bonsai log 02
A peek inside the League of Assessing
these are the times that test muh students
I have zero qualms “teaching to the test”, especially when I get to set the test.
Even so, I was surprised how relieved I felt when I figured out exactly how I would update the assessments on my Quantitative Reasoning course. To be honest, they were already in really good shape thanks to the previous lecturers — I just needed to wrap my head around how I would run them this year, especially working with a much leaner teaching and marking team.
You can read about where I found my mojo on My LinkedIn post about finding my datasets — but, essentially, I've assigned my students some datasets from the excellent CSIRO Educational Datasets resource and challenged them to make some sense of each. They'll have an ongoing series of workshops where, over twelve hours in total, they'll go from first look at a dense spreadsheet to a short report about something they've found in the data. They'll also have a take-home which guides them through a more directed analysis, which I think I'll give them three weeks to work on.
The other assignments are: two fluffy short pieces on how they'll apply what they learn to their future work — surprisingly useful for resumes! — and another take-home challenging them to rustle up some numbers to analyse a strategic aspect of Australia's economy. (It's much more structured than what I've described — but I can't give everything away!)
the test for me
I'm pretty happy with these assessments, especially because I can now firmly gear my teaching to them. Yes, in theory, I should want my students stretching their intellectual wings, asking cheeky questions, holding ambiguity, all that jazz. But even if that's an end goal, they have to start somewhere, and I'm always happy to indulge in an old drill-and-instill1 along the way.
But digging deeper — speaking just for myself — I've noticed a pedagogical streak in me that sometimes overcenters students’ comfort at the expense of their growth. I am happy to cut a course down to size; I'm very nervous challenging students to rise to a course's demands. There's clearly a world of psychoanalysis that could be done on my bleeding heart, but regardless of where it comes from, I do need to keep that side of me in check.
Students want to learn. They can grow to hold discomfort. They are very capable of, metacognitively, understanding (1) what a particular skill is (2) how to do it in theory (3) that in practice they're still not quite good at it yet, especially if they're under stress or time pressure (4) that such struggles might inform what jobs or areas of work they choose in future, without lessening one bit their intrinsic worth.
So I'm the most apprehensive and excited about how the workshops will go. I've signed myself, and my fearless leaders, to a two-hour open-ended data exploration, across a group of students with variable data skills. I know what we'll be looking for when we assign them participation marks, but I don't know how it's all going to pan out.
But here's the thing — my students are adults, even if they're little adults.
They're facing a world where they, too, don't know how it's all going to pan out.
And still we're going to get in there and get this data analysis job done.
Here's to growing up.
“You have heard it said ‘drill-and-kill’. But I say ‘drill-and-instill’. Or should it be ‘drill-and-distill’? ‘Drill-and-refill’? … that's a surprisingly larger number of acceptable rhymes than I expected.”