On 2014-10-30 2:55 PM, Naupaka Zimmerman wrote:
I'd love to hear if any other people have advice for improving the pre-course surveys to discriminate (make everyone write a fizz-buzz in their language of choice? bringing a printout of their favorite geeky meme?) between experience levels or more broadly about how folks have effectively/successfully engaged groups with heterogeneous experience levels.
I'm strongly in favor of finding out more about our learners before our workshops and/or making sure that people attend the right ones, but there's a trap we need to avoid. Our educational system trains people to believe that every test counts. Even if we tell them the pre-assessment isn't a test, some will perceive it that way, and if they can't get the right answers, they won't sign up for the workshop. Ironically, these are often exactly the people we most want to help. I don't know how big a problem this is (I don't even know what metric I'd use), but several conversations in the past two years make me believe it's big enough that we need to design for it.
Thanks, Greg -- Greg Wilson Software Carpentry | http://www.software-carpentry.org/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
