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New articles are added to the Effective Learning Report as the muse moves me to write something new. Therefore there is no publishing of new editions at regular intervals, and no way to price a subscription. Regardless, if you would like to receive a new free “edition” of the Effective Learning Report as the muse moves me to write something new, just send me your email address at rjstapleton@bulloch.net and I will add you to the email list for the Effective Learning Report. Please add the word Subscription in the subject line of the email. Cheers!
The purpose of the Effective Learning Report is not to cover current events. The purpose is simply to provide insight into how the world works and what might be done to improve things.
I have supported and voted for particular political candidates in the US because I thought the person was the best available person for the job, not because he or she was a member of a political party. I supported and voted for Barack Obama but I did not support or vote for Hillary Clinton. I supported Bernie Sanders until Sanders dropped out of the 2016 race. I wound up supporting and voting for Jill Stein of the Green Party in the US 2016 presidential race. Opinions written and published in this blog are the opinions of me alone, and do not reflect the opinions of clients or visitors at Effective Learning Company, especially my wife’s mathematics tutorees. While I let my wife know my opinions from time to time face-to-face, I make no effort to coerce or cajole her into adopting them, having long since learned such efforts are futile. I rarely discuss my opinions in this blog face-to-face with anyone at Effective Learning Company. As a professor teaching business policy, ethics, and entrepreneurship in a business school, political opinions were sometimes discussed in my classes as issues and students made recommendations, as I did, but no recommendations were ever taught as truth to be memorized for any sort of test. My attitude, believing it’s educational for people to hear, and read, alternative opinions, is “if the shoe fits wear it.” If not, believe whatever you want to believe. This issue was covered more comprehensively in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds. See “Inside the Book” Business Voyages by Richard John Stapleton free at Amazon.com to see the table of contents and some of the writing. Unfortunately in today’s Internet Facebook world many members of political parties regard people expressing opinions contrary to their party and personal propaganda, dogma, doctrine, lies, and opinions to be what they call “trolls”. A troll is someone who infiltrates the psychological, intellectual, or physical boundaries of a group or organization, such as a group of Democrats or Republicans, with the mission of changing the minds of members to further the aims and purposes of a competing group or organization. While I am not a troll, I consider contrary honest opinions people are randomly exposed to to be good for them, and for all people and groups aboard Spaceship Earth, since it causes everyone to learn something. We need more dialogical dialectic discussions, preferably face-to-face, however challenging, that might cause all of us to learn something. Otherwise, we are all living in a war zone with no hope of lasting peace. The trick is to learn how to do this in a civilized manner. Read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning for more detail on how to communicate and learn in groups with dialogical dialectical discussion. For more information about the book click on the Effective Learning Publications option at the top of this blog page in the left column. Comments, criticisms, and recommendations from readers are welcome. Please write your comments, criticisms, or recommendations in the block below articles on this page, or email me at rjstapleton@bulloch.net. In order to write comments, etc. on this page, you have to make sure you have popped the article up at the top of the right column of this page by clicking on the article title or a Read on option to energize the linking options. If you came to the page from Facebook or some other link the linking options are automatically visible and ready to go. While this page is relatively user friendly it forces people using it to become programmed robots to some degree in some ways, as does all computer technology used for any purpose. There are, alas, always tradeoffs, and no free lunches, in any entrepreneurial venture. In order to read free articles from this page, you have to conform to a computer algorithm, paying a price by giving up some autonomy and human dignity. In some ways we increase our freedom and satisfaction by using computers; but in other ways we lose freedom and satisfaction by using computers. As in all ventures we come out ahead only if we gain more than we lose. I sometimes wonder if humanity is actually getting better off because of developing and using computer technology, especially when talking with a robot on the telephone trying to get something straightened out, such as a problem with a medical bill or an insurance payment. Check out my Facebook pages: Richard John Stapleton—https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397 Effective Learning Company—https://www.facebook.com/www.effectivelearning.net/?ref=stale_email HOW TO EVALUATE THE PRODUCTIVITY OF TEACHERS AND LEARNERS Check out our article, “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and effective grades,” by Stapleton & Murkison, published in 2001 in the Journal of Management Education, by the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, using Sage Publications. This article presents a new metric I invented, the CITP, the Composite Indicator of Teaching Productivity, which has now been cited in sixty-one refereed professional journal articles in several disciplines, from physics to psychology. Here is a pdf copy of the article “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations: A Study of Correlations Between Instructor Excellence, Study Production, Learning Production and Expected Grades.” https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf
Published in 2001 by the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society in the Journal of Management Education, this article by Stapleton & Murkison has now been cited in 61 refereed professional journal articles, providing insights into how to evaluate teaching and learning in schools, colleges, and universities, showing how difficult it is to fairly evaluate teaching and learning and why relative expected grades questions should always be included on student evaluation forms to provide a modicum of fairness.
To verify the 61 citations just punch Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations into Google and read the sources.
Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations gets to the heart of intractable problems of the teaching profession, the most serious of which is probably teacher evaluations. How can you or a teacher know how well a teacher is doing his/her job? What sort of criteria can you use for making this judgment? Certainly the purpose of teaching is to cause learning to occur in students, but how do you measure this? What kind of learning? How much learning? How much learning relative to what? What percentage of a prescribed content or syllabus a teacher causes students to memorize? Or how much learning a teacher produces in students relative to how much peer teachers produce? In other words are you attempting to measure absolute learning or relative learning?
Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations presents a unique Composite Indicator of Teaching Productivity (CITP), one of the most sophisticated metrics of teaching productivity yet developed in the teacher evaluation literature.
Check it out at
http://www.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf
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