In 2014, we set out to make PISA more relevant and accessible to middle-and-low-income countries. Since launching in 2000, PISA has expanded to include more than 80 participating countries, and is today seen as the global yardstick for educational success. But as more countries joined PISA, it became apparent that the nature and methods of assessment needed to cater to a larger and more diverse set of countries. More...

Moneyball
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, March 28, 2014

People are beginning to notice the the proponents of learning analytics need to brink some new data and examples forward to support their case, as the old ones are not only, well, old, they have also been thoroughly discredited. More...

The Secular Problem of Evil
James Paul Gee, Weblog, March 31, 2014

James Paul Gee looks at the problem of evil from a secular perspective and comes up with the old Taoist maxim that life in the balance is the recipe for good. "Cooperation on a large scale—that is, any sort that could lead to cultures, institutions, cities, and states—requires solving what I will call 'hard continua problems'.  These are problems where too much of something is bad and too little of it is bad, but finding the 'middle-ground' is hard." But this isn't the answer to the question of why there is evil - it's the answer (or an answer) to the question of why it's so hard to eradicate. More...

The Game of Wrong, and Moral Psychology
John Holbo, Crooked Timber, March 28, 2014

Some interesting post-MOOC reflections on learning and moral psychology from Crooked Timber, another example I think of how a MOOC well done results in the creation of new knowledge, as opposed to the mere transmission of the old (this may not be so much true for the students of a Coursera course as it is for the instructor). Anyhow, the reflections cause in me some thoughts about the apparent contradition between two principles I have long held, the first of which is a form of utilitarianism, and the second of which is a version of Kant's principle that each person is inherently valuable. More...

The particulars of "When a Paradigm becomes a Paradogma"
Paul Kirschner, March 18, 2014
So a couple weeks ago Paul Kirschner posted an item called When a Paradigm becomes a Paradogma in which he protested that a colleague's paper was rejected from an unnamed journal on grounds that, as one reviewer said, "the research is not consistent with current theory, research, and practice in STEM fields of endeavor." Wrote Kirschner, "There are politically correct scientific paradigms and you had better be / become / look like a ‘believer’ in that paradigm or you will not be published in that journal." Now I haven't seen the article, but I have observed in the past that Kirschner is in error in matters of fact about how science is actually practiced. More...