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what does it mean to assess the effectiveness of a pedagogy or technology?
For many instructors, assessment just means grading, but it actually entails much more than this. When designed thoughtfully and implemented carefully, assessments can provide important evidence about what and how students are learning and whether course goals have been met. Today's educational settings place an increasing emphasis on understanding, analytical thinking, and communication skills, which in turn has created a growing need for assessment practices, procedures and measures that get beyond mere memorization of "facts." Assessing the effectiveness of a pedagogical or technological intervention in today's academic setting means, first, articulating course goals in terms of student understanding, analytical reasoning, domain-appropriate beliefs and attitudes, and communication skill; and then, second, creating strategies for assessing the extent to which such course goals have been met. Developing and implementing these kinds of assessments takes substantial time and intellectual energy (if not a bit of cleverness), yet the outcomes of such practices are well worth the resources they demand.
what this tutorial provides
Within these pages, you'll find a set of exemplary strategies for assessing the effectiveness of different pedagogies and/or technologies based on current "best practices" within the field of educational research. Each strategy is outlined in terms of its purpose and general requirements, its limitations, common variations on it, and additional resources for further inquiry. For each strategy, a list of example research studies is provided; these studies illustrates how the strategy was implemented and, when possible, what specific measures were used. The result is an interlinked network of webpages that you can navigate by example or by theme. You will find that many, if not most, of the example studies represented here combine two or more strategies for assessing a given intervention's effectiveness; such combinations illustrate the solutions that various investigators have developed in order to meet the challenge of conducting CAREful1
educational research head on.
CAREful Research
But what exactly does "CAREful" assessment of the effectiveness of a pedagogy or technology entail? Levin and O'Donnell (1999)32 provide the following definition: If an appropriate Comparison reveals Again and again evidence of a direct Relationship between an intervention and a specified outcome, while Eliminating all other competing explanations for the outcome, then the research yields scientifically convincing evidence of the intervention's effectiveness.
Let's break this down a bit more. According to Levin and O'Donnell (1999)32, "..evidence linking an instructional intervention to a specified educational outcome is scientifically convincing if...
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