Tag: research

I Work Hard to Doubt Your Research

classified research

I’ve been known to read a study or two. I can back up my point with this research or the other. Today, I was in a meeting where I easily pulled up 20 years’ worth of research to make my point. And while I’m not statistician or economist, I can evaluate a study’s worthiness of my attention better than most folks I run into. Treatment and control groups, T-tests, P levels, pseudo-experiments – thanks to more semesters of graduate level statistics courses than I’d ever intended on completing, I am functionally literate.

So, even though I appreciate a randomized-controlled trial and can revel in rejecting the null hypothesis, it may seem surprising that I work so hard on maintaining a bias of doubting even the most well-constructed study.

When it comes to what I privilege as a belief, I’ll point you to the sociologists and anthropologists who examine a phenomenon closely, take care to understand as much of everything around it as they can and present their findings by saying, “This thing happened, and here are the elements and conditions that happened when it happened.” Then, they turn around and return to watching, calling back as they leave, “We are going to keep watching to find out if it still happens when other things happen.”

Why, though, do I work so hard to maintain a bias in favor of this descriptivist approach? I think of it the other way around. I’m resisting the sexiness of numbers. An implied or inferred certainty can creep in when numbers are used to explain why something happens. Whatever quantitative study you choose to believe is basically saying, “If X, Y, and Z are equal, then we can say with this level of certainty that this thing will happen when you do that other thing.” It’s that first part of the statement that keeps me suspicious of education research. Tell me the the last time a teacher was able to control for all relevant variables when deciding which practice to employ in her classroom.

This is not to say I throw in with the sociologists’ ability to predict the future. It is only to say I take comfort in the implied humility in reporting your results by acknowledging they are the conclusions at which you arrived when trying to figure things out by watching this time.

It is also not to say I poo poo a well-constructed experimental study. I hear and read each one I encounter as, “Here’s a pretty good guess of what will happen when you do these things and know this about the population to which you’re doing it.”

All of this is how I think about dictionaries. Dictionaries are descriptivist tools. Adding a new word to an edition of a dictionary does not freeze that word in time, prescribing how it is to be used in language forevermore. Like the work of a sociologist, a dictionary’s contents are meant as a snapshot of language putting newly-deployed words alongside those already in existence. When Homer Simpson’s “d’oh” first found its way into Webster’s, few (if any) people started using it in their everyday speech or formal writing as a result.

For words with which I’m not initially familiar, the dictionary can act as our statisticians’ studies. Looking up “fat” after my early-90s self was told that’s how I looked would help me to understand what had been meant by the statement. Here too there’s a flaw. Without knowing the context inferred by the dictionary’s definition, I may walk away thinking the statement meant I was corpulent when it was meant to imply I was “phat”. The definition was the dictionary’s best guess.

I rely on dictionaries to help me navigate new terms in the same way I look to the results of well-designed studies to tell me about new ideas of practices – with a bias of believing they are providing me the best guess at the time.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

86/365 We Must Practice a New Research

Time used to be that you knew what research meant when a teacher announced to the class that they’d be conducting it. The library would be reserved (God only knows what would happen if more than one group of students were in there at once). The librarian could be counted upon to deliver the perfunctory “Here’s How We Use the Library” speech. And, the class would be released to find the handful of books related to their respective topics.

For those in high school who took an old school approach, research also means a plethora of notecards – source cards, quote cards, outline cards. Cards galore.

It was a simpler time, a calmer time, and, quite frankly, a better time for notecard manufacturers.

Say research now, and any myriad of scenarios run through students’ heads. Maybe a library is involved. Maybe they turn to their phones. Maybe it’s a computer lab or laptop cart. Perhaps it’s both. If it’s the latter, an Internet connection is handy, but the options only open from there. Will students use the simplified per-for-use services? Will they Google? Will they plagiarize? Will the teacher catch on?

The possibilities are endless.

Research is different now.

The schools we need see research questions as “what” and “how”.

To accomplish this, they must work to make sure teachers know how to find felicitous answers in any landscape. This doesn’t mean another seminar on how to use the latest subscribtion database. Teachers are as likely to pay attention to the intricacies set out for them as students are. Helping schools be centers of research means helping teachers develop the habits of practice that help them to make informed and efficient decisions within an information landscape.

All of this should be driven by the same things we hope for students – inquiry and projects worth completing.

Schools working to become learning organizations are asking questions. Their teachers have ideas and questions as to what need be done to improve the teaching and learning of the space, and they are asked to do generative work that moves practices forward.

Teachers as researchers in the now are much more likely to be better teachers of researchers at the same time.

Presented with the staid practices of notecard-based research or any derivatives thereof, students are likely to notice (and rightly so) that they’re being presented with strategies that ask them to devolve what are likely highly complex methods for tracking down information.

Instead, we must realize we are beyond being beholden to what can be found from a single source. Hypertextual sources mean students are able to track from one source to another to another ad infinitum. Anyone who’s jumped down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia knows this to be true.

The “how” and “what” question is ever more important.

In helping students to be researchers, teachers must pose and invite inquiry around some key questions:

What information is relevant to what I want to know?
What information is irrelevant to what I want to know?
How will I know the difference?
What kinds of places might hold interesting knowledge about my questions?
Whom might I want to access to better understand my interests?

Some key components about these questions should jump out immediately. In a super-informed space, it isn’t only about what information can be found, it is important to consider which information is both relevant as well as interesting. When we were counting on the five books from the library, we needn’t discern between what is interesting and what wasn’t. It was a seller’s market and we took notes on every mundane fact we could find to be able to reach our page requirement.

Contemporary researchers are flush with relevant and irrelevant as well as interesting and uninteresting information. Teaching to make the distinction is key.

Books also held us to their author’s page-contained views on a topic or a journalist’s one-off article on an event. Contemporary researchers have access to people as well as ideas. In asking whom they might want to contact, students are more likely to consider how they might leverage social technologies to communicate with sources in real time. From email to twitter, students can publish a report Friday that includes information from an interview Wednesday.

Research today must ask better questions with respect to the “how” of the questions we’re asking. It must also allow teachers to practice the kinds of information-gathering and synthesis they’re asking of students. Such an ecosystem is one driven not only to ask complex questions, but to craft complex answers as well.

Learning Grounds Ep. 011: In Which Jessica Alzen talks of teacher evaluation and the split between online and face-to-face teaching

In this episode, Zac talks to researcher and graduate student Jessica Alzen about constructing teacher evaluation systems and the differences between online and face-to-face teaching.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Things I Know 294 of 365: Students are rich in Funds of Knowledge

…children in the households are not passive bystanders, as they seem in the classrooms…

– Luis Moll et al.

One of my favorite texts this semester is a reading from Luis Moll, Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff, and Norma Gonzalez entitled “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms.” It’s better than it sounds. Let me distill:

“Our claim is that by capitalizing on household and other community resources, we can organize classroom instruction that far exceeds in quality the rote-like instructions these children [from working-class Mexican communities in Tucson, AZ] commonly encounter in schools.”

“We use the term ‘funds of knowledge’ to refer to these historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being.”

“[Home] networks are flexible adaptive, and active, and may involve multiple persons from outside the homes; in our terms, they are ‘thick’ and ‘multi-stranded,’ meaning that one may have multiple relationships with the same person or with various persons.”

“When funds of knowledge are not readily available within households, relationships with individuals outside the households are activated to meet either household or individual needs. In classrooms, however, teachers rarely draw on the resources of the ‘funds of knowledge’ of the child’s world outside the context of the classroom.”

“[Fund of knowledge] is more precise for our purposes because of its emphasis on strategic knowledge and related activities essential in households’ functioning, development, and well-being. It is specific funds of knowledge pertaining to the social, economic, and productive activities of people in a local region, not ‘culture’ in its broader, anthropological sense, that we seek to incorporate strategically into classrooms.”

I’ve been in many a conversation that came close to these ideas, but Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez put it in simply relatable terms and their full work is worth your time. Here’s the citation:

Moll, Luis et al. (Spring 1992). “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms,” in Theory Into Practice, XXXI(2), 132-141.

Things I Know 293 of 365: The glacier of higher education is drifting toward collaborative learning

If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.

– Wilson Mizner

I’m in the throws of finals at the moment. Today was spent reading the relevant four sources to be synthesized and analyzed in the essay final I’ll be writing tomorrow for one of classes. Contrary to my instincts, it won’t be available for viewing here until after the due date for submission has passed in keeping with the explicit instructions that we are allowed to discuss our ideas for the paper while we are planning and thinking about what we’ll write, but not once we’ve begun writing.

While I understand this guidance as keeping with the College’s policy of preserving “the status of the work as the student’s own genuine intellectual product,” I also wonder what effects such policies have on our abilities to build a fund of knowledge or work collaboratively.

Much of the work I’ve been doing over the course of this semester includes ideas around setting policy at the organizational and systems levels. This work has asked for definition of purpose and principles of design. It has asked for the articulation of beliefs as I would integrate them into organizations and systems under my supervision.

At the same time, the refinement of those principles and beliefs has largely been done individually.

There should be road testing.

Instead of my design principles, I’d love the chance to work within the context of a 70-student course to come to consensus on our design principles. Imagine the process of starting with 70 disperate ideas and the discussion surrounding their integration. Imagine the learning of the experience.

To be clear, this is the faulting of the system, not any individual. Much of the work done within higher education has to do with looking at the writings of those who have come before us and working to invent something just different enough so that we might call it unique. Given the plurality of ideas accessible in a globally networked world, such a process is intensely competitive.

In one of my courses this semester, we were asked to move toward a collaborative process. In teams, we were asked to set a research agenda and share our findings. Though not planned, this led to the sharing of resources across teams to the point that the course’s teaching team created and online space for teams to archive their research. Once allowed, the sharing was contagious. Not only was each piece of work created for that assignment each student’s own genuine intellectual property, it had the added benefit of drawing from the depth of a commons shaped by all the minds in the room.

This is an excellent start.

Still, we can do much more to foster individual thought built through communal knowledge.

The leading example of what is possible exists in Writing History in the Digital Age. Edited by Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, Writing is “a born-digital edited volume, under contract with the University of Michigan Press for the Digital Humanities Series of its digitalculturebooks imprint.”

It signals a shift in how we can better leverage intellectual capital to build polycultural works.

What’s more, the research is coming to support such a shift. If you’ve got the time, look at the work Sarah Thorneycroft is doing to change academic publishing or consider Doug Belshaw’s transparent, conversational and deeply academic work on digital literacies.

While I’m frustrated by the lingering restrictions of classroom 1.0 I’m encountering in graduate school, I’m heartened by these bright spots highlighting ways in which networks can be leveraged to support both individual creation and communal refinement.

Flash Assignment: History

The Gist:

  • We have 1:1 laptops.
  • I’m using the laptops to have kids jigsaw an understanding of the world in which Henry V exists.
  • It’s putting their research and reference skills to use in a way that will prove valuable in the immediate future.
  • They’re owning the learning (wouldn’t November be proud?).

The Whole Story:

My Shakespeare course just finished up The Tempest. It was fun, they created audio versions of the play which will be posted for other teachers to use soon. (Silly editing process.)

Our next work will be the first Shakespearian history they’ve encountered whilst at SLA. We did a minute of historical interpretation of the other works we’ve looked at so far this semester (King Lear and The Tempest). For Henry V, I want to make sure they leave with a better understanding of what was what during and leading up to Shakespeare’s day. Here’s what we did:

  • One person from each table group came up and pulled a slip of paper from the Coffee Can of Fate.
  • They read the slip of paper aloud and either kept it or gave it up.
  • If they kept it, all was set.
  • If they gave it up, another team would steal it and be set and the team that actually pulled the paper would wait for the next round.

Eventually, everything worked out and each table group had a paper.

The topics:

  1. Theatrical History (1400 A.D. – 1650 A.D.)
  2. The 100 Years War
  3. Social Classes
  4. Daily Life
  5. Henry IV (the plays)
  6. Technology of Warfare
  7. Divine Right of Ascension
  8. Feudalism

They have today to use their laptops to research their respective topics.

Next class, they will teach the class about their topic for approx. 7 minutes. They’ll have to create something that allows the rest of the class to take notes, is a physical handout or is a digital handout. I’m planning of posting what they come up with for anyone to use.

Based on what they present, I’ll make a quiz and incorporate the new knowledge throughout our unit of study.

This assignment would be possible without the laptops, but it’s so much better because of the laptops. It will also be a better class for their uses of multiple platforms to present their lessons than if I were to attempt to put together the same material in a small window of time.