Donald Clark is a reliably controversial blogger but a post last month took the biscuit. Based on some recently-published research that cast doubt on the claims of “brain training” software to produce learning that will generalise to other contexts, he concludes that “Gamification does NOT work!” in education. This is like finding a broken-down rickshaw and concluding that Continue reading
Tag Archives: benjamin bloom
5 tips for success with Mastery Mode
- Keep it short.
Students will do 5 minutes per day quite happily. Keep your assignment to a single quiz, at least until you have feedback from the students. - Explain the principle to your students.
They many not be used to homeworks that enforce a daily routine, and some will moan like heck at you that they can’t do it all at once. - Demand, and enforce, the first attempt on the first day.
If the majority of your students leave homework until the last minute of the last day, they will get caught out and may feel you have deliberately trapped them. - To track progress, sort results by Attempts.
Assignments > Results > Results (beta) > click on the top of the Attempts column. - To check completion, sort results by Mark.
Assignments > Results > Results in detail > Sort by Mark, and look for those who scored >80%.
Assessing Evaluation with multiple-choice questions
In a previous post I covered the KUE model and bemoaned the infrequent application of U and E in multiple-choice questions. Assessing evaluative thinking in multiple choice may seem the hardest of the lot, because it’s the most abstracted form of learning. In fact, it’s relatively easy provided you are very clear about exactly what you are testing for with each question.
Continuing the cycling theme, I’d like you to imagine you are talking one-to-one with a student, and you want Continue reading
Assessing Understanding with multiple-choice questions
The original 1988 National Curriculum couched learning achievement in terms of knowledge, understanding and evaluation (KUE), a cut-down version of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This remains, in my view, by far the most practical version for the working educator.
The easiest way to set up an assessment is via multiple-choice questions. Building the technology to serve and mark multiple choice tests is easy; most VLEs support it and there are plenty of Continue reading