Our sixth cohort had two good meetings online yesterday in which they shared their experiences with concept mapping and started exploring the how and why of assessment. Their next assignment is to:

  1. Read the third chapter of How Learning Works
  2. Choose a small topic (something that can be taught in 10 minutes or less).  This can be the same topic they used in the first exercise, or a new one.
  3. Come up with a multiple-choice question that can be used to distinguish novices who don't know anything about the topic from competent practitioners who understand the basics.
  4. Come up with another MCQ to distinguish competent people from experts.
  5. Post both questions to the blog in the category "Round 6.2″ without the answers.
  6. Comment on a couple of other people's posts. These comments should include answers to both questions, plus discussion of how comprehensible the questions were, how fair they were, and so on.

MCQs are a quick way to tell if a group of learners have understood a topic or not, but only if the wrong answers are plausible. If, after you've taught for 10-15 minutes, everyone can correctly answer the MCQ, you're ready to move on (and if everyone can answer it correctly before you teach, you can skip the topic). If everyone gives the same wrong answer, and you've chosen your wrong answers carefully, that wrong answer should help you diagnose their misunderstanding so that you can address it directly. If, on the other hand, the class is evenly split among all possible answers (right and wrong), the odds are that no-one understands the concept, so you need to try again.

Please try to have questions posted by September 5, and we'll meet again on September 12.