Criterion

Contents

• What is Criterion?
• An example of Criterion: "What is innateness?"
• Use in other fields
• How you can use it
• Contact details

What is Criterion?

Criterion is an online learning tool that allows students to deconstruct a complex, abstract concept so that it can be more fully understood. At LSE, it has been used to teach the subject of innateness in human development. However, the content is completely modifiable, so that the tool can be re-purposed for teaching other subjects.

Criterion is freely available for use in UK higher and further education institutions. See "How you can use it" below for details.

The way the tool works is best illustrated by a real example:

An example of Criterion: "What is innateness?"

The original implementation of Criterion forms an exercise called "What is innateness?". This was developed for use on the Masters-level course "Anthropology of Learning and Cognition" at LSE. 'Innateness' refers to the extent to which human behaviour and development is attributable to (a) their genetic and evolutionary endowment, or (b) their social, cultural and natural environment.

At the heart of Criterion is a grid, whose rows list twelve phenomena that might be described as ‘innate,’ and whose columns list five possible criteria for 'innateness'.

Clicking on one of the phenomena opens a resource page containing:

1. A brief description of the phenomenon
2. A number of supporting resources (scientific and popular articles, videos and audio recordings, relevant websites, etc.)
3. A list of the five criteria for innateness

The supporting resources give students the means to evaluate and comment on the relevance of each criterion to the phenomenon. These resources may not provide a definitive answer; students must also use their knowledge from classes and from background reading.

Clicking on one of the criteria in the list opens a contribution page, where students can record their answer and justify it. Participants are asked to decide whether they believe the criterion (in the form of a question) to be true, probably true, probably false, or false. Students can use these categories to reflect the weight of evidence one way or the other. The student must also comment on the justification for their choice; these comments are added to the page and thus allow debate to take place.

The assessments of truth are averaged, so that an overall choice emerges by consensus. Over time, these overall choices build up until the grid is completed. In our example, the exercise was conducted as group-work, so that each small group of students was responsible for studying a separate set of 3 phenomena.

Click here to examine the completed "What is innateness" exercise from 2005/2006 (read-only, student names have been anonymised).

Use in other fields

Criterion can easily be adapted to work with concepts other than innateness. Suitable concepts may have one or more of the following characteristics:

1. Cross-disciplinary use. A concept that has relevance in several disciplines may be interpreted in multiple ways, and illustrated by many distinct examples, giving rich scope for applying the Criterion approach.
2. 'Fuzzy' nature. Criterion works well with complex concepts that possess multiple properties that are, individually, neither necessary nor sufficient to define the concept.
3. Misleading popular characterisation. Where complex concepts are used both in scientific contexts and outside of them, there may be differences of meaning between the two contexts. Criterion can be used to identify these differences and thus clarify meaning.

Some other concepts that we think may benefit from the Criterion approach are as follows:

• Kinship
• Art
• Morality
• Religion
• Citizenship
• etc.

How you can use it

First, try it yourself with this fully-enabled version of "What is innateness?".

Criterion is freely available for use in UK HE or FE institutions. At present, we are also making it available to HE institutions outside the UK, in return for evaluation results on its use.

Within LSE: We can host your Criterion instance on our server.

Other institutions: You'll need to set up Criterion on your own server. To do this, you'll need:

• Web server
• PHP 4+
• MySQL 4+ (with a database to called 'criterion' which you have 'grant' privileges)

An authoring tool is planned, to simplify the development of new instances of Criterion. Until that is available, we can provide the technical support you need to set it up. Please contact us for futher details of how to proceed.

Contact details

Please contact the developer Steve Bond if you have any questions or would like to use Criterion in your own teaching.