Re: paleonet "Graduated but Not Literate"

["Xavier Panades I Blas" <cogombra@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I totally disagree with exams...They only test the memory capacity of 
students...The only valid exams are the ones where the answers are given and 
the students are marked by their conclusions!



Respectfully,

Xavier Panades I Blas
55, Marksbury Road
Bedminster
Bristol BS3 5JY
England (EC)

http://www.acs.bolton.ac.uk/~xp1pls/
















From: TomDeVrie@aol.com
Reply-To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
Subject: Re: paleonet "Graduated but Not Literate"
Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 11:16:08 EST

One area for improvement that could lead to higher levels of adult literacy,
in evolution as well as other subjects, is student testing.

How many professors reading paleonet assess their students' progress with
exams that force students to formulate a cogent and coherent response and 
then
express that response in an intelligible, organized, and grammatically 
correct
manner?

Alternatively, how many professors hand out multiple-choice exams that can 
be
processed through a scantron machine?

While at Amherst College in the mid-1970s, I don't recall having taken a
single multiple choice test. I've seen some college exams since that would 
be a
professional embarrassment for a middle school teacher. In my own high 
school
classes, I haven't ever given a multiple-choice, true-false, 
fill-in-the-blank,
match-the-items test.

As for the teaching of evolution (or any subject with an important 
conceptual
component): students who are required to communicate their own understanding
of the subject, and who receive feedback from an instructor if their
understanding is deficient, are more likely to walk away with the skills 
advocated by
adult literacy proponents than students who are told simply that answer 'a,'
'b,' or 'c' is correct.

The moral of the story: if you want to have higher levels of performance, 
you
must have higher levels of expectation. Students can only while away their
time with Facebook or other distractions if there are no academic 
consequences.
If students are only assigned 50 pages to read a week, and correctly 
conclude
that reading half that will yield a good grade, is the diminished learning 
the
student's fault, or the professor's?

Tom DeVries