Posts Tagged ‘educational assessments’
August 8 - To Make Assessment Manageable Keep it Simple and Be Flexible
By: Mary Bart in Educational Assessment
Anyone with a 3-year-old knows one of their favorite words is “Why.” As it turns out, asking “why” is a good way to examine your assessment goals and how they align with your institution’s core values.
“My favorite assessment question is ‘Why’ and I ask it over and over again,” said Linda Suskie, president at the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
July 21 - Getting a Balanced Picture of Student Learning
By: Mary Bart in Educational Assessment
From local and external standards to norm-referenced and value-added benchmarks, to name just a few, there is no shortage of educational assessment options to use. The question everyone wants answered, however, is ‘Which one is the best?’
June 20 - Technology-Enhanced Classroom Assessment Techniques
By: Jacqueline Mangieri, PhD. in Online Education
In the mid-1990s, college faculty members were introduced to the concept of classroom assessment techniques (CATs) by Angelo and Cross (1993). These formative assessment strategies were learner-centered, teacher-directed ongoing activities that were rooted in good teaching practice. They were designed to provide relatively quick and useful feedback to the faculty member about what students did and did not understand in order to enhance the teaching and learning process.
May 5 - Summarizing and Using Assessment Results
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
You put a lot of hard work into creating student assessments. And then what? With all the time spent developing and administering assessments, it’s a shame not to reap the benefits of your efforts. This seminar will teach you how to summarize and use your assessment results.
October 14 - Do More Tests Lead to More Learning?
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Educational Assessment
Most college teachers assume that more tests are better than a few. Why? What caused us to decide on three or four unit tests followed by a final? Is there evidence that students don’t do as well in courses where there are only a midterm and a final? Why do we think that more tests might be better? And what do we mean by better? Higher grades? More learning?
January 4 - Improving Your Assessment Processes: Q&A with Linda Suskie
By: Rob Kelly in Educational Assessment
It’s a new year, but the same old challenges exist. Given today’s financial challenges, colleges and universities are all working harder than ever to be careful stewards of limited resources and to demonstrate their effectiveness to stakeholders, constituents, and the public.
October 9 - Using Self-Check Exercises to Assess Online Learning
By: Patti Shank, PhD, CPT in Educational Assessment, Online Education
The intermediate statistics class I took quite a number of years ago had two types of learners at the outset—those who were worried about passing the course and those who were sure they couldn’t pass it. The professor clearly understood the “fear-of-stats” phenomenon and used a number of instructional techniques to help learners gain confidence and skills.
September 16 - Designing Effective Assessments: Q&A with Trudy Banta
By: Rob Kelly in Educational Assessment
In their new book, Designing Effective Assessment: Principles and Profiles of Good Practice, Trudy Banta, Elizabeth Jones, and Karen Black provide assessment profiles from a wide variety of institutions and units. In advance of her online seminar titled Principles and Profiles of Good Practice in Assessment. Dr. Banta answered questions about the book and some of the topics she will discuss next week’s seminar.
September 11 - Encouraging Faculty Involvement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
By: Rob Kelly in Teaching and Learning
Despite the admirable goal of improving student learning by assessment, many faculty members are uneasy about participating in assessment-related activities. One way to overcome negative feelings about assessment while promoting improved student learning is to encourage faculty to engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).
November 10 - Assessment for Improvement vs. Assessment for Accountability
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
Just as simply weighing a pig will not make it fatter, spending millions to simply test college students is not likely to help them learn more. So what then are the best ways to measure our students’ growth and learning over time?
Dr. Trudy W. Banta is professor of higher education and senior advisor to the chancellor for academic planning and evaluation at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She has developed and coordinated 21 national conferences and 15 international conferences on the topic of assessing quality in higher education. She has consulted with faculty and administrators in 46 states, Puerto Rico, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates and has by invitation addressed national conferences on outcomes assessment in Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Spain and Scotland. Dr. Banta has edited 15 published volumes on assessment, contributed 26 chapters to published works, and written more than 200 articles and reports. She is the founding editor of Assessment Update, a bi-monthly periodical published since 1989. She has been honored for her work by the American Association for Higher Education, American College Personnel Association, American Productivity and Quality Center, Association for Institutional Research, National Council on Measurement in Education, and National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education.