Bloom's Sixth

Most Americans still see a four-year degree as important, but it is not at the top of the list of things that will help someone achieve a successful career, a recent Heartland Monitor poll suggests. In the poll, respondents ranked technology skills, an ability to work with diverse groups of people, keeping skills current, and having family connections above a four-year college degree. They certainly didn’t dismiss a college education. More than half said a…

True learning has little to do with memorization. Benjamin Bloom explained that with enduring clarity 60-plus years ago. His six-tiered taxonomy places rote recall of facts at the bottom of a hierarchical order, with real learning taking place on higher tiers when students apply, analyze, synthesize, and create. Deep learning, project-based learning and a host of other high-impact approaches have provided evidence to back up Bloom’s…

I often roll my eyes at articles that take millennials to task for not measuring up to the standard of the day. All too often, baby boomers and those in generations before seem to wag their fingers at young people and spew out curmudgeonly laments that inevitably start with, “When I was your age …” Sample questions, above and below, from the international survey of millennials’ skills As I dug into a new report by the Educational Testing Service (There was a link, but the page no longer exists), though, I began to buy into the concerns it raises about the skills of American…

How can we grade participation more effectively? Maryellen Weimer argues that the way we usually grade participation in our classes doesn’t work. That is, many students still don’t join the conversations for fear of looking dumb. The typical grading approach also rewards quantity over quality. In an article in Faculty Focus, she writes about a colleague’s solution to this: using “extra-credit engagement tickets” students earn by completing assignments on time, joining online…