David Pritchard - Course Reform MIT Style: Student Evaluations vs. Scientific Evidence

David Pritchard
March 20, 2017 4:00pm
Location
MIT Campus
Type
xTalks
Audience
Faculty
MIT Community
Public
Students

The evaluation of most course reforms generally rests heavily on teacher and student evaluations about which Prof Pritchard will present a short literature review. In contrast, he’ll present reform MIT style: select objectives, adopt metrics, experiment, and evaluate; recycle for improvement (in education this is called “backward design”). The MIT approach starts with the question of “what should they learn?” which he'll address first. He’ll then describe his flipped classroom designed to teach strategic thinking and other expert traits in introductory physics. Three lines of evidence of success will be presented and one of failure. Time remaining, Prof. Pritchard will compare learning from MasteringPhysics.com and edX.org – both in blended usage in 8.01.

David E. Pritchard is the Cecil and Ida Greene Professor of Physics and developer of MasteringPhysics.com.

For a student perspective on Prof Pritchard's xTalk, read Timmy Hussain's blog post.

Related Material

Slides from Pritchard's xTalk

Video of Pritchard's xTalk