Posts Tagged ‘assessing student learning’
January 27 - Developing Student Self Assessment Skills
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Our interest in more learner-centered instruction has changed the way many of us think about teaching as well as what we do in the classroom. We are devoting more energy to getting students involved during class. We are trying to give them more opportunities to practice those learning skills that expedite learning. We let them summarize the content; rather than doing it for them. We try to have them ask more questions than we do. We design activities which encourage them to learn from and with each other.
October 19 - Grading Practices: Liabilities of the Points System
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
The November issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter contains highlights from a speech given by Diane L. Pike at the 2010 Midwest Sociological Society meeting and subsequently published in the reference below. It’s a great speech that identifies three dead ideas in teaching and the tyranny that results from holding those beliefs.
August 30 - Eight Lessons about Student Learning and What They Mean for You
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Curriculum Development
A new edition of a classic book on the curriculum suggests eight lessons from the learning literature with implications for course and curriculum planning. Any list like this tends to simplify a lot of complicated research and offer generalizations that apply most, but certainly not all, of the time. Despite these caveats, lists like this are valuable. They give busy faculty a sense of the landscape and offer principles that can guide decision making, in this case about courses and curricula.
June 21 - Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More Meaningful Results
By: Mary Bart in Educational Assessment, Free Reports
Making Sense of Higher Education Assessment Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More Meaningful Results Assessing institutional effectiveness is a noble pursuit, but measuring student learning is not always easy. As with so many things we try to quantify, there’s much more to learning than a number in a datasheet. When it comes to assessment.
May 13 - Assessing Student Learning
By: John Orlando, PhD in Educational Assessment
Curriculum, instruction, and assessment: the three fundamental components of education, whether online or face to face. Author Milton Chen calls these the “three legs of the classroom stool” and reminds us that each leg must be equally strong in order for the “stool” to function properly, balanced and supportive. Habitually, the questions What am I going to teach and How am I going to teach it? weigh heavier on an instructor’s mind than How will I assess? As a result, the assessment “leg” of the classroom stool is often the weakest of the three, the least understood and least effectively implemented.
April 1 - Activities that Promote Deep, Lasting Learning Not Used Enough
By: Linda Suskie in Trends in Higher Education
Academically Adrift is provoking plenty of discussion throughout American higher education, and with good reason. While there are valid concerns about the methodology, instrumentation and overreaching inferences of Richard Arum’s and Josipa Roksa’s research study, many of their conclusions are important ones that have been confirmed by others.
September 1 - Five Steps to Improving Program-Level Assessment Practices
By: Mary Bart in Educational Assessment
Student learning outcomes assessment can be defined in a lot of different ways, but Lisa R. Shibley, PhD., assistant vice president for Institutional Assessment and Planning at Millersville University, has a favorite definition. It’s from Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education by Barbara E. Walvoord and states that student learning outcomes assessment is “the systematic collection of information about student learning, using time, knowledge, expertise, and resources available in order to inform decisions about how to improve learning.”
July 30 - What it Means to be a Self-Regulated Learner
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning
“Self-regulation is not a mental ability or an academic performance skill; rather it is the self-directive process by which learners transform their mental abilities into academic skills.” (p. 65) That definition is offered by Barry Zimmerman, one of the foremost researchers on self-regulated learning. It appears in a succinct five-page article that offers a very readable overview of research in this area.
June 24 - Good Job! The Importance of Writing More Meaningful Comments on Student Papers
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning
When graded papers get a quick glance before being shoved into a backpack or deposited into the trash can on the way out of class, it’s often hard for teachers to summon the motivation to write lots of comments on papers. That’s why I was pleased to find evidence in two studies that students do value written comments on their work.
May 20 - Inquiry into the College Classroom
By: Paul Savory, PhD, and Amy Goodburn, PhD in Teaching and Learning
Are our students learning? Are they developing? Are we having an impact? These questions are only a small sample of those that faculty ask before, during, and after each course that they teach. Faculty often attempt to answer such questions using the evidence they have—student remarks during class and office hours, student performance on examinations or homework assignments, student comments solicited via teaching evaluations, and their own classroom observations. While these forms of evidence can be useful, such informal assessments also can be misleading, particularly because they are generally not systematic or fully representative.
