The Data-Driven Classroom

David Clemens

  • Article
  • March 03, 2010

I am still jazzed by the techno-pitchman’s hype last week about clickers, assessment, and SLOs, and I know clickers are the future of edubiz!  Clickers generate tsunamis of admin's holy grail—data! With data I can prepare reports and quantify learning to show that I’m accountable. I went right to work, making a PowerPoint of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” embedding slides to measure student learning of the concepts.  This way I can build a data bridge from my students' clicker responses to bar graphs and data reservoirs.   Crunching the data even shows the accreditation Cylons just how effective (but perpetually improving!) my methodologies and pedagogies are in producing the feedback loop of capability enhancement and desirable outcome consequentialities.  God, I love being a teacher! Now to ze text:

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table;

I ripped “P-Frock” off the Net (whoops, no epigraph on this one but I’ll add a link to Dante).  WTF?  An entire stanza is missing!  Data entry malfunction—and there are formatting problems and mis-transcriptions.  Better hyperlink “etherised” to Wikipedia so students can learn about anaesthics, their development and use in care facilities; ditto British spelling.  And link to “simile.” Time for an assessment slide to see if students are getting the concepts. QUESTION:  Eliot employs figures of speech.  Name two.

  1. Miscegenation
  2. Tropospheric hegemony
  3. Simile
  4. Smiley
  5. Jane Smiley
  6. Anthropomorphism
  7. Anthropogenic global warming
  8. a and d
  9. c and e
  10. e and e

I'll have them click, then discuss with their peeps, then click again.  Then I'll have data and I can grok if my students are getting the concept!

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

Yikes!  Better link “women” to the Women’s Studies Program.  Add another hyperlink to “Michelangelo”  and Google images of David, the Sistine Chapel, The Thinker (wait, is that Michelangelo?  The Thinker). Dang, only 18 stanzas to go!  I am so teaching now!

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