David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Feb 6, 2012, 9:05 am
"The State of Science Standards 2012" maps out an analysis of pre-college science instruction in the United States.Quote:A majority of the states’ standards remainmediocre to awful. In fact, the average grade across all statesis—once again—a thoroughly undistinguished C.There are individual st...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Feb 4, 2012, 2:59 pm
In "The End of Preparation" I gave an alternative to the factory-like "prepare and certify" philosophy evident in the current practice of formal education. The purpose of the present article is to develop a modest trial program to test the portfolio approach. In order to have something specific to t...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jan 28, 2012, 8:51 pm
... since I had seen the thing from inception to impact report. I got permission from Coker ... is: Download Coker College's QEP Impact Report The whole fifth year ... is an important part of the impact report, and this is a ... imagine the CIA does. Each portfolio got an ID number that would ...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jan 25, 2012, 6:22 am
Most readers will know William of Occam's principle about not multiplying eventualities unnecessarily. It's commonly thought of as "the simplest explanation is the best explanation." I learned about a countervailing principle in Arora and Barak's Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach. It's eve...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jan 22, 2012, 7:50 am
You can file www.sightmap.com under "novel data representation." It's a heat map overlay of Google Maps that shows the most popular spots for taking photos, using the upload site Panoramio as the source. This could be good fodder for a student research project. The only disappointment for me was not...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jan 19, 2012, 8:19 pm
This post is an overdue follow-up to "Randomness and Prediction," which takes up the question of how we should judge the quality of a test. There are many kinds of tests, but for the moment I'm only interested in ones that are supposed to predict future performance. Since education is in the prepara...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Dec 16, 2011, 7:39 am
In the last year there have been announcements of two free software packages that use machine learning techniques to mine data for relationships. The resulting mathematical formulas can be used to form hypotheses about the underlying phenomena (i.e. whatever the data represents). The first one I hav...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Dec 10, 2011, 10:16 am
I saw a question at stackoverflow.com asking why computer programs can't produce true random numbers. I can't locate the exact page now, but here's a similar one. The question spooked around in my head all day, despite my head-down work to catch up on paperwork after being away at the SACSCOC meetin...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Dec 9, 2011, 10:15 am
I continue to develop and use the software I patched together to look at correlates (or covariates) within large scalar or ordinal data sets like surveys. I have gotten requests from several institutions in and out of higher ed to do these. A couple of interesting graphs that resulted are shown belo...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Dec 9, 2011, 7:07 am
I found this chart at the Chronicle very interesting. It shows the ratio of presidential pay to average professor pay. For example, at Stevenson University, it's 16 to 1. My rule of thumb is that the quality of an institution is ranked by Instructional Costs/FTE. Here are some selected institutions...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Dec 2, 2011, 7:22 am
In the last few articles beginning with "The End of Preparation", I have contrasted two epistemologies. One proceeds by definition, which I called monological, and the other emerges from dialogue. These are distinct and equally useful ways of understanding the world. We could display the discipline ...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Dec 1, 2011, 7:34 am
Here's another serving of link salad. The articles referenced connect to recent topics of discussion. HERI just released a report on college graduation rates. They give details on regressions to predict completion, and provide the rates of correct classification rates for same. Here's an example: N...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Nov 28, 2011, 6:40 am
A Monday's worth of interesting education-related links: On non-cognitives, we have two articles from the Boston Globe. The first is "How College Prep is Killing High School": A number of economists, including Nobel economist James Heckman, have documented the need for noncognitive or so-called soft...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Nov 23, 2011, 8:18 am
In "Tests and Dialogues" I promised to address the use of rubrics, which I get to. But before I do, I want to extend the ideas presented in the last few articles. By coincidence, my daughter  provided an example the same day I wrote the article. My daughter Epsilon had a math test and a French test...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Nov 22, 2011, 7:13 am
In "The End of Preparation" I argued that standardized tests, as they exist now, are not very suited to the task of correctly classifying quality of the partial products we call students. Certainly the tests give us information beyond mere guessing, but the accuracy (judging from the SAT) is not hig...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Nov 2, 2011, 9:42 am
This post summarizes the conclusions from my presentation yesterday at the Assessment Institute in Indianapolis. Many thanks to Trudy and everyone else who helps make this conference happen! The topics below are taken from my Conclusions slide. They are related to the relationship between reality (a...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Oct 23, 2011, 8:25 am
Survey responses for the assessment workshop next week are shown below. Nothing is hyperlinked, since these are just images. I had to do it this way to protect the data, so the individual responses can't be used to identify individuals.
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Oct 18, 2011, 7:38 pm
In my spare time (ha-ha) I refined the software I blogged about in the last two posts in order to automate almost everything about sorting out what's connected to what in a data set.  Now I can create a folder with a data file, an index of variables, and an options list, drop that folder on a scrip...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Oct 1, 2011, 10:20 am
Yesterday I solved one of my data problems, but that just led to another one. I can now filter large correlation tables for (absolute) values above a threshold, but it's still laborious to connect those in a diagram that shows the relationships. So the next step was to look for a program to display ...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Sep 30, 2011, 10:02 am
The internet has revolutionized intelligence. I've seen articles about how it's making us dumber, and I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly made me spoiled. In the old days if I had a computer problem I would just use brute trial and error, often giving up before finding a solution. Now, I...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Sep 28, 2011, 8:55 pm
In "The Economics of Imperfect Tests" I explored the consequences of errors when making decisions with a test. By coincidence, the College Board came out with something very similar a few days later: their revised College and Career Readiness Benchmark from 2007 give statistics that can illuminate ...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Sep 9, 2011, 1:42 pm
Along with Kaye Crook and Terri Flateby, I will be leading a one-day pre-institute workshop at the 2011 Assessment Institute in Indianapolis. This is a large national conference led by Trudy Banta and her team at IUPUI. It runs from October 31- November 1, with the pre-institute workshops on October...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Sep 5, 2011, 3:17 pm
It's fascinating to me how attracted people are to rankings: colleges, sports teams, best cities to live in, most beautiful people, and so on can seemingly be put in an order. Of course, it's ridiculous if you stop to ask if the quality in question could really be as simply as a one-dimensional scal...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Sep 4, 2011, 8:45 am
Over the summer I wrote a paper that explores the role of language in outcomes assessment: how it can help and how it can get in the way of understanding what's going on. This exercise clarified for me the long-term importance of eportfolios, and the risks inherent to abstract forms of assessment. I...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Sep 3, 2011, 12:10 pm
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is a fascinating application of mathematics to social science. Arrow took up the problem of how to find a voting system that meets certain reasonable criteria, such as taking into account the preferences of more than one voter. He showed that not all of the criteria can...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Aug 19, 2011, 10:14 am
The project that consumed a large chunk of my time this summer was being project manager for our new university web site. It launched August 1 (on time and on budget, I'm happy to report), after a very intense summer of teamwork. Knowmad Technologies is the web development company that we partnered ...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jul 1, 2011, 6:19 pm
Thanks to our always-helpful government grants office, we were able to find money to develop a technology lab for teaching and learning. We brainstormed for a way to augment our existing installations, which already provide a lot of technology for course instructors. Given our new foray into online ...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jul 1, 2011, 7:39 am
Our two-week project with Upward Bound came to a close yesterday. I've been working with Soumia Ichoua on her NSF-supported project to try to interest high schoolers in the fun side of math. More to come after we've analyzed the assessment results and put the paper together. AcknowledgementsFinanci...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jun 10, 2011, 11:06 am
On Wednesday I wrote about my take-aways from the AALHE meeting in Lexington, and drew on some remarks from Trudy Banta. Some of the responses I got were justly critical of the way I mangled Trudy's message about the wider importance of the SAT example. It's true--I botched it, and I'd like to set t...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jun 9, 2011, 6:15 am
There's an interesting article in The Atlantic. There's much more to it, but this quote gets to the heart of the experience for many classroom instructors at all levels, I imagine: Professor X is shrewd about the reasons it’s hard to teach underprepared students how to write. “I have come to thi...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jun 8, 2011, 9:38 am
I flew back yesterday from Lexington and the first AALHE conference. I found it very stimulating. I put faces to names from the ASSESS list server, which was delightful. In the opening plenary, Trudy Banta gave us a broad perspective on the evolution of the measurement and accountability, pointing o...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - May 23, 2011, 9:52 am
This year we changed our course evaluation form from a very long list of management questions ("Did the instructor meet office hours regularly?") to a short one focused on learning outcomes. The report below is from my fall 2010 Calculus II class.   That's the whole form, except for free-form writt...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - May 3, 2011, 1:46 pm
A few weeks ago I posted about recommended changes to our SACS-COC accreditation standards. Today the review committee's recommendations for change were announced. You can find the document here. There is a comment period on this document open until May 18.
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Apr 29, 2011, 1:26 pm
I mentioned Wordle.net a while back. It's a way to create 'word clouds' from text. It occurred to me this afternoon that it would be neat to put course descriptions in from the catalog for each major. I tried a couple of them, shown below.
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Apr 29, 2011, 9:38 am
I attended the SACS Commission on Colleges Small College Initiative this week. You can find the slides on the SACS web site here. Below are some of my notes and observations. Mike Johnson talked about CR 2.5 (Institutional Effectiveness) and pointed out the difference between assessment and evaluati...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Apr 28, 2011, 7:54 am
Angela Duckworth et al have a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) entitled "Role of test motivation in intelligence testing." The abstract reads, in part: Intelligence tests are widely assumed to measure maximal intellectual performance, and predictive associati...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Apr 13, 2011, 8:23 am
 Barbara Fister's "Why the 'Research Paper' Isn't Working" has some interesting observations about the teaching and assessment of composition, and I made the connection to the deductive/inductive divide I've been going on about lately. Let me reframe the latter as the "language/expression" divide a...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Apr 7, 2011, 6:48 am
In a recent post on the topic of memory, I noted that this skill was at the base of the revised Bloom's Taxonomy (or taxidermy?). This morning I woke up thinking about the other end: creativity. I've mused about the role of creativity before, and how to teach and it (here and here). It's easy to m...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Mar 27, 2011, 11:03 am
Learning an academic subject usually goes like this. First you have to get used to a new language and ideas expressed in that language. At first you're quizzed on meaning, but you're increasingly required to actively use the new concepts (using a different part of your brain to do so). When you get ...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Mar 25, 2011, 8:10 pm
When the word came filtering down through the academic rumor enhancement facility (an endowed building, thankfully) that we'd have to do assessment--this happening in a past demarcated by one (1) millennium post, one (1) century post, and two (2) decades--we academics ran for cover. Some are still d...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Mar 24, 2011, 8:02 am
Why don't we teach memory skills as learning outcomes? Given the amount of memorizing required for many college courses, wouldn't it make sense to have a first-year course on the general subject: theory and application? Or better yet, integrate techniques within classes. I can remember my uncle, who...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Mar 23, 2011, 8:56 am
These pairs of quotes come from different viewpoints about how we know what we know, and how we should conduct higher education. Write a 3000 word essay in which you reflect how these statements fit into the practice of teaching and learning as you currently understand it. Due Friday. If we take tak...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Mar 15, 2011, 10:25 am
If you are in the SACS/CoC region, you know all about the Principles of Accreditation, the document that outlines accreditation standards, and which every institution must use to report compliance every ten years and (with fewer sections) every five years in between.  Until March 31, the Commission...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Mar 14, 2011, 9:32 am
I've come up for air after posting part three of Life Artificial yesterday evening. Over the last few weeks I've had dozens of browser tabs open to write a post about, but have been too focused on getting particular projects done to write them. I finished reading most of Academically Adrift last wee...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Feb 25, 2011, 6:28 am
Perhaps this was inevitable...a WikiLeaks clone for higher education. Seems to be UK-centric so far, but don't wait for the rush--dust off those fiery curriculum committee minutes and start some controversy! Image from UniLeaks.org.
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Jan 20, 2011, 7:06 am
I have about two dozen web pages marked to write articles about, but haven't found the time. I'm trying to wrap up part three of my novel (see that blog), and still working on writing up my research. A couple of new things for me: Our non-cognitive research is going well. Preliminary results based o...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Dec 7, 2010, 2:51 pm
Last year's tweets from the SACS/COC December meeting were almost non-existent. That has been remedied this year thanks to contributions from several indefatigable tweeters. You can see them at http://twitter.com/search?q=%23sacs. I have notes to write up and post here, but will have to wait until...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Dec 3, 2010, 8:42 am
I'm off to Louisville tomorrow morning for the December SACS meeting. Last year's backchannel was about zilch, and it looks like #SACS means something in another context, judging from the Twitter search for #SACS. I'll tweet to #SACS anyway, from my phone or iPad. Send me an email if you want to hav...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Nov 21, 2010, 9:03 am
I mentioned the Collatz Conjecture in "On Design" as an example of the qualitative difference between simulation and inverse problem solving. In this article I want to use it for another purpose: to show how structure emerges out of iteration. Specifically, I want to create a very simple model of Da...
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David Eubanks posted an article on Higher Ed/ - Nov 20, 2010, 8:06 am
In "On Design," I gave three versions of designing for an outcome: soft, forward, and inverse, in increasing degree of difficulty. The question "how difficult is inverse design?" is of utmost importance when we consider complex systems. As a real example, consider how the government of the United St...
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