This blog is written by Peggie Weeks of the Evalua|t|e Center.  She was a panelist on NetWorks’ webinar, Evaluating Student Impact (click to view the recording) and was a comment about using trial and error for students.  She writes more about this:

I made a comment during MATEC’s Evaluating Student Impact webinar about a “trial and error” approach to implementing new courses, teaching strategies, etc.  I said that I thought that “faculty are implementing new courses, revising old courses, using new pedagogical approaches…and all too often they are doing it by trial and error. That’s not to say that they aren’t doing great things—it’s that there is not a systematic, thoughtful plan of implementation that includes strong formative assessment and evaluation components.”
 

A number of webinar participants suggested that a trial and error approach is a good thing. I too believe that it is a very good idea indeed to try new things in the classroom. I also believe that it is very important to “fail” and to learn from the strategies that don’t work.  What I meant by trial and error (and I probably should have used different terminology here) is implementation without a thoughtful formative evaluation plan. Nothing could be more important for educational progress than to find new and exciting content and pedagogies to share with students.  But without careful attention to evaluation, it is difficult to have a clear sense of what contributions these new programs and strategies are making to student learning. 
 

I’d like to share an example….A few years ago, I was working with a group of high school technology teachers as part of a National Science Foundation funded project at Hofstra University.  We were trying to come up with a more rigorous engineering approach to technology education, a discipline that has evolved from the old industrial arts programs. A great deal of the design and problem solving that was going on in the tech ed classrooms was a “trial and error” method. For example, students might be given an assignment to build a suspension bridge out of balsa wood and glue that would be able to support a 20 pound weight. Another popular project was building a fast mousetrap car.  Students in the tech ed classrooms would be given  materials and supplies.  They might also be given a few lessons in using tools if appropriate.  What they rarely got (and I apologize to the technology teachers who were the exception) was a lesson in the mathematics or physics behind such projects. They would build their projects without thinking about how they worked or how they could make them better.  Sometimes the teacher would provide helpful advice.  It’s not that the students weren’t using some important “trial and error” ways of thinking – it’s just that the projects could have been even more meaningful if the students could have applied engineering (math & science) principles. In the case of the balsa wood bridges, they might have learned something about trusses and strength of balsa wood; and in the case of mousetrap cars, the physics of speed! 
 

In our NSF funded project, students were given a problem (“design a food dehydrator” was a popular one at the time) and were expected to work in teams and come up with a working solution. We found a way to incorporate scientific principles (like humidity and evaporation) to get the students to think more systematically about their solutions.  We called the concept “informed design.” [see http://www.hofstra.edu/Academics/colleges/SOEAHS/CTL/ctl_informeddesign.html] This was design that was informed by science and engineering principles.  It’s not to say that students didn’t experiment with their designs—and oftentimes, they “failed.” But the students were learning to work with some powerful tools, and they began to understand how these tools could enhance their designs and help them to solve problems.  So too is it with evaluation—a powerful tool that can help determine the most effective course to our students’ learning. 
 

I want to thank our participants for their thoughtful and thought-provoking comments!

Thank you Peggie for your follow up and I hope we have some more comments from people who have viewed the webinar.

Mark Viquesney