I was talking with education researcher Bob Boruch about my frustrations in teaching, the idea that as statisticians we tell people to do formal experimentation but in our own teaching practice we typically just try different things without even measuring outcomes, let alone performing any formal evaluation. Boruch showed me this article with Alan Ruby about learning from failure. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten all my other thoughts from our conversation but I’m posting the article here.
Here, we’re always being plagued by needing to invent “outcome measurement” exercises, which seem rather artificial in my field.
As for specifics: things that flop in one class can work swimmingly in others; of course, mere awareness that X didn’t work last time, can make it work the next time (perhaps due to scarcely conscious tweaks).
If only you were wearing google googles, you could just review your conversation. Hell, you could even post it to youtube.
Andrew,
I’m entirely on board with the empirical approach to teaching. In a course I TA, we’ve decided to track student participation rates (whenever a student makes a contribution to class discussion, we log their name, but don’t get any fancier than that). Looking at the data, I’m seeing for the first time how skewed the distribution of contributions is. Have you come across any other data on in-class discussion?
Also, as an entire newcomer to any sort of education research, I have no idea how IRB works in this domain– any suggestions?
Mark