If you've submitted the Police survey, thanks!
The survey was created primarily out of a thread on Policespecials.com which was discussing the fact that many members of private security firms look much like police officers. I was curious to see how many people could recognise police from security, so I await the results. I'll leave this a few weeks and then post the answers for all to see. Thanks if you took the time to fill it in.
Tuesday, 22 May 2012
Police or Not Police?
Police or Not?
Is the person in the photograph a member of a UK Police force either as a Constable or Police Community Support Officer?
* Required
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
Can programming be taught?
This blog post is specifically targeted at Teresa again as she rewrote much of the first year undergraduate Computer Science Programming Principles course a couple of years ago.
A friend pointed out Jeff Atwood's blog at codinghorror.com. If you're not aware of Jeff, he's a co-founder of Stack Overflow and has many thought provoking articles. The one that really caught my eye is from back in 2006 called Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats. The paper mentioned (the blog links to a draft here, but look on your preferred academic repo for the final version) discusses the high rate of failure on these types of foundation programming courses and suggests that students who fail the course can be determined before they even start the course with a high degree of accuracy.
I find the following quote, like the author, quite disturbing and also a little hard to believe.
Also linked to this, is the UK government's intended changes to secondary IT education to make it more computer science relevant likely to change the results if the experiment was to be rerun in a few years?
A friend pointed out Jeff Atwood's blog at codinghorror.com. If you're not aware of Jeff, he's a co-founder of Stack Overflow and has many thought provoking articles. The one that really caught my eye is from back in 2006 called Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats. The paper mentioned (the blog links to a draft here, but look on your preferred academic repo for the final version) discusses the high rate of failure on these types of foundation programming courses and suggests that students who fail the course can be determined before they even start the course with a high degree of accuracy.
I find the following quote, like the author, quite disturbing and also a little hard to believe.
But it's still a little disturbing that the act of programming seems literally unteachable to a sizable subset of incoming computer science studentsCould it really be possible that some people simply can't be taught how to program? If so, what are the root causes to this?
Also linked to this, is the UK government's intended changes to secondary IT education to make it more computer science relevant likely to change the results if the experiment was to be rerun in a few years?
Assessment - Required in all learning? - Revisited
So, it's been a while since my last blog post and I haven't been quite as active as I would have hoped, but I've got quite a few new posts all half written, begging to be finished, so what this space.
Since my last post on assessment, Teresa has offered a retort to my ideas here. I couldn't resist picking up on a few issues that I'm sure Teresa won't be surprised me bringing to her attention.
The first point Teresa has even admitted I'd be shaking me head at. She was spot on. I am and here's why:
My original example of where this is the case diversity training for Hampshire Constabulary. To even start to assess this type of training you need to set out what the competencies are. It's very tempting to qualify this in terms of what the tutor is trying to teach: "To demonstrate to students that different cultures and backgrounds can affect the way an Officer should deal with a situation" rather than what the student should learn. The problem arises when you try and define it for the student as the outcomes can be different for different people.
What you're trying to do it change beliefs and subtle behaviours in everyday encounters. How do you assess change in beliefs? Are there a set of rules that define exactly what a person's beliefs should be in this instance? I would suggest not, and that to attempt this would be very difficult. The teaching here is more about giving people a set of tools, giving people a brief set of instructions and (for want of a better word) hope that they use them properly. Here's an analogy: say you give someone a knife and show someone how to use it. You can never be sure what someone's beliefs on the knife are. Do they respect it? Do they think it's a utility rather than a weapon? Do they appreciate it's power? Will they ever forget to use it or misuse it? More importantly here, can you ever assess any of these things? People often are unsure of what their beliefs really are until they are tested in real life. Real life is often far removed from simulation or the classroom, I can't see how you can pass or fail someone on this.
Teresa makes the point that this is about the teaching, not the learning, but only a learner could even start to assess beliefs. Teresa also says that the "assessment" could be from the learners perspective and that they can be small, atomic and unconscious. I agree this is useful, but is it assessment? The though provoking image is a good example, people could challenge their initial perceptions and perhaps change them in future, but is this really assessment and do it really qualify the standard of teaching?
Since my last post on assessment, Teresa has offered a retort to my ideas here. I couldn't resist picking up on a few issues that I'm sure Teresa won't be surprised me bringing to her attention.
The first point Teresa has even admitted I'd be shaking me head at. She was spot on. I am and here's why:
A student can either do something, or they can’t – a miss is as good as a mile. The only skills or knowledge that we can assume a student has are the ones they can demonstrate.My first issue with this is that whether someone can demonstrate a skill depends totally on how well that skill or competency is defined. Driving is a fairly easy situation to define what the competency is an how to assess it; there is a whole book dedicated to defining it's rules: the highway code. When you move away to anything more grey and difficult to define, this assertion falls apart.
My original example of where this is the case diversity training for Hampshire Constabulary. To even start to assess this type of training you need to set out what the competencies are. It's very tempting to qualify this in terms of what the tutor is trying to teach: "To demonstrate to students that different cultures and backgrounds can affect the way an Officer should deal with a situation" rather than what the student should learn. The problem arises when you try and define it for the student as the outcomes can be different for different people.
What you're trying to do it change beliefs and subtle behaviours in everyday encounters. How do you assess change in beliefs? Are there a set of rules that define exactly what a person's beliefs should be in this instance? I would suggest not, and that to attempt this would be very difficult. The teaching here is more about giving people a set of tools, giving people a brief set of instructions and (for want of a better word) hope that they use them properly. Here's an analogy: say you give someone a knife and show someone how to use it. You can never be sure what someone's beliefs on the knife are. Do they respect it? Do they think it's a utility rather than a weapon? Do they appreciate it's power? Will they ever forget to use it or misuse it? More importantly here, can you ever assess any of these things? People often are unsure of what their beliefs really are until they are tested in real life. Real life is often far removed from simulation or the classroom, I can't see how you can pass or fail someone on this.
Teresa makes the point that this is about the teaching, not the learning, but only a learner could even start to assess beliefs. Teresa also says that the "assessment" could be from the learners perspective and that they can be small, atomic and unconscious. I agree this is useful, but is it assessment? The though provoking image is a good example, people could challenge their initial perceptions and perhaps change them in future, but is this really assessment and do it really qualify the standard of teaching?
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