A couple of links for Basic Skills teachers

A correspondent who teaches ESOL in Minnesota strongly recommends this linked paper (you can download it, but it is big).

And as testimony to the site's usefulness, the "related links" feature takes you to The Impact of "Skills for Life" on Adult Basic Skills in England: How Should We Interpret Trends in Participation and Achievement? You can't get that directly from the site, but even the abstract is interesting.

ERIC is back!

I may be late getting this news, but ERIC is back.

Who he? Educational Resources Information Center is the largest largely open-access database of educational research in the world, courtesy of the US Department of Education. A few years ago they pulled the plug on the funding. A couple of sites struggled on, providing access to the database but not adding anything to it, but now it appears to be back in rude health, with over 3200 new resources added in the past month, and new search facilities.

Note that it can't always provide the full-text resources for free, but sometimes it can, and the ERIC "digests" provide superb overviews of selected topics. Bookmark it!

An aside

This may not be about threshold concepts, but if you want a masterclass in how to give an entertaining lecture, as well as some really thought-provoking ideas, then there is no better way to spend twenty minutes.

Question! If you are not teaching in the "arts", what does Ken have to say to your practice?

Did you watch "Lewis" this evening?

As befits the topic, the obvious link tells you nothing!

But did you spot the threshold concept? [Yes, "how sad can you get?" notwithstanding..] The Haydn Gwynne character, maths lecturer, sets a probability problem for her class early in the story. It is about darts, and the odds of player A or player B getting to zero first...

Part of the information she supplies concerns the previous form of both players. I think that is totally irrelevant. The probabilities of the present situation are quite independent of previous success; this is counter-intuitive, hence troublesome knowledge, and possibly a threshold concept.

But is this the case? The probability of success on the basis of previous form is (presumably) a measure of skill, since darts is not a random game...

I have no idea of the answer, of course. I don't even know if there is one.

Study Day Evaluations

Here are the basic evaluations of the first three Study Days, in chart form.*

If;

• you would like the original data to work on, or
  
• you have additional comments to make (existing write-in comments have been noted)

--please comment on this blog.

Thanks

For geeks only:

*It's an Adobe Flash file, which is by far the most compact way of making PowerPoint available on the web. You sacrifice some of the animation and interactivity, but it is small and just one file. You can't export as Flash from Powerpoint, of course. However, just download (completely free--not even any ads) OpenOffice from http://www.openoffice.org/ I say "just" download--it will take a while because OpenOffice is a serious competitor to Microsoft Office, on all fronts. It is fully compatible with MS Office in all but a few esoteric respects (like custom animations), but improves on it in various ways;

• it is FREE
• it can save directly to Acrobat (.pdf) files
• and if appropriate to Flash...

I'm a fan, obviously; but not merely because of the above. For those of you teaching introductory ICT; why are you teaching MS Office? I know it is installed on all the college machines, but there is nothing to stop them installing OpenOffice alongside it. It is FREE, after all. And it is not flaky; it is the non-commercial version of Sun Microsystems office suite, StarOffice, which is the standard package for the German government... And you could legally and legitimately give it to your learners on a CD; saving them at least £120 (you might have to charge them 20p for the disc, of course).

Come to think of it, why Windows? OpenOffice is originally a Linux package...

Are fractions really threshold concepts?

The linked story concerns a maths professor who thinks that fractions can and should be abandoned (along with long division and some other topics) in early maths learning. They might be re-introduced after calculus, he believes.

I have argued that learning basic arithmetic consists of a series of obligatory threshold concepts, but I stopped at division. Fractions usually come next in the traditional school curriculum, and they too are regarded as a threshold concept; this mathematician obviously thinks they are not. Discuss.

A major threshold concept

Over coffee this morning, Peter, Juliet and I were discussing last night's TV; so of course we talked about Horizon on gravity. Peter pointed out that "spacetime" (clearly all one word and sometimes referred to as "the spacetime"), is clearly a threshold concept—and troublesome knowledge—for understanding post-Newtonian physics.

How did the programme do in getting over this critical idea? Do respond!

You can watch the whole programme again for the next six days, or download it and keep it for a month, from the link.