, T., Taylor, S. H.,
and Daley, A. (2011). Fostering integrative knowledge through eportfolios.
International Journal of ePortfolio, 1(1), 11-31.
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READINGS OF INTEREST
Lessons from Kindergarten: Self-regulated Learning
The January 2014 Transformative Teacher-Scholar Readings of Interest article shared
information about the Dunedin study, a 30-year longitudinal study that showed
self-regulation to be more important to a number of health and well-being
measures, including academic success, than socioeconomic status or IQ. One
instructional strategy mentioned in the article with the potential to help improve
students’ self-regulation is group work, which requires students in the group to
plan and execute tasks devised by the group in service to accomplishing the
group work outcomes.
The flip side of the coin is that unregulated group-work activity can be counterproductive in developing self-regulation. This would be true, of course, with any
activity that has the potential to develop self-regulatory skills.
It may be, though, that some of the same techniques and strategies used in
kindergartens specifically designed to help students develop self-control may
also work in college.
The Tools of the Mind curriculum for pre-kindergarten through kindergarten
began in 1993 at the Metropolitan State College of Denver (now Metropolitan
State University of Denver) when a Vygotskian-trained researcher came
from Russia to implement those educational philosophies, launching a
collaboration with a faculty member at the college. Their stated purpose was
to improve children’s ability to learn and to teach new instructional techniques
to American educators.
Vygotsky is widely known (Chaiklin, 2003) for his Zone of Proximal
Development theory, which holds that learners move from that which
they know and do only with help to being independently able to do and
to demonstrate understanding by moving through the zone of proximal
development. The two Denver faculty scholars ultimately launched Tools of
the Mind as an outgrowth of a learning laboratory built to implement and test
Vygotskian and other early childhood teaching/learning strategies.
Along the way, Tools of the Mind also incorporated specific strategies to
develop learners’ self-regulation. This was based on research — the Dunedin
study being but one example — showing that self-regulation is extremely
important for success in school and in life.
What Tools of the Mind’s founders, Drs. Elena Bodrova and Deborah Leong,
discovered to be one effective strategy to help kindergartners develop selfregulation was “learning plans”:
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Learning Plans allow children to plan the work they will accomplish in
the independent activity centers . . . Each activity in the center contains
a work product the children must produce and place in a folder. Children
work in pairs so that their “study buddy” helps them remember what
they are going to do, the rules for looking up the answers, and checks
to make sure their partner has completed the activity. (Tools of the Mind,
2014)
The above description of what kindergartners do as a way to develop and
reinforce academic self-regulation skills is also a description of what can
be done in a college classroom. One adjustment might be required for the
“independent activity centers”: unless there’s such an area in your classroom,
the activity center might rather be the library, or a small group break-out room,
or another location on campus — any area where student dyads can meet to
discuss progress on learning plans and to assess work produced as students
progress toward completing the project, presentation, paper, etc.
The basic features of the process would work the same, however:
● students commit to paper their plans to accomplish a learning task along
with their time line showing milestone dates for completion of various parts of
the overall task (these plans are filed with the instructor but also provided to the
study buddy);
● work product is “put in a folder” (i.e., placed in the D2L dropbox or physically
turned in); and,
● study buddies are assigned to serve two tasks: accountability and peer
evaluation (instructor provides guidelines for peer evaluation; in a perfect
scenario, peers could use the grading rubric for the project — this would help
students become even better self-regulators because they would be using
the same rubric the instructor uses, but students would be using it to give
their partner feedback, a process that would ultimately help them use rubrics
themselves to produce their work).
The study-buddy aspect of this approach may be something you haven’t tried.
There are some points to recommend it:
● It works for both introverted and extroverted students, a consideration not
often taken into account if a class has a lot of group work. Susan Cain, author
of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (2012),
recommends dyad work as an instructional strategy in which “both introverts
and extroverts can thrive” (as quoted in May, 2014).
● It exposes students to a peer’s planning and time management methods. In
some cases, this can be a transformative experience: a student who has always
struggled with getting academic work done may find an excellent technique
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used by her buddy. (And, as with so many things in classrooms at any level,
learning something from a peer compared to learning exactly the same thing
from a teacher will be remembered better and easier.)
● A requirement to see work completed by milestone dates means you can
intervene during the course of students’ progress, thereby catching some
mistakes early before they lead to bigger mistakes later on in the project.
Perhaps not all kindergarten teaching strategies work in college, but some do.
And many of the things students learn in kindergarten apply equally well in
college. Remember these?
●
●
●
●
●
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess. (Fulghum, 1988, p. 6)
References
Cain, S. (2012). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop
Talking. New York, NY: Random House.
Chaiklin, S. (2003). The zone of proximal development in Vygotsky’s analysis
of learning and instruction. In Kozulin, A., Gindis, B., Agayev, V. S., &
Miller, S. M. (Eds.), Vygotsky’s educational theory in cultural context
(Learning in doing: Social, congitive and computational perspectives) (pp.
39-64). New York: Cambridge University Press. Available:
http://peopleucsc.edu/~gwells/Files/Courses_Folder/documents/chaiklin
zpd.pdf
Fulghum, R. (1988). All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten:
Uncommon thoughts on common things. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
May, K. T. (2014, September 2). How to teach a young introvert. Retrieved
October 16, 2014, from
http://ideas.ted.com/2014/09/02/how-to-teach-a-young-introvert/
Tools of the Mind. (2014). Denver, CO. Available:
http://www.toolsofthemindorg/curriculum/kindergarten/
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eLEARNING
Designing with Patterns in Mind
Bucky J. Dodd, Ph.D.
The elearning design process can be a mystifying process for many
educators. For some, it is a matter of defining a design process and following
that process through to completion of the project. For others, it may be a
more intuitive exercise guided by feedback and small changes and iterations
in the project. This article highlights design patterns as a tool educators can
use to create strategies for elearning projects.
The Role of Strategy in eLearning
Think for a moment about the natural world around us… Patterns, or reoccurring
phenomena, are abundantly present among plants, animals, and rocks. Even
languages have defined patterns moving from letters, words, and paragraphs.
In much the same way, learning occurs in patterns that can be useful for better
understanding how and why people learn, and how learning experiences can
be designed in intentional ways. Using patterns can be a useful approach
to creating strategies for designing elearning courses or programs. Instead
of focusing on small discrete units of instruction or resources, the designer
is concerned with the relationships between the elements and how these
elements merge into patterns.
Strategy within instructional design contexts is focused on outcomes and
approaches. For example, a strategy may define what the learner should be
able to do at the end of a training, but also what the training should accomplish
from an organizational perspective. Gibbons (2014) described a learning
design strategy as incorporating three types of goals: instructional, strategic,
and means.
● Instructional goals focus on what the learner will be able to do or know after
the learning experience is complete.
● Strategic goals focus on the approach the designer uses to help the learner
achieve the instructional goals.
● Means goals are specific tactics the designer will build into the instruction
that will help the learner achieve the instructional goals.
Uses and Examples of Design Patterns
Designing elearning courses and programs can involve many complex
and interconnected topics or considerations that ultimately influence the
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effectiveness of the learning experience. For example, a learning design
pattern may be a reoccurring organizational theme used in a course to present
information (i.e. Read, Watch, Do). A pattern may also be a sequence of how
learners approach designed learning experiences (i.e. watch a demonstration,
practice task, complete task assessment). Learning design patterns help by
highlighting reoccurring sequences that occur in design decisions and how
these translate into a strategy for the design of the learning environment.
Design patterns typically focus on the underlying strategic goals carried by
the course designer in how they will help the learners achieve the instructional
goals of the learning experience.
Figure 1 is an example of a learning design pattern communicated using a
visual tool. This example shows the design strategy of a specific blended
learning module. This visual tool is an updated version of the eLearning
Instructional Design Visualization Framework (e-IDViz) (Dodd, 2013) called
Learning Experience Builder (LXB). Learning Experience Builder is a visual
tool/framework for designing courses, programs, and experiences.
Figure 1. Example of a Learning Design Pattern Presented Using Visual
Methods
In this example, the module of instruction is presented using a series of visual
symbols relating to specific learning events. The pattern begins with the learner
interacting in an asynchronous online environment working through resources
and completing a practice activity. Next, the learner interacts in a classroom
environment and engages in a dialogue and two practice activities. Finally, the
learner returns to the asynchronous online environment to complete an artifact
demonstrating mastery of the skills.
In this small visual diagram, a designer or viewer can quickly determine the
strategic (pattern design) and means goals (content and activities contained in
pattern) of the design and how this pattern may be replicated throughout the
learning experience. Likewise, the learner may use this pattern visualization to
plan expectations for the learning experience.
Using learning design patterns offer several important advantages to enhance
common instructional design methods.
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● Understandable: Learning design patterns provide a method for those
not familiar with instructional design approaches to see how an instructional
sequence may be designed and how the learner would interact with the
instruction.
● Replicable: Learning design patterns provide a guide for replicating
strategies that work in other contexts. This saves time and helps designers
select sequences that are more likely to be successful give a specific set of
criteria. This is a major advantage over selecting individual discrete methods.
● Generative: Learning design patterns offer a method for changing,
enhancing, and improving from an established framework. This allows patterns
to improve overtime and generate an awareness of situations when a certain
pattern may be preferable over another.
In addition to communicating design patterns in a visual format, learning
designs may also use more descriptive means to add additional detail to a
design pattern. Table 1 is a template for describing the elements in Figure 1.
In this example, the pattern is used to outline the specific sequence for the
instruction. The designer can then describe the specific elements that are used
to create the learning sequence.
Table 1. Example Template for Describing a Learning Design Pattern
Using Common Learning Design Patterns
Two of the major advantages to using learning design patterns as a visual
tool for designing learning are being able to replicate successful patterns
and compare patterns to one another based on the needs of the learner and
the instructional goals. For example, Figure 2 shows a typical lecture-based
learning pattern. The assumption is that learners will learn from resources
(lectures) and demonstrate their knowledge on a unit exam all in a classroom
setting. This is not to say that every lecture follows this pattern, but rather this
shows how a lecture-format pattern might be constructed.
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Figure 2. Example of a Typical Lecture Pattern
Compare the pattern shown in Figure 2 with that shown in Figure 3. At first
glance, it is clear there are major differences in the strategy for how the learning
experience is designed.
Figure 3. Example of a “Learn by Doing” Pattern
Figure 3 is a “learn by doing” pattern that places practice at the center of the
model and relies on resources, dialogue, and feedback as learning scaffolds.
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The pattern concludes with demonstration of an artifact all occurring in the
asynchronous online environment. Even without knowing the specific content,
the visual pattern shows how the strategy may be designed for a specific
learning experience. These patterns can then be combined and reused which
provides knowledge management benefits for designers over time.
Conclusion
Learning design patterns are tools for helping designers make more effective
decisions and comparisons about the learning environments they create. The
Learning Experience Builder (LXB) is an example of a visual tool that can be
useful as course designers create instructional goals, strategic goals, and
means goals. Learning design patterns offer a way of explaining how learning
experiences are constructed and ways designers can better understand,
replicate, and expand upon these design approaches.
References
Dodd, B.J. (2013). eLearning instructional design visualization: An innovation
in online course design. Presentation given at the 19th Annual Sloan
Consortium International Conference on Online Learning.
Gibbons, A. S. (2014). An architectural approach to instructional design. New
York NY: Routledge.
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