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Review of Five morally dubious educational ideas  : https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/five-morally-dubious-educational-ideas/ 1) Should we abolish exams? No, it should be a part of the assessment Let it come under peer review. Let them retake assessment till they have not reached their goals. It's more to do with designing of questions in exams, what is taught and quality of formative assessment to make the exam successful. Standardized testing only to test the foundational learning that is required for every child or every child of the specific stream. 2) Students should engage in projects and inquiry learning Yes, they should engage, but in a guided manner, where teacher or mentor will scaffold the entire process. Projects and inquiry learning is only a part of learning and is not complete, explicit teaching is as important as inquiry learning. 3) Education is preparation for future employment No education is preparation for self-employment, self-rel...

Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. What happens when you limit the voicing of these two important words? 1) Nescience : (Ignorance is a lack of knowledge) Our eyes and senses are limited by many ways. We are adapted to view the world perfectly only at a particular zooming level . The world becomes blurred when we increase or decrease the zooming level. We can't know what is happening in another country just by our senses. Increasing and decreasing the zooming level requires indirect measurements that are tedious and sophisticated. You need to learn the outcomes of the research, and techniques to make measurements by bringing it down to texts and tools that are compatible with our zooming level. Without sharing these texts, using and adapting it, our knowledge will be limited to our zooming level and will...

Higher education must immediately stop obsolete blackboard teaching. Higher ed requires mentor and collaboration. What is obsolete blackboard teaching? [Lecturing is the] best way to get information from teacher’s notebook (mouth) to student’s notebook without touching the student’s mind.                                                                                         — George Leonard Patterns for bad practices of teaching, what is done in higher education, even best colleges. https://iambrainstorming.blogspot.in/2017/11/patterns-for-bad-practices-of-te...

1) Teaching whiteboard not students Students work is only to nod head to say yes most of the time even if they understood nothing, disagreement is remarkably uncommon. Teachers don't inquire about student comprehension. Some teachers do inquire but by asking a dichotomous answer of yes or no. But to know the comprehension level, one has to test it by asking questions to students or asking them to explain the concept. 2) Not answering means insult If students don't give the right answer, they are insulted in front of the whole class. Students are completely responsible for not knowing the answer. "Kya tum gharme padthe nahi ho" (Don't you study at home?). So everything you have to study at home. School is not a place for learning. 3) Personal attack when you ask too much question Again students are insulted if they ask too many questions. 4) Target only to finish the syllabus The syllabus is paramount, not students. Why are teachers going so fast that students are ...

All scientific discovery relies on peer review for validation, Why not the assessment of schools and colleges be done through peer review? Peer Review definition: evaluation of scientific, academic, or professional work by others working in the same field. In case of open peer review, the reviewer reports are published which can again go through auditing. Benefits of open peer review: 1) Feedback to the students After a test, feedback to the student becomes a crucial part of their learning. Feedback can be in many forms such as detailed corrections of the answers, making their misconceptions corrected for a particular concept, identifying their specific problems and asking them to take necessary steps to improve. 2) Time-saving of teachers As this can be done in a collaborative manner, it will give freedom to any teacher from the respective subjects to annotate the assessments, the burden is no more to the individual teacher, it will be shared among the country or world. The burden o...

Most often questions are designed that tests the understanding of whole instead of its components.  Students miserably fail to solve these problems due to lack of enough practice of its components. So systematically breaking down the whole concept into its required components is important. e.g. Take this question: [Cr(NH 3 ) 6 ] 3+  is paramagnetic while [Ni(CN) 4 ] 2-  is diamagnetic. Explain why? To start solving this question you have to know the following components: 1) You have to know the atomic number of Cr and Ni. If you have forgotten the atomic number or not memorized it, you are out of luck to solve it. So, has the teacher or the book has given memory tricks to memorize the periodic table. 2) After you know the atomic number, do you know the electronic configuration of the metal atom? 3) Then, can you determine the electronic configuration of metal ion? 4) Do you know how to calculate the oxidation state, because you need to calculate the charge of metal ion? 5...

Problems with alike content: 1) Homogenization of skills When a finished product reaches the market, the product development cycle goes through the touch of many divergent skilled peoples. A product can have many components which require different skill sets of different people. For example, Website Development: When you begin to develop a website, you start with designing a prototype of how it will look, which requires the expertise of graphic designers, you need the skill of programmer to code for the website, you need to be a webmaster to host your website. If you look into the depth, there is much more complexity to it. Each website has its own requirements. A prototype can be designed by using different software, such as Inkscape, illustrator and many others. Each software requires a different kind of learning and experience. Similarly, from programmer side, which language you will be using, which framework, based upon your website requirements such as speed of development, scalab...