Key Points for Designing Learning Spaces From Executive Summary of Knowing What Students Know

 Dan Gilbert April 24, 2008

If you read nothing else on this page, please read this:

The part of the paper that I circled and wrote "For Your Project Your Assesment

Assessment in Practice (p7-8)

"Guiding the committee’s work were the premises that (1) something important should be learned from every assessment situation, and (2) the information gained should ultimately help improve learning."

These are two key principles that sound obvious but I think are extremely valuable.  the implications for assessments in space are:

(1) You can't assess everything nor everyone who you have targeted for your learning goal, you'll be lucky to get one thing. Make sure that one thing is important! As the designer and the advocate for the learner and learning organization you get to lead the discussion for what "important" means

(2) You need to do something with the data that you gather from an assessment that benefits learners - maybe not the same group of learners but you are assessing to improve learning

A few more comments about connecting this reading to designing learning spaces

Reasoning From Evidence: Many of you displayed a thorough understanding of this concept in your posters.  Sounds obvious but sometimes it is not, you need evidence to make a claim.

The Assessmnet Triangle: Cognition, Observation, Interpretation.  I also think about this as having learners describe something (cognition); perform something that can be observed (observation) and  a process for an observer to make claims about what has happened (interpretation)

my interpretation of this triangle

How can your designs help people organize their experiences so that they can commit them to long-term memory. 

Metacognition: How can your projects help people recognize that they are learning?  How can they encourage reflection?

Formative and Summative Assessment and transfer: How can space support learners and organizations to carry out these activities?

Recommendation 7: Are there tools that you could propose for staff at your sites that they could use to help maesure the impact of the space?

Recommendation 11: How can your spaces leverage both formative and summative assessments?

Recommendation 12: A challenge for all learning projects: How can you communicate what you have found to a larger audience?

Small Group Evaluation

With the last 20 minutes of class, Marcelo Clerici- Arias of Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning facilitated a small group evaluation to generate formative feedback from students to the instructor (Dan).  Here's what the final product looks like: gilbertSGE_0408.pdf