Bowling for Grades and Beyond: A Paradigm for Achievement-Based Learning
Perry Cook and Wayne Wolf
Princeton University
Motivation
Today's teaching environment presents multiple challenges for both the educator and the student. Students grow up in a multi-modal, multi-cultural, multi-medai world that is unfamiliar to their instructors. Educators must find a way to bridge that gap to deliver formative knowledge and skills using palatable methods.
An Achievement-Based Approach to Performance-Driven Learning
Our approach to course design takes advantage of the diversity of skills that students bring to the classroom. We integrate physical and cognitive skills with traditional course activities to motivate and reinforce.
Bowling for Grades, simply put, uses a well-defined socio-kinetic practicum as a model for the underlying pedagogical goals of the knowledge/skills matrix. Socio-kinetic skills provide an excellent platform for the analysis and measurement of the full range of curriclular media: cognitive, interpersonal, motor, etc.
We have implemented this methodology in ELE/COS 579/479, Pervasive Information Systems, at Princeton University. This course provides a statistically significant sampling of age groups, backgrounds, and studential goals through which we can evaluate the efficacy of our underlying hypothesis.
Students react positively to this novel metaphor for evaluation. They intuitively grasp the importance of the cumulative goal and conceptually render a vivid image of their required performance. This rendering is formed at the initiation of the course and lasts through the entire educational process. They appreciate the parallel, inter-sensory feedback provided by the evaluative task and leverage their evaluation to internalize both course content and broader life skills.
From Classroom to Curriculum
One may reasonably ask whether this achievement-based approach is limited to class-by-class application. We propose a holisitc view of the education process that we call Bowling for Diplomas. Rather than evaluating knowledge modules individually, as is traditional practice in instutional settings, we believe that a universally quantified evaluation strategy would both reinforce learning and achieve operational efficiencies. Global evaluation is not commonly used in the United States, but the practice has been used successfully elsewhere, such as the examination system common to British universities. Our proposed methodology builds on those traditions by introducing an evaluation model that leverages to the socio-kinetic paradigm.
Summary
Pedagogical parameters must be adapted to meet the changing content of student socio-economic expectations. We believe that achievement-based paradigms like Bowling for Grades can serve fundamental factors in engines for achievement.
About the Authors
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