Dumbing down of scuba certification courses (PADI) - what have we missed?

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

It's not even that challanging. While NetDoc and Boulderjohn question the need for such training, indeed there was a comment about how teaching that skill would take longer than the average scuba course , in reality we get that done in about an hour ... but that's what elite groups are capable of.:D
I teach the Bowline during a safety stop to most of my Advanced students and to ALL of my Master Diver students. I also teach the Reef and sheetbend during the same safety stop. I do not try to teach these to OW students and see no need to start. I even know a way to tie the bowline with only my left hand that is quite possibly unknown to Thal. It's a great way to win a bar bet!

As an aside, I teach a lot of Boy Scout Leaders the essentials of how to camp and assist the boys to run their own units efficiently and to keep them FUN. I need twenty five minutes to teach 8 leaders the following skills.
  1. Square (Reef)
  2. Sheet Bend
  3. Two Half Hitches
  4. Taut Line Hitch
  5. Clove Hitch
  6. Bow Line
  7. Rope Whipping
They can tell you when the knots should be used and why, and will also be able to show you the QUICK way to untie the Reef knot. The retention rate is great and the group has a really fun time. If the group is quick or we have five more minutes, they will also get a taste of splicing, learn several ways to tie the humble bowline and also learn the thief's knot.

Give me fifteen minutes and I can teach you how to fly cast. Another fifteen minutes and I can help you to learn how to tie a woolly bugger. I have had students catch fish on a fly rod within an hour of first deciding to learn the skill.

What IS challenging, is trying to post through my new kitten filter. She is simply enamored with the words popping up on the monitor.
 
I am thinking, as I often do, in terms of an analogy.

A number of years ago I took the soccer team of 16-year old boys I was coaching to Europe. We stayed and played a while in Germany, taking in local cultural sights as we did. We were took those side trips in our assigned tour bus. The trip to Heidelberg Castle was quite an experience, with that lumbering bus maneuvering up the narrow, medieval road that led up the steep face of the mountain, with each hairpin switchback seemingly more impossible to navigate than the last. A team of 16-year old boys, the hardest audience in the world to impress, watched in silent awe and at times burst into cheers and applause.

That driver was impressive. Words cannot convey how much better a driver he was than I am.

Me thinks thy are treading closely to a "sage on stage" comment.:wink:
 
Me thinks thy are treading closely to a "sage on stage" comment.:wink:
Given the context here of a discussion, there is simply no better place for such an anecdotal piece.

Stories are great and they have their place. But like that giant stride entrance during a shore dive, there are places where they are simply inappropriate. Encumbering a class with a litany of dive stories might make an interesting class, but it will more than likely lose the marginal student's interest and simply eat up lots of time.
 
Me thinks thy are treading closely to a "sage on stage" comment.:wink:

Given the context here of a discussion, there is simply no better place for such an anecdotal piece.

Stories are great and they have their place. But like that giant stride entrance during a shore dive, there are places where they are simply inappropriate. Encumbering a class with a litany of dive stories might make an interesting class, but it will more than likely lose the marginal student's interest and simply eat up lots of time.

This is pretty complex and hard to distill in such little space. I never said you could not tell stories to illustrate points. Such stories are valuable when appropriate, but I agree with NetDoc that they can be over done. I also never said that an instructor does not talk to the students and explain things. The idea of the "sage on the stage" as a generally poor strategy refers to the formal lecture is the primary means by which information is conveyed. It may look similar, but it is different when the "sage" helps individuals or groups come to a better understanding of a learning experience they have had as a part of a complex set of learning strategies. Standing in front of a class and helping them understand the work they have done through another process on, say, Boyle's Law, is not the same as "Today I am going to explain a concept called Boyle's Law."

Analogies, on the other hand, are very different from stories used as examples of a point, and they serve a very different purpose. An example serves to help students see exactly what they have been taught more clearly. An analogy forces students to make a comparison between two otherwise unlike situations and ask themselves how the two are the same or different.

Most learning occurs when the learner encounters a new situation and applies old knowledge to it. One of the most important aspects of what we call intelligence is the ability to do that. When so called intelligent people look at new learning, they intuitively and without realizing it ask two questions: How is this the same as something I already know? How is this different from something I already know? This sends them in an analytic direction toward that learning, and they begin to dissect the whole into understandable parts.

In contrast, people we think of as being less intelligent tend to look at new learning as an entirely new whole, and they try to take it all in at once. It is overwhelming to them, and this contributes to their failure because of another skill we associate with intelligence: optimism. The "intelligent" person, armed with a history of success, will perservere toward sucess despite hardship, but the "less intelligent" person will quit easily.

The skilled instructor sequences instructional experiences to allow a transfer of knowledge at each step. This is called a "transfer load." If the transfer load is too small, the student is merely getting repetition. If it is too great, the student is confused and cannot learn. That instructor will do things that force students to ask those two comparative questions, whether they would have done so intuitively or not. The skilled instructor makes sure the tansfer load is appropriate to the student and provides the "scaffolding" needed to make those transitions in learning. They make sure students enjoy early success. Thus, students who have grown up with a pessimistic attitude toward their own learning will not be dismayed by early failure and quit.

Back to analogies:

Research by a number of researchers has shown that instructional activities that force students to make comparisons between old learning and new learning have the greatest effect size on student learning of all strategies studied. [For more details, see Marzano, R. (2003). What works in schools: translating research into action. Alexandria: ASCD.] Analogies are one of many ways that an instructor can make that happen, and they can be very effective instructional tools.
 
Sea stories that are told on the spur of the moment and that do not a a very specific, predetermined reason to be told should wait for after class, they distract from the cohesion of the lecture and are far worse than just a waste of valuable class time, they are actually a setback. You can always tell when a random sea story has just been told, there's that same uncomfortable feeling in the room as when someone tells a joke and blows the punchline. If you can't tie a story rather closely to a learning objective of your lecture, or you have not predetermined that a short tale is needed in at a given time as a seqway or to change the pacing, than you need to not tell it.cer

As far as analogies are concerned, they can be a very valuable teaching tool for the reasons expressed. The problem with analogies is that when offered as part of a dialectical examination of issues, or other form of contentious debate, they can be seductive in their simplicity, but are in my experience, usually deceitful and dead wrong; because the root comparison on which the analogy is based is oft glossed over by the distraction of the concluding clause. There is an entire body of knowledge relating to the this form of logical fallacy, usually under the heading of "Weak Analogy" with aliases that include, "False Analogy," "Faulty Analogy," and "Questionable Analogy."
 
As far as analogies are concerned, they can be very valuable teaching tools. If fact there are all sorts of analogy questions on IQ and other tests. The problem with analogies is that while that can be seductive in their simplicity, they can at the same time be dead wrong.

Absolutely. As I said earlier, analogies are wonderful ways to assist instruction. Too many people, though, think they constitute logical proof. They do not.
 
Sorry, we're both typing at the same time and "stepping" on each other's transmissions and revisions.
 
Just another comment...

Earlier in the thread people commented that they had learned more through ScubaBoard discussions than other more traditional modes of learning. This is not at all surprising when you look at the learning theory behind this experience. When lively discussions take place on controversial issues, participants (including lurkers who post nothing) are forced to compare different ideas, think through the points, and make decisions. This is an active learning process that is far superior to passive learning, in which one simply receives and tries to remember information. This is also an example of what I said earlier, that instructional activities tht make the learner make comparisons and draw conclusions have been shown to be the most effective.

It is one of the reasons that all evaluative guides on eLearning programs (see the iNACOL, SREB, and NEA web sites for examples of rubrics used to rate the quality of online education programs) include threaded discussions as something to look for. Threaded discussions can be difficult to include in some courses, but properly done, they are extremely effective learning tools.

On the other hand, they can be done improperly. Many programs have poorly designed threaded discussions simply because the course instructors were required to include them, and they create discussions that have no prayer of working because they don't know how to do it right. Many of those same people designing those ineffective online classes have ineffective traditional classroom discussions as well because they don't know how to phrase a discussion question to elicit quality responses.
 
While I agree with what your saying, I have to tell you that the first critical lesson I learned in the graduate education courses I took was to heavily discount anything that used the word "rubric," unless it came with a colorful cube.:D
 
While I agree with what your saying, I have to tell you that the first critical lesson I learned in the graduate education courses I took was to heavily discount anything that used the word "rubric," unless it came with a colorful cube.:D

Ah, you have touched on an area of my expertise!

Rubric is a term that derives from the Catholic Church, the red colored writing that instructs priests on how to conduct the mass. The earliest use I know of it in English (I did not check the OED--just my own reading) is in the "Wife of Bath's Tale" in Chaucer, when she uses the term "rubriche" to declare she will not follow the formal expectations society had for female behavor at that time.

I have spent a lot of time teaching proper use of rubrics, and I have seen a whole lot of improper use. A poorly designed rubric is poison--it can actually lower student performance. A well designed rubric can do the opposite, and wonderfully so. I have also seen many examples, including unfortunately too often in the people I hired in my previous job, where people were given great rubrics to use but they did not understand them and completely misapplied them. One online education company with which I consulted had some of the worst I have ever seen, and it took a while lot of work to get them to understand that.

For a good description of good use of rubrics, see Wiggins, G. and McTigue, J. (2005)Understanding by design. 2nd edition. Alexandria: ASCD. Grant Wiggins is one of the best authorities possible for rubric design.

The primary problem in poor rubric design comes from a fear of employing subjective judgment. To use technical assessment terms, writers of poor rubrics are so focused on reliability that they ignore validity. If in rubric design you truly focus on validity, you can create a rubric that is both valid and reliable. If instead you focus on reliability, you can create what I call the illusion of objectivity and not realize that your results do not in any way accurately reflect the actual quality of the student's work. You got a nice, clear number, but the number is meaningless.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/swift/

Back
Top Bottom