Faculty Focus

HIGHER ED TEACHING STRATEGIES FROM MAGNA PUBLICATIONS

assessment alternatives

Students discuss with one another in library

Assignments with Significance

It has been estimated that college students across the globe devote in excess of a billion hours per year to “disposable” assignments (Wiley, 2016). Students view

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Group testing

Why Open-book Tests Deserve a Place in Your Courses

With the proliferation of learning management systems (LMS), many instructors now incorporate web-based technologies into their courses. While posting slides and readings online are common practices, the LMS can also be leveraged for testing. Purely online courses typically employ some form of web-based testing tool, but they are also useful for hybrid and face-to-face (F2F) offerings. Some instructors, however, are reluctant to embrace online testing. Their concerns can be wide ranging, but chief among them is cheating.

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class project - peer assessment

Multiple Perspective Assessment: Self, Peer, and Teacher

A college student opens the double doors and walks into a large conference room full of 65 long tables, set end-to-end and stacked six rows deep. Taking it all in, he asks his classmate, “How do we know where to put our projects?” before realizing large instructions with randomly assigned locations are projected up on the screen for all to see. He carefully places his project down onto spot #45, along with his required “Executive Summary,” a two-page document that provides his self-assessment and rationale about why he chose his project, what class content it caused him to research and learn more deeply, and how his project directly helped fulfill the four overall stated course outcomes.

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Ideas for Rethinking Your Quiz Tactics

If your quiz strategies are becoming stale, this free report is loaded with fresh ideas that will help you better understand why you are using quizzes, what you hope they will accomplish, and how they can best be used to facilitate student learning.

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Dropping Scores: The Case for Hope

In “Calculating Final Course Grades: What About Dropping Scores or Offering a Replacement?” (The Teaching Professor March 2014), the editor notes that “some students … assume that course content is a breeze, [so] the first exam serve[s] as a wake-up call.” (p. 6) In two Introductory Psychology classes (150 students), I recently implemented an effective three-step strategy for getting the best out of such students (and, indeed, all students).

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Calculating Final Course Grades: What about Dropping Scores or Offering a Replacement?

Instructors commonly cope with a missed test or failed exam (this may also apply to quizzes) by letting students drop their lowest score. Sometimes the lowest score is replaced by an extra exam or quiz. Sometimes the tests are worth different amounts, with the first test worth less, the second worth a bit more, and the third worth more than the first two—but not as much as the final.

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Student-Written Exams Increase Student Involvement

What? Students writing their own exams? Yes, that’s exactly what these marketing faculty members had their students do. “The Student-Written Exam method is an open book and notes take-home exam in which each student writes and answers his or her own multiple-choice and short essay questions.” (p. 32)

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