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Sherman Dorn
Craftwork academe
Last semester, a doctoral student at USF asked me, what were the methods of historians? I responded by talking in general about the uses of archival materials, publications, oral histories, multimedia, statistical data, all sorts of primary sources … and realized quickly that was not what the student meant or needed. What the student was […]
NYC teacher “value added” and the veneer of factuality
Teachers College sociologist Aaron Pallas takes a New York judge to task for miscategorizing what is Fact Or Opinion in the ruling to let the internal NYC "teacher ratings" become public. (The issue is on appeal, and the judge's ruling is stayed while the appeal is pending.) Essentially, Pallas's point is that with such uncertainty about the […]
New York Times reporters and editors fail reading comprehension test
First read this headline: Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say. And the lede: "Taking a test… helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques." Now read the following text: Without the [chosen] passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 […]
Gainful employment: an immodest proposal
So for-profit universities have hired Lanny Davis to get some friends to become strange bedfellows fighting the federal government's draft gainful-employment rules, which would require colleges and universities that engage in vocational education/workforce training to document that the cost of the education does not completely overwhelm the likely benefit (with measures of repayment rates and […]
The inside debate on teacher expectations
In the past few years, there has been so much focus on arguments about the use of student outcome data to help evaluate teachers and the role of evaluation in personnel decisions that there has been too little attention paid to the ways teachers in different circumstances view the issues. So here comes Stephen Sawchuk with […]