Assessment and Evaluation
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Educational Theory, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, SoTL
What is the science behind your course design madness?
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Fred Phillips, Professor, Baxter Scholar, Edwards School of Business As we begin another year, students are encountering some of the course design decisions made by their instructors. Some will be introduced to “flipped classrooms”, where students prepare by reading/viewing/responding to a learning prompt before it is formally taken up in class. Others will encounter new learning tools, such as adaptive reading systems that embed interactive questions within reading materials with the goal of assessing each student’s comprehension so that new topics can be delivered the moment he or she is ready to comprehend them. Just as instructors have questions about these approaches and tools, students are likely…
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Feedback in Marking – Some Tips for Efficiency
[social_share/] [social-bio] Feedback is one of the most important factors when it comes to improving student performance in a course. Yet many instructors would use words like tedious, grueling, or headache-inducing to describe the process of providing feedback to student work. If you are one of those instructors, consider integrating one (or more!) of the following strategies into your grading practice. Separate Grading and Feedback: If the student cannot use your feedback to improve the quality of their work, writing comments on student work is probably just a waste of your time and energy. Frontload Feedback: Provide specific and more detailed feedback early and frequent in the term, so it can be integrated into…
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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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Evaluating Presentations With a Little Help From My (Citable) Friends …
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Individual and group presentations provide great opportunity for students to share what they have learned with peers and an efficient and feasible way of marking for instructors. That being said, how do you grade them? I, and I’m pretty sure you too, have experienced the full range of presentations from the stunningly excellent to the staggeringly confusing, from the inspirational to the sleep-inducing. The challenge is describing these qualities so they can be identified and assessed. One option would be to create my own rubric based on these experiences. The easier option is to use or adapt existing materials from others I respect. The…
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Authentic Assessment
[social_share/] [social-bio] I think of authentic assessments as ways for students to demonstrate knowledge and understanding in a public way. What makes assessment authentic for me is that students do something to show what they know in a public way that benefits a wider community than the one person assigning a grade. The posters that students did in their first year College of Agriculture and Bioresources (AgBio) classes this past term are, in my way of defining authentic assessment, stellar examples. Working in teams, students prepared a research poster as part of their undergraduate research experience. On the afternoon of December 3rd there were 99 posters on display up and…
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Feedback to Improve Teaching
[social_share/] [social-bio] This fall I taught my first for-credit university course. I have plenty of previous teaching experience in the K-12 system and non-credit workshops/courses offered through the GMCTE, but this was the first-time teaching paying university students. I was feeling some apprehension and added pressure. With this pressure in mind (and wanting to provide the best learning experience possible) I put together a formative assessment plan for the course. This plan would allow students to provide me with feedback on my teaching and use of learning activities. Here is a list of some of the items in that plan: Pre-Course Survey: I began with a pre-course survey the last…
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College of Education Adopts Use of ePortfolios
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Tim Molnar, Assistant Professor, College of Education The College of Education recently implemented an electronic portfolio system (ePort) called Mahara™. This open source ePort emerged from a collaborative venture funded by several post secondary institutions and government bodies in New Zealand. In Maori mahara means “to think, thinking, or thought.” Our intentions with implementing Mahara™ are to enhance teacher candidates’ learning by offering a place for the collection of evidence, analysis, representation and sharing relating to their experience as developing educators. Instructors and cooperating teachers have the opportunity to examine, assess and provide feedback to teacher candidates on their efforts and progress. Using Mahara™ also offers an…
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There Are No “Dumb” Questions, But There Are Intelligently Guessed Answers
[social_share/] [social-bio] The weather turning colder, the snow starting to fall, the days becoming shorter and people more busily bustling around are sure signs that “the most wonderful time of the year” on our campus is fast approaching: final exam season. Few, if any, types of questions appear more prolifically on final exams than multiple choice questions (MCQ). However, there are good MCQ’s and there are not-so-good MCQ’s. An exam containing poorly written questions will produce inaccurate measures of your student learning; if the purpose of a final exam is measuring student learning, a final exam consisting of poorly constructed questions is essentially just “going through the motions” of assessment.…
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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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John Boyer touches Down on Tuesday at the U of S
[social_share/] [social-bio] Sometimes, the time is right to reach into the past for a “re-post”. Now is such a time to look again at the February 24, 2014 post by Susan Bens since we are in the wonderful position to be hosting John Boyer at the U of S on Tuesday, October 7. He’ll be speaking from 2:30 – 3:30 in the GSA Commons on the very structure of assessment he uses in his huge, blended course on World Regions. Check out this event, and other events appearing under the Academic Integrity Awareness Week Banner. What? A Menu of Assessment Options? By Susan Bens I have recently come upon…