I think that most of you are familiar with Michelle Alexander's powerful book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I just learned, from the Inside/Out listserv, of an equally compelling critique: James Forman's Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow, New York University Law Review 87 (Feb. 26, 2012).

Take a look; I'd really like to discuss this...and thanks!

According to Steven Mintz, Executive Director of the University of Texas System's Institute for Transformation Learning, it isn't just education that's changing: it's pedagogy. He recalls Jerome Bruner's work in the early 1960s which found that the standard pedagogy of the era, knowledge transmission, needed to be revised. He suggested "discovery learning," which emphasizes learning through inquiry and team work instead of passive reception. Professor Mintz believes its time for another change: as he wrote in a recent post for Inside Higher Ed, "The time is ripe to move toward Pedagogy 3.0: a pedagogy of collaboration, creativity, and invention which treats students not simply as learners but as creators of knowledge."

Mintz notes that the way undergraduate institutions work, they only really serve one out of three subgroups they should be serving: those struggling without proper preparation and faced with other demands, and potential students who are currently workin adults and full-time caretakers, often go unserved. The Pedagogy of Discovery, according to Professor Mintz, would help address these gaps. Instead of treating college students as passive, it treats them as "knowledge creators whose school work needs to be meaningul and subject to vetting not just by a single professor but a broader audience."

ECON 136:  Week 8 Tasks

Updated 3/17 to incorporate reading for Wednesday.

Hope you had a renewing and (where needed) healing Break. 

Individual Conferences

I’d like to check in with each of you about how the semester is going.   If you’ve fallen behind in some of our tasks, this is a good time to talk through how best to catch up.  If there is a topic in the revised syllabus you’d like to cover in more depth, let’s discuss.   This might be a good time to go over one of your midterm  rewrites.  (If you haven’t picked up your graded exam, copies will be available first thing Monday morning in Dalton 114.)

Before you retire Sunday night, please choose a meeting slot in the Week 8 block in the Working with Economic Data Moodle site.

Monday:  Solving Externality and Public Goods Problems

Five hardy souls made it to class on the 7th.   So I’ll ask them to take the lead in helping the rest of us work through the sort of problems someone who understands the externality and public goods market failure ought to be able to solve. 

Preparing for class:

Review or  complete the  Week 7 Tasks.    I’ve reset the Sapling Learnng problem sets to be due Monday at 3am.

ECON 136:  Week 8 Tasks

Hope you had a renewing and (where needed) healing Break. 

Individual Conferences

I’d like to check in with each of you about how the semester is going.   If you’ve fallen behind in some of our tasks, this is a good time to talk through how best to catch up.  If there is a topic in the revised syllabus you’d like to cover in more depth, let’s discuss.   This might be a good time to go over one of your midterm  rewrites.  (If you haven’t picked up your graded exam, copies will be available first thing Monday morning in Dalton 114.)

Before you retire Sunday night, please choose a meeting slot in the Week 8 block in the Working with Economic Data Moodle site.

Monday:  Solving Externality and Public Goods Problems

Five hardy souls made it to class on the 7th.   So I’ll ask them to take the lead in helping the rest of us work through the sort of problems someone who understands the externality and public goods market failure ought to be able to solve. 

Preparing for class:

Review or  complete the  Week 7 Tasks.    I’ve reset the Sapling Learnng problem sets to be due Monday at 3am.

Wednesday:  Cost-Benefit Analysis

In a series of posts on the Teaching Professor Blog, Dr. Maryellen Weimer took on the challenge of improving college-level multiple choice tests. While multiple choice tests are a convenience for many professors, for instructors of blended and online courses they can be a necessity. The problem is, of course, that many instructors question what multiple choice tests are really testing -- student learning, or student ability to select an answer from a list of choices.

According to Dr. Weimer, not all multiple choice tests are bad tests. The real problem is crafting the right questions. According to the first post in the series, "A number of years ago, a cross-disciplinary faculty cohort reported that a third of their questions measured complex cognitive skills. An analysis showed that only 8.5% of their questions did, with the remaining testing basic comprehension and recall." Improving the quality of the questions, according to Dr. Weimer, can make multiple choice tests efficient and effective. In the second post, she provides some tips for writing good multiple choice questions, including:

During an interview with Online Classroom, professor Rosemary Cleveland and instructional designer Kim Kenward suggested some tips for providing students with feedback in their online courses. Even though their interview was targeted towards completely online courses, there were some key takeaways for instructors teaching both blended, and even completely traditional courses.

One of their tips was to "Consider various formats" for giving feedback. As Cleveland and Kenward pointed out, most students and instructors are familiar with traditional, text-based feedback -- but that doesn't mean that it's the only way. They cited a survey of their own students, in which "70 percent liked having audio feedback because they could hear the instructor's voice, which makes the message more personal."

And it's not just students who like audio feedback: oral feedback is also more efficient for instructors to produce. With the steady advance of course management systems, it also doesn't require a lot of technical expertise to easily give audio feedback. Both Blackboard and Moodle, for example, have audio recording built-in to their grading components.