Modes of practice are the first observable, reliable, public, and testable unit of analysis for identifying knowledge development.
Identifying Knowledge Development
The Adaptive Complexity Process: Six rules for identifying what others know even when you do not know it.
Developmental Interpretation Rubrics for improving personal skills and enriching communities.
Poster illustrating the outlined concepts presented to the North Carolina Cognition Group in 2017..
Teachers, learners, modes of practice: Theory and methodology for identifying knowledge development
Learn about modes of practice.
Conduct developmental surveys and interviews.
Create learning outcomes for fields of expertise.
Create curricula that accelerate development.
Support transformative learning.
Assess development in many fields.
Organize course designs.
Contribute to praxomics.
The 107 page appendix contains complete rubrics for 20 disciplines based on 300+ interviews of experts.
Order the book
Available in the Fuquay-Varina Community Library, the NC State Library, over 100 other academic libraries, and at the following sellers:
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A seven year project has shown great progress in realizing real time developmental education of music and behavior among impoverished students. Soundscapes is one of the oldest El Sistema programs in the United States. Program Director Reynaldo Ramirez and David Dirlam presented at the National Symposium of the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles.
Dirlam, D. K. Developmental Assessment for Online Learning, November, 2020
Ramirez, R. Illuminating True Progress for All Students. The Ensemble, June, 2019.
Ramirez, R. & Dirlam, D. Novice to Expert: Developmental Rubrics, A Crash Course on Creating and Using Them, YOLA National Symposium, 2019.
The Succession Model (the most detailed expression is worked out in Dirlam, Gamble and Lloyd, 1999 and Dirlam, 2017 and in the documents below) applies to repeated instances that result in countable and classifiable products of any human activity, journal articles, classroom or factory work, website pages, performances of musical groups during a competition, etc. It is an adaptation of ecology's Lotka-Volterra equation, which describes ecological growth patterns among species competing for static resources. The human practices are classified according to the strategies used to create them which are each identified by a single rubric. The model gives the frequencies of the succession of rubrics for a single criterion. Products may be classified using several different criteria, but each criterion results in exhaustive classification of all products.
Download A Decade of Higher Education Assessment Papers and Presentations (7.5 Mb)
2018 Transformative Learning Needed for Higher Education Assessment
2018 Developmental Interviewing Tool
2018 AALHE KDTF Interview Analysis
2017 Praxomics Nested Hierarchy of Units
2017 Nested Hierarchy of Practice
2017 How Modes of Practice Revolutionize Learning and its Assessment
2016 Real-time Developmental Assessment for Transforming Students and Teachers
2016 Does assessment make colleges better
2015 How to Help Faculty Make Better Rubrics
2014 The Course Design Survey 2014 The Course Design Matrix
2008-2113 Nine additional papers and three presentations.
Wisdom Profiles & Developmental Rubrics
Collected writings from the early days of wisdoms profiles and interview-based developmental rubrics, especially including profiles from individual experts not included in Dirlam, 2017 (above).
Also, see the 2002 monograph, Memes in your Life.
Development of Counseling Patients
The book on Teachers, Learners, and Modes of Practice plus the 2018 papers in the Knowledge Assessment collection above described the results of 15 years of progress on developmental interviewing. During the same year a group of counselors applied the methods to create a developmental profile of patients. Click Development of Counseling Patients to see the profile.