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Don’t make me choose!

MIT professor David E. Pritchard conducted a recent study that analyzed cheating on homework in his introductory physics course.  He arrived at some interesting conclusions. Chief among these, that cheating occurs  about 50% more than is reported by students in surveys and that this frequently led to students bombing their tests.

The professor, David E. Pritchard, led a research team that analyzed student performance in an online homework system called MasteringPhysics.com during four different semesters. The researchers were able to measure the time spent on each question and look for suspicious work patterns. If a student took less than a minute each answering several complex questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged that as likely cheating. “Since one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several answers typically required, we infer that the quick-solver group is copying the answer from somewhere,” said the researchers in a paper due out today in the free online journal Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research. (more…)

Dan Pink delivered an interesting talk on motivation and the problems associated with extrinsic motivation. According to Pink, research has shown that certain sorts of extrinsic incentives or what Pink refers to as “contingent motivators” actually dull thinking and stifle creativity. Even though the scientific research conducted over the past forty years seems to support this theory, much of the business world, on the other hand, seems to be unwilling to incorporate these findings in the structures it uses to manage people.

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In An Open Letter to Educators, Dan Brown challenges educators, as well as our past notions of education. It is bound to spark controversy in some areas. Nevertheless, this should cause each teacher to re-examine the relationship between teacher, student, and material. Enjoy…

I’ve just returned from presenting at the California Charter Schools Conference in Sacramento. With so many topics and such diverse backgrounds it was quite enlightening. The interest in Web 2.0 technologies was intense. It seems to be one of the hottest topics and everyone is scrambling to learn how it can improve education.

As with any new technology, there are challenges (legal and technical) to its implementation. Additionally, some are more apt to embrace its use while others are more cautious or even try to block them. We will discuss this in depth in future posts. For now, I’ve posted our presentations below. Feel free to use them, we only ask that you attribute them to us.