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With the introduction of the licensing exam, finally, some students seemed to regard educational psychology as more important than in the past—even using university break weeks for additional study of the textbook! On the other hand, some students seemed to worry about their performance on the test, and their anxiety may have interfered with learning about educational psychology itself. Their worries created a dilemma that Professor never truly resolved: how to get students to prepare for the test seriously without arousing undue worry or anxiety in them?
How well do you feel that Professor Sutton’s dilemmas about high-stakes testing reflect the dilemmas that public school teachers might face in preparing their own students for high-stakes tests?
On balance, and taking into account Professor Sutton’s experience, do you think that high-stakes tests are desirable?
Cochran-Smith, M. (2003). Assessing assessment in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 54(3), 187-191.
Educational Testing Service. (2004). Study guide for Principles of Learning and Teaching, 2nd edition. Princeton, NJ: Author.
Numerous educators have planned and implemented activities and curriculum units that use either behaviorist or constructivist principles in one way or another. Often the demonstrated activities or units are hard to compare directly simply because behaviorism and constructivism address different aspects of learning, and therefore call upon teachers to perform somewhat different roles. To see what I mean, look at these two examples of instructional research. The first is grounded in behaviorism and the second is grounded in constructivism.
Behaviorism in action: a remedy for stuttering Mark Onslow and his colleagues have described a way to help young children overcome stuttering, a problem in which sounds and words are repeated or stretched unduly, so that fluent conversation is difficult (2001). Onslow’s research strategy was simple, at least in principle: he trained parents of children who stuttered to praise their child more strongly is the child spoke fluently (without any stutter), and to correct the child quietly, but non-punitively whenever the child did stutter. A fluent sentence therefore produced praise, or even a gold star, from parents. A stuttered sentence produced an immediate sentence like “I think that was a stutter”, stated factually and quietly. Value judgments and criticisms were not allowed.
Onslow’s program contradicted the conventional advice to parents about stuttering, which was to ignore it wherever possible. Nonetheless the program produced very positive results. All of the stuttering children reduced or even eliminated their stuttering after a few weeks of the differential reinforcement by their parents, and the stuttering did not return when they were tested even one year after the program finished.
Constructivism in action: project-based learning Juliette Goldman, an educator working in Australia, demonstrated how this can be done with health education for middle years students (Goldman, 2006). She designed a project for seventh-grade students in which they had to publish a training manual for fellow-students on the topic of “good food handling”, advice for restaurant workers about how they can keep for contaminating either themselves or the food that they serve. The writers of the manual worked in groups of three, researching information on a range of topics related to food handling. Then they used computer self-publishing software to prepare and print copies of their information. They also made oral presentations about their manuals to a school assembly to which local food-industry representatives were invited, and they arranged to display the finished manuals at the local public library.
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