Truth is, I already did. Years ago..jpg)
About 2 years into my career, I figured out that if students arrived in class already knowing something about the day’s learning, they took away a deeper, more satisfying, understanding. We were able to use class time differently, in ways that helped us learn more authentically.
I did not need standardized tests, value-added evaluations, or clever new names for the method to figure this out, by the way.
Every dataset has a story. We usually look only at the data and ignore the story. For example, according to my original findings, and as approved by my committee of esteemed researchers in education and science, I could make this statement:
Pre-service elementary teachers showed a statistically significant gain in their learning about the moon and teaching elementary students about the moon by inquiry.
And this supporting statement:
The study shows that pre-service teachers average gain scores from pre-test to post-test increased by 7 points on a 21-item test.
If this were taken as the only finding from my dissertation, these pre-service teachers obviously demonstrated significant learning. All is well.
But wait. (See below for the tl;dr version.)
