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Ideas about Assessing Student Participation
[social_share/] [social-bio] Recently we completed another Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) at our Centre. This an intensive and engaging 4-day workshop where faculty and instructors learn about and practice participatory learning strategies, and upon completion, receive a certificate of completion that is nationally recognized. As the workshop unfolds, important questions are brought forward by participants. Given our focus on student participation in the ISW, the question of how to (and whether to) give participation marks arises. While the answers depend on the context of the course, the teaching approach, and the design of the learning experiences and assessments, specific ideas from others can help us arrive at ways of doing this…
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Reflecting on Assessment and Feedback
[social_share/] [social-bio] At this time of year, faculty can see the learning that has occurred for students reflected back through the culminating assessments. Whether it’s the term project, the research paper, the reflective portfolio, the group presentation, or the final exam – this is a means to discover what has been learned by students and to what standard. Here are 10 questions gleaned from a 2004 article by Gibbs and Simpson on assessment that support students’ learning. Looking back at the term, an instructor may ask: Did the assessment require sufficient time and effort on the kind of learning intended? Did the assessment indicate the appropriate proportion of effort to…
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Talking with Students About Suspected Plagiarism: Ten Guiding Questions
[social_share/] [social-bio] As assignments start to come in, this can be the time in the term when faculty notice what may be inadvertent or intentional plagiarism by students. Hopefully, you rarely encounter this yourself. But, if you do suspect plagiarism, how can you best proceed? Here’s what I would do… First, become familiar with the institutional policy and any particular procedures with respect to this policy in your department or college. Next, I suggest that you discuss the matter with the student(s) you suspect. Here are ten guiding questions offered to help you to prepare for and to anticipate the potential directions of a discussion: Why am I asking to discuss…
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Too explicit? No such thing.
[social_share/] [social-bio] Following on Heather’s post last week about the key (and required) elements of the syllabus at the University of Sasaktchewan, I wanted to add a point of emphasis that I think saves time, saves confusion, and may even save you some heartache. That point is: be explicit with your students about your expectations. Sometimes, as instructors, we may forget that we too had to learn about academic expectations and norms. If we were lucky, we caught on quickly, probably in our first or second years of undergraduate study. Our new students (new to our disciplines, our institution, our jargon, our everyday language, our Saskatchewan and/or Canadian…
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Practice Problem Sets: Issues of Timing and Mixing
[social_share/] [social-bio] While looking for resources for a faculty member in the sciences who was interested in incorporating more problem sets into her lectures to increase student engagement, I came upon a 2007 article by Rohere and Taylor, appearing in Instructional Science. This article describes two experiments where particular timing and mixing of mathematics practice problems improved learning. The authors point out that it is usual for practice problems to be assigned: • immediately following the relevant lesson (massed), and • for problems of the same type to be grouped together (blocked). Through Rohere and Taylor’s experiments, they found that spacing the timing of two sets of practice problems 1…
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What is Digital Citizenship?
[social_share/] [social-bio] Many teaching and learning conversations include notions of developing and fostering citizenship for our teachers and our learners in our respective disciplines and fields and in society. Citizenship can be such broad territory. One way to focus it further is to discuss Digital Citizenship. If you’re still stumped, let me point you to a useful set of Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship appearing on a web site dedicated to this topic. Here, among other things, you’ll find types of norms that characterize appropriate and response technology use. The distinctions between digital literacy, digital communication, digital etiquette, and digital rights and responsibilities strike me as most informative. When we…
- Academic Integrity, Educational Technology, General, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies
It’s Course Design Not Entertainment: A visit from John Boyer
[social_share/] [social-bio] On October 7, we had the pleasure at the University of Saskatchewan of welcoming John Boyer from the Geography Department at Virginia Tech to speak with us about his innovative and increasingly acclaimed approaches to teaching large classes and his approaches for motivating learning and designing assessment. Recordings of his talks are available at these links, and are embedded at the end of this post. 1. Assessment Innovations that Reduce Cheating and Enhance Learning 2. Teaching (Really) Large Classes (Very) Well There is some repetition between them since there were slightly different audiences in attendance at both sessions and John therefore needed to describe the format of his…
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Defining Shared Thresholds for Dealing with Academic Dishonesty
[social_share/] [social-bio] The Academic Misconduct Policy at the University of Saskatchewan recognizes that as instructors, we often are in a great position to judge the severity of an act of dishonesty and to situate that act in the context of our course. The informal procedures available through the U of S academic misconduct policy set clear parameters—to apply a grade penalty on the assignment or test that is of concern, it must be dealt with using the “informal procedures”. Whereas, the formal procedures may be invoked when the grade penalty you see as deserved extends beyond the assignment or test to the overall grade for the course. However, each of…
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The Academic Dishonesty Redirect: Be Explicit, Know your Policies, Assess Authentically
[social_share/] [social-bio] At the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness, when faculty and instructors ask us about academic integrity, we will inevitably steer the conversation to three main values: the value of being very explicit with students about the rules you expect them to follow the value of understanding the rules of your home department or college as well as the university policy on academic misconduct, the value of designing assessment for authentic learning. Here’s a video that demonstrates this tendency quite nicely, if I do say so myself: And, for further evidence of our redirect, coming up on Monday, October 6 1:30 – 2:15 in the GMCTE Classroom, as…
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Peer-to-Peer Writing Feedback: That’s what friends are for!
[social_share/] [social-bio] Peer-to-peer writing feedback is a process by which students judge other students’ written work and produce and provide feedback to them and then, in turn, also receive feedback on their own work. By feedback, I mean commentary of a formative kind: that is, students have the chance to consider and incorporate the feedback received from their peers. Peers are not assigning grades (that would be “peer assessment”), but they may be evaluating the work using a set of provided standards or a rubric. The process can be anonymous, but it does not need to be. This fall, I will be trying out peer-to-peer writing feedback in a course…