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Toggle comments on Open thread, Nov. 10 - Nov. 16, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've been commenting on the site or a few months now, but so far just replies and responses. I've been thinking about potential contributions for a top-level discussion post, and I thought I'd ask about it here first to gage interest.
I have taught university classes in the past, usually with traditional methodology but in one memorable case with some experimental methods. There were a few ways this was different; as an example, we used 'high expectations, low stakes'- we allowed students to retake any assignment as many times as they liked, but their grade for the entire class was basically the lowest grade they got on any assignment. (This was partly inspired by video games, actually.)
It will obviously be of particular interest to anyone else who does teaching, but there's reasonable hope that some of my experiences there would be of use to audidacts. Do you think this would be a good use of my time?
I think the phrase in the education literature is mastery learning: my exposure to it was discussion of how Khan Academy does math tests. Because they're on a computer-based system, they can generate an arbitrary number of problems of a particular form (like, for example, 'multiply two three digit numbers together') and give each student as many problems as it takes for them to get 10 right in a row. Sometimes the student gets the lesson and only does 10 questions; sometimes the student takes 200 tries to get 10 right in a row, but they always master the skill before they move on (or they spend a lot of time getting very lucky).
I think your account will be received fairly well in Discussion if you present it like the above.
Isn't that a high stake situation?
Holistically, yes. But they are free to fail any given assignment any number of times- in fact, many would sign up to take quizzes before studying, as a preview of what the assessment would look like and a way to rapidly jump through sections they might have studied elsewhere.