Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Syllabus Language, Teaching Style, and Instructor Self-Perception: Toward Congruence

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I read so many poor academic papers it's easy to get despondent, but here we have a paper (12 page PDF) that hits all the right notes. Basically, the paper asks about the relation between the emotion expressed in language used in a course syllabus and the teaching style (perceived and actual) used by the teacher in the associated class. You'd expect that they would match, so that the syllabus would give you some idea of what to expect. There are so many good bits. For example, they use the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) scale instead of just using vague off-the-cuff vocabulary (like so many others). Based on the name the scale might seem inappropriate, but it's well-explained and fits the bill. Then they "created an algorithm in Jupyter Notebook that calculated scores for each text." They used Grasha's inventory of teaching styles (again, a standardized measure) and then examined the relationships between Grasha's inventory and the teaching PAD scale. That's how you do it! The results are specific, not overly generalized, useful, and can be replicated.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Dec 22, 2024 9:40 p.m.

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