Increasingly calls are being made to distinguish between the assessment of learning(testing) and assessment for learning.
I think this is much easier for us to do at GMU than it is for high school teachers. We are purely focused on educating our students--we don't have to worry (too much) about our students doing well on a standardized tests, and we don't have to worry about our jobs being affected by our students' performance on those tests!
eek to engage learners in tasks seen as ends in themselves and consequently ashaving implicit worth.
I'm drawing a blank here: how can we do this in our classes? We design all of our tasks as ends in themselves, right? But do our students know that? I think they get caught up in "you asked me to write a paper so my job is to get an A, and if I get an A, I win" instead of "I was assigned this paper so I'd learn something about writing in my discipline."
I think that perhaps we could emphasize this for our students just by emphasizing it in class: "hey, I didn't assign this to you because I love grading papers: I assigned it because I genuinely believe that this skill will be useful to you in later life--in and outside of work." What do you all think?
Due to the interpersonal requirements within the social constructivist position, akey element is an ability to decode attendant language (Vygotsky, 1986, cited inGoodman & Goodman, 1990; Kanuka & Anderson, 1999) so that negotiated, socialinteraction within prevailing personal-to-social constructs might be enabled.
This section was troubling to me, but this is where it came together for me. It sounds like Adams' definition of the SC theory of learning is that it's not about learning "wrong" and "right" but being able to communicate with others in our own discourse community. I love that idea (if I'm reading him correctly). I think we do, in 302, give our students an introduction to participating in the discourse communities of their disciplines--a useful skill!
Furthermore, due to the mediatory features of language and other forms ofcommunication, knowledge constructs are formed first on an inter-psychological level(between people) before becoming internalized or existing intra-psychologically(Daniels, 2001).
I had a knee-jerk negative reaction to this because I'm an independent learner, and I have a hard time learning in groups because of my social anxiety. HOWEVER I think this may still be true for myself and other introverts: the way we learn may still be inter-psychological in that we have a sort of inner discourse community that we imagine ourselves part of. Does that make sense? After all, when I write an academic article, I'm not writing it for an actual person sitting next to me, but the theoretical discourse community that I'm part of.
ehaviourist principlesconsider the learner to be atabula rasa, filled with transmission-based teaching thatimproves stimulus–response connections, thereby communicating and instilling a set ofpredetermined and agreed facts (Reeves, 1992).
Reminds me of Paulo Freire...
