Kicking and other accidents in the classroom - random or by design?
“I accidentally kicked him,” my student said. "You were both standing there and your foot, without your knowing it, accidentally kicked him." This is a typical exchange between me and my second grade students. Hopefully this “by accident” plea is not something I use when it comes to teaching and learning in my classroom - that my students are not learning “by accident,” but rather, they are learning by design, or purposefully. Or are they? Thankfully, there is a way to find out through a t-test using paired samples. It sounds complicated but it's really quite easy. Dr. James Carroll of the University of Portland taught me how to do it with EZanalyze, a free add-on to the Excel spreadsheet program. I type in my two sets of scores from a pre test (test given before instruction) and post test (test given after instruction). With a few clicks, (plea...