Talk
Education Research Speaker Series
When
· 1:30 PM MDT
Shown in the venue’s time zone (America/Denver), not yours.
Where
Miramontes Baca Education Building, 260
Boulder, CO
Tickets
No on-sale date recorded
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What the source said
The Education Research Speaker Series features the latest research in education from CU Boulder scholars, alumni and leading experts from other institutions. Open to everyone, and a Q&A will follow each talk. Sept. 30, | 1:30–2:30 p.m., MBE Room 260 A Fable on Problem Solving in Educational Research Educational researchers are skilled at naming the problems that get in the way of good teaching and learning, but often less adept at proposing solutions; this talk is about making that move. This case study is a methodological problem that has occupied Associate Dean for Faculty & Professor Derek Briggs for over 20 years now: the challenge of making valid inferences about student growth. The starting point for such inferences is usually the quantification of repeated observations through a process of measurement. But the interpretation of a measurement requires a scale with a meaningful unit (e.g., a degree on the Fahrenheit scale for temperature). When test scores are treated as de facto measurements, the construct being measured is often murky, and, relatedly, the unit of these measurements typically has an ambiguous interpretation. We aspire to have score scales that tell us how much students have grown in a domain of interest; but most test score scales can only convey more limited information about order, ranks and percentiles. In recent years, Briggs has proposed an approach called content-referenced growth that can help solve this problem, and he will demonstrate a proof of concept. In this talk, Briggs, will also show how a recent collaboration with an AI assistant (Claude Fable) helped him to make connections between past ideas that were hiding in plain sight, and to formalize principles that other psychometricians can apply to improve the process of scale construction. The moral is that naming a problem is where the work starts, but this should not be where the work ends. And sometimes finding a solution means learning to make the most of a tool you had not previously considered. Learn More!