undesigned

JCDL 2008 trip continued: In Education and NSDL: Past, Present and Future, David McArthur presented the future of the NSDL as a platform from which to build. This is the right direction to head… hopefully not too late. The NSDL should provide additional services beyond search, it should provide web services, architectures, and tools that make it easy for people to develop learning resources and communities. Those services should provide simple and powerful ways for member collections to play together. Needed services include authoring, collaboration, adaptation, recommendation, student tracking, and teacher publishing. It was also neat to meet Kim Lightle and David Yaron who I had never met before.

I resonate with David Yaron’s concern that we teach the wrong things in High School and introductory College courses, focusing on teaching students to follow mathematical procedures rather gain a conceptual understanding of the content. I shared my theory a cause:

1. We emphasize in our teaching what we test
2. We test what is easy to test
3. Testing simple recall and procedure following is easy
4. We emphasize simple recall and procedure following in our tests
   
5. We emphasize simple recall and procedure following in our teaching
   

The remedy is to develop automated measures of higher level thinking: conceptual understanding, problem solving, design. He agreed in part but challenged that we don’t know or agree what problem solving is and have an even harder time measuring it. I agree in part, but think we do know something and can begin heading in the direction of trying to measure problem solving and higher level thinking.

Problem solving is what we do when we don’t know what to do.

Problem solving involves recognizing and defining a problem, searching for relevant information, forming appropriate subgoals, selecting appropriate strategies for accomplishing subgoals, executing procedures, monitoring progress and redirecting efforts when appropriate, recognizing when satisfactory solution has been arrived at, and interpreting the results of problem solving efforts. Interestingly this relates to the conversations I had at the PSLC later in my trip.

Yaron, who sits on the AP Chemistry board, also indicates that even if we had good automated measures of higher level thinking it would take a long time for them to be widely adopted and that a revision approach is more likely to succeed than a revolution approach.

Posted on July 9th, 2008 by joel
Filed under: conferences, problem solving