Record, Research, Report: an approach to science education

Science education should move away from rote and memory based approach. Science in the schools should be done primarily with hands, and be supported by building conceptual structures based on this experience. Ideas of science need concrete experiential basis. But any such approach to change how science is taught and learnt in the schools will be unsuccessful if we do not change the assessments methods and techniques.

Assessment in education is a horcrux to improve the education. Unless you make changes in assessments types and methods, the large scale picture of education is not going to change. All the efforts towards “improving” education have largely failed precisely because of this. As Papert commented decades ago, the educational system acts like a living organism that wants to maintain status quo. Any change in the fundamental processes such as classroom discourse, or teacher professional development must be accompanied by equivalent changes in the assessment techniques. Failing that the reforms will hit a block and if successful, will be very limited than the original objective. This is why I say assessment is like a horcrux, change the assessment type and patterns, the other systemic changes will follow.

For example, the teachers have been for several decades now being fed (forced?) with the agenda of using constructivism as an approach in their classroom teaching. The teacher training curricula has chapters on this very idea, with Piaget and Vygotsky being the buzzwords. (Whether constructivism is the best approach to teaching and learning is another question to be pondered. The fact remains that most academics accept by default that constructivism is the only way forward for better education.) So after learning all these theories, when it comes to actual classroom, these theories don’t mean much particularly in later grades. Because none of our assessments, particularly in the all important, life-defining, board exams are not constructivist in nature. Conversely, they are exemplars of rote-memory based assessments, in which replicating from memory in a given time frame is the most crucial quality that a learner can possess. So where do all the constructivist approaches go in the case of board exams? Are these exams even oriented to handle the constructivism based learning approach? They are not, hence all such reforms are doomed to fail. I call such reforms in school education as cosmetic reforms as they only change the appearance (in a limited way, and for limited people) rather than changing the educational approaches.

cosmetic | kɒzˈmɛtɪk | adjective: affecting only the appearance of something rather than its substance:

At most such cosmetic reforms create employment opportunities for educational researchers like myself, who bask in glory of research outputs such reforms create. Most of such research do not lead to any changes to implementation, but remain insulated and experimental cases which may not be scalable. Here one such idea is presented, might be too theoretical or not be scalable but worth sharing with others.

3R approach to science education – Record, Research, Report

The 4Rs of education are crucial, this idea is specific to science education which can be applied to other forms of education as well. But here it is presented in the context of science education. The basic idea is on project based learning in which the learners record (collect the data), research (analyse the data) and report the data back to their peer group. The choosing of the projects has to be done carefully so that there are natural variations in the implementation by different learners. It definitely should not be cookbook type projects in which everyone gets the same answer. The research questions for the project are hence important and can be akin to renewable assessments of Wiley. At the end of it they must lead to creation of something of value and interest to the learner, peers and community at large. It might be challenging to design such assessments, but then we are trying to change the overall approach to science education, cosmetic changes won’t work!

Record: The data should be recorded providing details of how it was done, and if possible with access to raw data stored somewhere. Someone else might find that data useful. FAIR principles might of help to understand how’s and why’s of data sharing.

Research: Analyse the data in the light of research questions, also some exploratory data analysis could be done. This might be an individual or a group task. Also interesting would be to look at how the learners work with data sets that have been created by others by incorporating them in their own research questions. Tools for analysis can be varied, and will depend on the type of research questions that are asked. Statistical analysis is only one part of research.

Report: Science is a community based activity. Unless the data and findings from analysing it are shared with the peer community, it is not possible to call something science. The reporting might (should?) not be a research paper but should incrementally report the progress or any major Aha! moments. Such reporting will also help to create a history which the learner can see, and actually look at various aspects of learning. Reporting something might itself lead to learning about things, as writing is a higher form of cognitive activity. Reporting is also a form of error correcting mechanism, which might lead to deeper engagement with peers and the subject matter.

So a platform that is needed should suffice to cater to these three needs. And this is cyclical, with reporting leading to next questions, which need data to record -> research -> report -> record

Keeping these in mind I have created a logo for RRR which inherently describes a cyclical process of these three components. A learner sits in the centre, with an eye on a telescope like “r” for recording.

Logo idea for Record, Research, Report

A versio without text.

December 6, 2019December 7, 2019 The Mitr

On wearing branded stuff

I always felt uncomfortable when clothing or wearable accessories have an incredibly large amount of space for their own branding. I usually avoid such stuff when the brand name takes over the product. There are certain brands that do that, every item they produce will have an unreasonably large amount of real estate in the product to their own logo. I thought this was crappy/bad design. But it actually works, as people actually buy the product because it has that ultra visible branding. And people like to show other people that they are wearing something branded. As long as it is subtle and occupies the minimum space it requires, I am okay with it, but anything larger is a complete putoff. At more times than I can remember I have not bought clothes that have too much branding even if I like other attributes (color/texture/cut). I always felt it as odd to have too much branding on myself and somehow I could not explain this feeling of uneasiness, as I could not exactly pinpoint the cause of this discomfort, or put it in words (or both). Recently I read something which resonated perfectly with my own thought process (is there a word for what I have just described: a single word describing the feeling). Anyways here is an entry from a great blog which describes that feeling:

When you see someone sporting a shirt with the manufacturer’s name inscribed in bold letters across the chest, it’s hard to ignore the irony. The wearer is paying the company to promote its name, rather than vice versa. For the privilege of being a walking billboard, the purchaser may have paid many times the normal price of that product.

So next time you wear a pair of shoes with that logo, or a pair of pants with some large initials stitched on them, or a shirt with a brightly painted name, remember, you’re inadvertently advertising the company. The word “advertise” comes to us from Latin advertere meaning “to turn toward” or “to pay attention”. The word “inadvertently” derives from the same source. In other words, by not paying attention, we ARE paying attention.

Anu Garg (A Word A Day)

Now, the aesthetics of branding is something that can have personal preferences. I like mine subtle not garish, better still if it is not at all visible to others. It is like the aesthetical difference between pornography and artistic nude. You know it when you see it.

July 8, 2013 damitr

Pedagogy of Idea of Power

A paper from much later Papert IBM Journal 2000
“What’s the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power

Here he distinguishes between the psychological (how a person is
affected by a treatment) and epistemological (about ideas) aspects of
learning and assessment. It is rather unfortunate that researchers (much
to Papert’s dismay) choose to study “effects of programming (or of LOGO
or of Computer)” on children after a certain exposure akin to a medical
treatment. This is certainly not what was envisioned by Papert for LOGO
and computers. He also adds that the third word in the subtitle of
“Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas”, namely powerful
ideas is something that most researchers forgot. They only concentrated
on the earlier two and left the powerful ideas outside the classroom and
the school.

Also for the current practices in the fields of research in education
and especially constructvism which is in vogue now, he has following
critique (which I think is prevalent methodology and framework in our
own centre and applies to them as well):
“Consider Michael’s relationship with school mathematics. Learning how
to ﬁnd the common denominator of a bunch of fractions is boring for him
because he is not able to use it in any exciting way. It supports
neither ﬂights of the mind nor “hands-on” projects.

Enter a constructivist who says: Michael will have a better relationship
with the manipulation of fractions if he discovers the rules himself. So
situations are created (often with great ingenuity) that will lead
children to “discover” the rules of arithmetic. But being made to
“discover” what someone else (and someone you may not even like) wants
you to discover (and already knows!) is not Michael’s idea of an
exciting intellectual adventure. The idea of invention has been tamed
and has lost its essence. He
wants to ﬂy, but what this kind of constructivism offers him is more
like decorating the captive bird’s
cage.

This failure of the constructivist to meet Michael’s needs represents a
double whammy of disempowerment. Jean Piaget’s very strong idea that all
learning takes place by discovery is emasculated by its translation into
the common practice known in schools as “discovery learning.” It is
disempowered in part because discovery stops being discovery when it is
orchestrated to happen on the preset agenda of a curriculum but also in
large part because the ideas being learned are disempowered. For
example, the idea of rules for manipulating numbers was historically one
of the most powerful ideas ever and in the right context can still be.
But no child would ever
suspect that from its presentation in school as a rather boring routine.
Setting ourselves the task of
re-empowering the ideas being learned is also a step toward
re-empowering the idea of learning by discovery.

The same double whammy is present when the excellent and potentially
powerful intention, that
knowledge is situated, turns into presenting manipulations of fractions
in the guise of “real world” situations such as shopping at the
supermarket. For Michael this contributes nothing to a sense of the
power of the idea of fractions. He cares nothing about shopping in the
supermarket and knows that
in these days of automation at the checkout counter and unit prices on
the labels, no one exercises arithmetic while shopping.”

In this article he also talks about why school reforms are impossible
but change is not.

“So, too, the mega-change in education that will undoubtedly come in the
next few decades will not be
a “reform” in the sense of a deliberate attempt to impose a new designed
structure. My conﬁdence in making this statement is based on two factors:
(1) forces are at work that put the old structure in increasing
dissonance with the society of which it is
ultimately a part, and
(2) ideas and technologies needed to build new structures are becoming
increasingly available.
I hope that publishing this paper will help both factors. Public
discussion of the idea-averse
nature of School makes the dissonance more acute. Public access to
empowered forms of ideas and the ways in which technology can support
them fertilizes the process of new growth.”

Most of the people who are averse to technology for various reasons, are
essentially ignoring the fact that new epistemological and relational
structures among the learners and the things to be learned have started
to form due to current technologies, which were impossible earlier. The
very ignorance of the fact that these structures are changing the
dynamics of knowledge and ideas around us, sometimes knowingly and
patronizingly, will not lead us anywhere but keep us in an idea aversion
mode.

January 2, 2013January 2, 2013 damitr

CURE Logo

In earlier post we had seen the CUBE Logo, now in this post we will see, CURE Logo. CURE stands for a cure of problems of CUBE and is Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Education. The idea is to propagate the spirit and activities via making many-many centres across India and when one centre gets the know-how, it starts acting as a centre itself. This has enormous potential and is also not so easy, if we are planning to form a network of 20,000 odd colleges across India. Hats off to this initiative by Dr. M. C. Arunan.

Since the idea was to propagate the via forming numerous nodes, and absence of a centralized structure, we came up with the Pythagorean Tree as one of the possible candidates for the logo. The Pythagorean Tree is a fractal structure which is self similar. This also reflects the spirit of CURE and CUBE, that the size of the institute or its location should not reflect on the facilities or the opportunities that it provides to its students.

In this program an initial batch of students , lets call them Batch-0 is trained for performing a series of experiments . At end of their training which is a hands on, they give a talk on their work. In the next step, these students build these facilities at their alma mater and maintain them. This is the first iteration of the program. After this iteration, the Batch-0 students, who have handled these biological systems for some time now and carried out some investigations become mentors for the next batch of students. Lets call these as Batch-1. Now we conduct another session of training, in this the Batch-0 students act as mentors for Batch-1 students. Thus at end of this training another iteration of the programme is completed. So the second iteration builds on the first one. Then for the Batch-2 students, the students from earlier batches act as mentors, thus at each stage we are increasing the mentors as well as the facilities available for doing research. Iteratively, collaboratively we can sure reach the 20,000 odd under-graduate colleges in India

In the logo the base triangle forms the basis of all the structure, this we call as Batch-0, and rest of all others are based on this. And since this is an iterative, self-similar figure, none of them are different from one another, neither are the squares different. For example the small branch sitting on top of the large branch is a similar to the larger branch. If we scale it. it would be the same.

Lack of research facilities at the undergraduate level , is most often cited as cause for poor education at that level. And the facilities come expensive. This was we can make in-expensive or some times zero-expense facilities for college education and get the students involved. This logo is released under Creative Commons Share Alike License. The logo was made using Free Software for vector editing Inkscape.

November 6, 2012November 6, 2012 damitr

On Division of Education

‘Consider how we design our educational programs. We take the major subjects apart and reduce them to a number of main sub-sections. Then we subdivide the sub-sections. We continue until we have a large collection of little pieces that we believe that children can understand.

‘As a result we present our students with disembodied fragments of subject matter … fragments that they can’t possibly make sense of … fragments that they can’t use for anything. Most of them never sense the full power of the subjects that they encounter.’

via |Turtle Speaks Mathematics

May 30, 2012October 5, 2012 damitr