I’m currently in the Master of Educational Technology program at UBC, and was doing some research on a paper tonight.
And I just found a nice new method ….
I found a book by a foundation on “formative assessment,” a type of continuous checking to see what students have learning. It seems a little more authentic than episodic assessment, such as tests and exams. In any case, I could learn nothing about the topic without buying the book, waiting for it to arrive, and reading it.
Ridiculous. Who thinks up these things?
I had no time for that, so instead, I went to Amazon and searched for “formative assessment” within books. I found this book, which looked very interesting.
Well, searching inside the book for the phrase “learning to learn” gave me this result, among others:
” [ Formative assessment ] enables the pupil to gain more control of the learning process, to develop some of the metacognitive aspects noted above, and thus learn how to learn”.
Wow! Page number, all the bibliography information I need, and juicy quote for my paper. There are obvious issues, the possibility of misquoting being one of them, but a simple click on the page number gives me, voila, the quote in context.
Wow. This digital age is just far too easy …