[IAEP] Proposed New K-12 Science Framework

[mokurai at earthtreasury.org]

On Tue, July 26, 2011 9:15 pm, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>>
>>
>> Now I am going to skip over to Chapter 10 where the nitty-gritty stuff
>> seems to be.  I'm talking about things like teacher training and student
>> assessment.  I hope they addressed the inadequacy of the "standardized"
>> multiple choice test where students regurgitate memorized facts which
>> they
>> will promptly forget. We shall see!
>>
>>
>> They couldn't go beyond the research, and research in better methods of
> evaluation is not as strong as it should be. Still, they clearly left a
> mandate for those who follow them to avoid purely fact-based testing, as
> that would undermine the whole point of their "three-dimensional"
> standards.

I seem to know about research that they did not make use of. But I can't
say for sure until I read more. The problem is very similar to the Turing
test (modified to ask whether we are talking to a scientist in the making,
rather than whether we are talking to a person), or to Wittgenstein's
question in the Philosophical Investigations: How can you tell whether
another person understands you? In the language of Foundations of
Mathematics, the answer is that this is a fundamentally undecidable
question in general. So we have to find tractable subsets of the general
question. This can unfortunately leave us in the position of the man in
the joke who lost his wallet in a dark part of a street, and was looking
for it under a distant lamppost because he could see better there.

Of course, all of science and engineering has this problem of looking in
the few areas where we have lampposts for solutions to the mysteries of
the darkness, and only occasionally putting up new lampposts.

> I think they did the best they could.

Given that it was not their job to be the next Maria Montessori or Caleb
Gattegno or Jaime Escalante of science, etc., teaching. But then, who is,
other than themselves? ^_^

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-- 
Edward Mokurai
(默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر
ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks