PolicyArchive, an online archive of public-policy research, was unveiled today by Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis University Library and the Center for Governmental Studies, a nonprofit group that encourages civic engagement.
PolicyArchive now holds more than 12,000 policy documents from about 220 think tanks and research groups. The archive’s developers say it will house up to 20,000 documents by the end of 2008. They want it to become the largest online repository of public-policy research in the world.
The archive documents are freely available, and publishers are encouraged to upload their documents to the site. —Andrea L. Foster
8 Responses to Indiana U.-Purdue U. at Indianapolis Trumpets Database of Policy Research
kathden - March 19, 2012 at 3:55 pm
The video is a mini-lecture. I point this out not in
contradiction of the speaker and the author of the blog but as something
obvious that tends to be overlooked. Lecture, whether live or as video (etc.), can be
very effective in conveying information and attitude in a short timespan.
I am not sure that the speaker is right to emphasize “lifelong” learning goals, however. That sounds highminded but is impractical and beyond our control. My concerns are framed by the week, the semester, and the duration of the degree program.
cschroeder - March 19, 2012 at 4:37 pm
Stupid (or maybe not so stupid?) question: what do “statistically validated measures of student learning like pre- and post-test measurements of learning gains” look like, especially in the Humanities fields?
Robert Talbert - March 19, 2012 at 10:02 pm
I don’t think it’s out of our (profs’) control at all. You just keep in mind the kinds of cognitive tasks that students are going to need to learn new things later in life: critical reading skills, being able to extract and synthesize information from a variety of sources, being able to map existing skills onto new problems, etc. It’s the most practical kind of learning there is because it is what students will spend the majority of their lives doing!
Robert Talbert - March 19, 2012 at 10:03 pm
I can’t speak for the humanities (maybe somebody else can) but, for example, in physics they sometimes use the Force Concept Inventory as a pre- and post-test measure and look at normalized gains. I’ve heard of similar kinds of assessment tools being used for writing.
mbelvadi - March 20, 2012 at 7:36 am
To answer this, you need to answer, “What does learning look like in the Humanities?” It’s amazing that after all this time and investment in the field, there is absolutely no consensus on the answer. If you can’t define a thing, you can’t define a way to measure the thing.
veritaspotens - March 24, 2012 at 2:03 pm
I use a combination of lecture and group activities in my mathematics classes; learning requires both. When presenting a complex argument (a measure that varies with the course level), a lecture is the only way I know. A lecture shares many attributes with a book, but has the advantage of the lecturer’s vocal intonation, body language, pacing, and availability for interactivity (ie, questions).
Example:Last year, teaching graduate algebra, I lectured for three weeks on the classification of finitely generated modules over principal ideal domains; if I had approached this topic as group or discovery work, the students would never have seen it. On the other hand, I have found group work on discovering elementary concepts from probability to be quite effective.I am also a flight instructor. I never lecture in an airplane! But I am very cautious about allowing students too much room for discovery.A good teacher selects an appropriate method for the combination of students and material.
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