Month: February 2016

It is very inspiring to learn from this week’s reading materials that games (i.e., video games and role playing games) can contribute to student learning. Games are not only designed for fun. They can motivate and actively engage learners in the learning processs, and kills utilized in games can be translated to the real world. Thus, Game-Based learning and gamification get a lot of attention and are fast becoming used in the classroom (see more information about Game-Based learning from Jessica Trybus’s paper “Game-Based Learning: What it is, Why it Works, and Where it’s Going“). It seems like bringing games to the classroom might be an acceptable, even accredited, alternative strategy to education.

I would also like to share an interesting TED talk by Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world. According to McGonigal, if we can create engaging and fun games based on meaningful real world problems, we can leverage the combined knowledge, energy and enthusiasm to solve the world’s biggest problems and we can change the world.

 

In the “Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning”, Marilyn Lombardi compared authentic assessment with traditional assessment. According to the information provided in Table 1, traditional assessments seem to have few positive characteristics. Thus, a movement from traditional assessment to authentic assessment improves teaching and learning (see more from Grant Wiggins’s “A True Test: Toward More Authentic and Equitable Assessment” and “The Case for Authentic Assessment“). From my experience, some mix of the two seem to be more appropriate and beneficial.

As an instructor of an introductory Remote Sensing course, I applied traditional assessment tools (multiple-choice quizzes, short-answer exams, and essays) and authentic assessment (hands-on experiments, computer labs, and class projects). The combination of the two improves teaching and learning. Quizzes, which only have five multiple choice questions covering basic concepts and key ideas of a former lecture each time, help me measure students’ acquisition of knowledge and my teaching quality. When students made mistakes, they didn’t acquire the knowledge because of their misunderstanding or my unclear explanation. Then I can find another way to explain the concept clearly. The relationship between the time used to answer each question and accuracy of the question can reflect students’ learning in some way —shorter time with higher accuracy means students are likely acquire the knowledge, longer time with lower or even higher accuracy means students are not familiar with the knowledge, and shorter tiem with lower accuracy means students do not care. Hands-on experiments and computer labs, which are designed to introduce various useful equipments, software, and skills, help students apply the knowledge to solve real-world problems. Then students developed their own class projects related to their interests and I talked more about the topics they focused but not well covered in former classes. Authentic assessment complements traditional assessment but it increases my workload. My advisor is always trying to find a better way to mix the two for a large class.

According to National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, critical thinking is “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

Everyone endorses the teaching of critical thinking and every teacher try to build their teaching philosophy. But critical thinking taught in what fashion? And how to evaluate teaching effectiveness for critical thinking?

In the field of Geography, there is a growing need for software training, especially for GIS and remote sensing. I think the best way to learn software is a question-driven approach or a project-oriented approach. Most of GIS and remote sensing courses use computer labs and customized class projects to help students to get familiar with software packages, and more importantly, to improve their skills in computer-aided problem-solving. Based on my experience as a teaching assistant and an instructor, two types of strategies are used mostly for computer labs. The first one is providing students with detailed step-by-step lab instructions. Students only need to follow the instructions and click the button even without thinking. There are less simple questions from students because they have all the information. But at the end of the courses, many students still know little about the software techniques. The second one is providing students with problems, goals and plenty of data. Students need to select their methods and data to support their analysis. It encourages students to think critically to solve the problems. Some students will find multiple ways to reach the goals and bring good ideas for their class projects, but many others, especially undergrads, still rely on instructors and teaching assistants to tell them step by step. They complain the second method is too hard and time consuming. They suggest instructors should provide step-by-step instructions from their evaluation. In such cases, evaluation is not effective. How to solve this mismatch problem?