Itamar Tzadok

Here is a question for you Lesli.

What role did the forgotten passages of Shakespeare play in your acquisition of the unforgotten ability to apply analytical skill sets to passages of Shakespeare and others?

It should be pretty hard to answer this question and not only because we don't remember the things we have forgotten. But arguably those memorised passages did play an important role. It's like watching a movie for the third and fourth time. You start noticing all kinds of details you haven't noticed before. That's because many of the other details that attracted your attention the first couple of times are by the third and fourth times familiar enough to be perceived without the need to be aware of perceiving them. And so you can turn your attention to some details that were there all those times but you were just too busy to notice them. In a similar way, you can start paying attention to ideas between the lines after the lines themselves are well absorbed.

Appreciate your detailed response. I don't have a chemistry background but I do have math and at the other end of the circle, philosophy/history. Both ends as well as everything in between are very problem oriented. Just like anything important in life. The only thing that makes chemistry and math seem more or exclusively problem oriented (compared to philosophy/history) is that they are accepted as inherently symbolic, and it is much easier to introduce and solve a complex problem without getting lost in details when the problem/solution description can be abbreviated by symbolization. Subjects such as philosophy/history are traditionally unsymbolized and consequently do not lend themselves easily to complex problem solving. The closest they get to that is a short moment of formal logic, where you can find problems such as

Provide a proof for the following argument

∃x∃y(((Ax ∧ Ox) ∧ (Ay ∧ Oy)) ∧ ~(x = y))
∀x(Ax → Px)
∀x∀y∀z((((Px ∧ Ox) ∧ (Py ∧ Oy)) ∧ (Pz ∧ Oz)) → ((x = y) ∨ ((x = z) ∨ (y = z))))
-------------------------------------------------------------------
∃x∃y((((Px ∧ Ox) ∧ (Py ∧ Oy)) ∧ ~(x = y)) ∧ ∀z((Pz ∧ Oz) → ((z = x) ∨ (z = y))))

and depending on the system of rules you are provided with can take some 40 steps to solve (and up to 80 for some students, but only b/c I put the limit at 80).

So we seem to talk about the same sort of complex multistep and multiskill problems. Consider now that I require students to solve 10-20 such problems (alongside instances of a couple of other types) every week for 12 weeks. The questions are drawn randomly from a large bank so in each attempt the student may get a different subset, but even with repeating instances the letters and order of premises will be changed randomly. The virtual question bank is pretty huge so much so that it ensures that even if the final exam draws from that same question bank, as it does, students are likely to get "never-seen-before" and yet well-practiced instances.

Beyond formal logic we need to work harder to generate problem domains where symbols are not a natural/traditional extension.

Your big bucks repoint granted, but I was referring to things in demand and especially those in the grey area.

Sorry to hear about the rework by your state. It's amazing albeit not surprising to see institutional education keep complaining about the superficiality of students learning and performance while submitting to what is arguably a very superficial rating culture. How can students who are not professional instructors evaluate the professional performance of instructors? And if they can't what are these surveys good for? From what I see, all the surveys do is drive instructors to be very lenient and give higher grades so as to get better student evaluations. And then institutional education start complaining about grade inflation.

... and solving problems of types they have never seen before is discussed and practiced in class with general problem solving skills ...

There may be some confusion here between problem types and problem instances. Testing the students with never-seen-before instances of problem type A which has been discussed and practiced in the course is fine. But testing students with instances of problem type B which has not been discussed and practiced is questionable. This may be testing the students on their ability to move from type A to type B without giving them a fair opportunity to practice and acquire the skill to apply from A to B. It is legit if that's the requirement, but it's rarely the requirement even in the rare occasions where teachers make the requirements clear.

if you want to make the big bucks in the world you're going to be applying your skills and understanding to unique situations

Not really. It's probably more important to be willing to do what most people won't do, most of which has nothing to do with skills or understanding of unique situations. But I suppose those who actually make the big bucks can be better judges of what it really takes.

I'm tested everyday by the questions and concerns that students bring to me that I've never encountered before ...

Only if at the end of the term you get a grade that affects your paycheck prospects. Otherwise, it's not really a test and you're not really evaluated by the students.

See example at http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Print_style.

You can test locally in a quiz by adding a description question and in html mode adding the css inside a style tag:

<style type="text/css">
...
</style>

hth

You can add to your theme @media css rules for the quiz page. Then if you set up the quiz with all questions on one page the students could use the browser's print option to print a clean version. You may need also to set the css to page break after one or two questions depending on their display size so that the printout will divide properly to pages. hth