US Higher Education’s Billion-Dollar Liability
I am not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on TV. I’m a literal-minded engineer who loves education...
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Category: Feedback
Designed for Suffering: Student Retention Through Adaptive Pain
I was catching up on my reading and came across a wonderful essay on the economist Albert O. Hirschman (who I’d never heard of). My wife asked me what I was doing, and I said, “I’m reading this wonderful...
Read MoreCreativity Requires Criticism
We’ve been revisiting the assumptions and research on feedback recently – more to come on that. In a nutshell, faith in the power of feedback has fueled my work for almost 10 years. And clearly the...
Read MoreGoing on Faith?
When I was an RA (Residential Assistant) in college my floor got new carpets over the summer. I walked out to my first floor meeting, with my 20 or 30 freshman who would soon be (already were) smoking cigarettes, consuming vast...
Read MoreiPad and Observational Assessment
We recently got our hands on an iPad. Its speed impressed us, so we made a video to show off Waypoint running on this eminently portable assessment tool. It’s perfect for a classroom teacher or a professor working (and...
Read MoreRediscovering Dialog
To enter into a dialog is to be human. But dialog is difficult in many modern organizations, where large groups of people interact, time is a vanishing resource, and personal and professional pressures overwhelm. Education is a...
Read MoreThe Ultimate ‘Outcome’
We often use the example of assessing driving skills in faculty development workshops. We like the example because most of us feel that we know a good driver when we see one (and that we’re good drivers!), but it is an...
Read MoreOutcomes Assessment and Grades
A couple of recent articles in Inside Higher Ed caught our eye – one on grades and grade inflation, and the other on the creation of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. It seems obvious to us that...
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