Making Connections: Thinking and Learning

This morning, when I was about to get into the shower, I was taking off my watch and I noticed that I'm starting to get get my typical biking-glove-tan-lines. That gave me a bit of joy, actually, because it means the weather has warmed up enough for me to be biking regularly again, and it's sunny enough that my arms are starting to brown (slightly) compared to my hands, which stay covered up by my palm-padded biking gloves.

Noticing this, reminded me of an Encyclopedia Brown story I read (probably around age 10? I was obsessed!) that revolved around the culprit being left-handed, and one of the clues was that a suspect had different colored hands--because he was a golfer, and only wore a glove on one hand.

The concept of only wearing one glove made me think of Michael Jackson, who used to famously wear only one glove, and I briefly wondered if his hands were different colors in the 1980s too.

And that idea of only wearing one glove in the 80s reminded me of a memory from when I was in the third grade, and a friend had gone to a Dodgers game on "batting glove night," and she gave me the glove she got--not because either of us were big baseball fans, but because we were friends, and she thought I would like it. She was right, I did. Because it was the 80s, and people could wear just one glove and be cool. (If we were pretending to be Michael Jackson, I guess.)

And that reminded me of an episode of 99% Invisible I just listened to on a bike ride this week that was all about the history of how the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and how the city displaced a Mexican-American community from the area that would become Dodger Stadium. Listening to this podcast has helped me to make all sorts of interesting and strange connections between so many aspects of contemporary life and good design (that's where the title comes from: if it's good design, it is "99% invisible"--you only notice it if the design is bad.)

I suddenly realized this weird cognitive loop, and it made me smile

And all of this happened in about 30 seconds, as I got into the shower, closed the curtain, and turned the water on.

Opinions: Evidence of Thinking

"Hey, Professor Mulder...is this an opinion question?"

A few semesters ago, I had a student taking a test raise her hand to call me over with this concern. She was in the midst of of the test, doing her best to answer carefully, and the thought must have struck her that there were multiple "correct" answers to the question I was asking.

Not every question I ask on a test is cut-and-dried. Some are. Some questions are convergent: there is clearly one correct answer. Convergent questions are usually best for assessing relatively low-level knowledge and understanding. Can the students recall the facts? Have they mastered the vocabulary? Do they have an understanding of the basic concepts? Convergent questions are good for these sort of course material. By asking a convergent question on an exam, I am verifying that my students have mastered a particular concept. And this is valuable in it's way; there are concepts that I want all of my students to learn, and a convergent question is a way of focusing in on their knowledge of a particular concept.

However, I don't think that convergent questions are always the best questions, even on a test. I want my students to provide evidence of thinking, not just rote memorization. How will they use the basic concepts they have learned? I've written before about Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive objectives. Bloom's taxonomy is one way of thinking about different levels of thinking. Here it is in a nutshell: