Analytics in Teaching?
Calling out to all the teachers.
Question: How do they track if teacher A’s methodology to teach math is better than teacher B’s? Is that even tracked?
Reason why i’m asking this quesiton is: it’ll be cool, if someone tracks the performance of teacher A’s students over the next 3-5 years and see how they do in math compared to teacher B’s students.
In the example below i assigned random grades to all the students between 60 and 100.
Based on above, teacher B has taught the basics of match (multiplication, division etc.) well to his/her students than teacher A. Of course, there are several assumptions we are making here about the student.
Why do this? If there was a way to look at historical data and see which teacher’s methodology is better, it should be taken as a best practice for all the teachers.
S said,
August 2, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Great Idea! To make it work…meaning to answer the question about the ability of the instructor you need to have some tool to measure the abilities of the students before….as in the first day of class. What learning abilities and disabilities exist, etc. Also….the grades don’t mean anything. All a teacher would have to do to get a good grade is pass everyone with great grades no matter what the person’s skill level…and we have enough of that. You need to measure skill before class and at varying times during class. Also, what is the student doing? The teacher can be super but if the student doesn’t care…they are not going to do well. So how do you make up for this? You would need a tool for that too. Otherwise you are simply measuring what teachers give out the most high grades…which basically could mean they are not holding any standards for the students. (or they are in a very good area where the students all care, etc etc etc)
Interesting thought though. I am sure a lot of students would like to know what teachers will let them float through class. (wink)
Seriously though, I think this IS great. Just needs some things to make it an accurate measure. Good luck with this!