Actually I think the next step is to run the experiment. It’s a perfectly good experiment—even though I’d expect it not to happen inside a real school, because the students would complain they weren’t being graded fairly.
Concept is still important enough that I promoted it immediately.
I would expect it not to happen inside a real school because the school would be uninterested in improving their teaching via the experimental method. Of course I hope I’m wrong! (Anyone know of particularly enlightened schools?)
If I’m right it would seem a much harder problem to solve than the being-graded-fairly one.
Someone could just book a ceramics studio and advertise free lessons/use in exchange for participating in an experiment.
Then split the people there into two groups, and tell one group that they get money (or other arbitrary desirable) based on how many pots they make, and the other on how good their pots are.
My wife intends to start teaching sculpture in a year or so… I’ll make sure to bring this up to her. The tricky part will be objectively grading quality (an outside judge and blindness should be sufficient).
Maybe it could be done across different schools, different classes or different years. For example, in year 1 teach subject focusing on quality and subject 2 focusing on quantity. Then in year 2 reverse the roles. But then you also need to be careful with the order of the subjects.
Just splitting the students into two groups would be better though, aside from the complaints. This is a problem with A/B testing in general: people want to be treated fairly. Are there good ways to reduce (the risk of) such complaints?
To me, the simplest solution that comes to mind is to grade on a curve at the end of the course, based on the quality of the work (or some other subjective measure—I’m not familiar with university art courses, but I assume there’s some kind of widely-accepted grading methodology). That is to say—tell the students before the course they will be graded on quality or quantity depending on the group, but grade each student on a curve relative to their own section for their permanent grade once the course has finished. This would obviously still require lying to the students (at the very least by omission, arguably), however.
One really shouldn’t give probably apocryphal evidence like this in support of a theory.
Actually I think the next step is to run the experiment. It’s a perfectly good experiment—even though I’d expect it not to happen inside a real school, because the students would complain they weren’t being graded fairly.
Concept is still important enough that I promoted it immediately.
I would expect it not to happen inside a real school because the school would be uninterested in improving their teaching via the experimental method. Of course I hope I’m wrong! (Anyone know of particularly enlightened schools?)
If I’m right it would seem a much harder problem to solve than the being-graded-fairly one.
Someone could just book a ceramics studio and advertise free lessons/use in exchange for participating in an experiment.
Then split the people there into two groups, and tell one group that they get money (or other arbitrary desirable) based on how many pots they make, and the other on how good their pots are.
My wife intends to start teaching sculpture in a year or so… I’ll make sure to bring this up to her. The tricky part will be objectively grading quality (an outside judge and blindness should be sufficient).
Maybe it could be done across different schools, different classes or different years. For example, in year 1 teach subject focusing on quality and subject 2 focusing on quantity. Then in year 2 reverse the roles. But then you also need to be careful with the order of the subjects.
Just splitting the students into two groups would be better though, aside from the complaints. This is a problem with A/B testing in general: people want to be treated fairly. Are there good ways to reduce (the risk of) such complaints?
To me, the simplest solution that comes to mind is to grade on a curve at the end of the course, based on the quality of the work (or some other subjective measure—I’m not familiar with university art courses, but I assume there’s some kind of widely-accepted grading methodology). That is to say—tell the students before the course they will be graded on quality or quantity depending on the group, but grade each student on a curve relative to their own section for their permanent grade once the course has finished. This would obviously still require lying to the students (at the very least by omission, arguably), however.