Educational Assessment Archives - Page 2 of 12 - Faculty Focus

December 1, 2015

Axial Assessment: The 21st Century Answer to Assessment

The current state of student assessment in the classroom is mediocre, vague, and reprehensibly flawed. In much of higher education, we educators stake a moral high ground on positivistic academics. Case in point: assessment. We claim that our assessments within the classroom are objective, not subjective. After all, you wouldn’t stand in front of class and say that your grading is subjective and that students should just deal with it, right? Can we honestly examine a written paper or virtually any other assessment in our courses and claim that we grade completely void of bias? Let’s put this idea to the test. Take one of your assessments previously completed by a student. Grade the assignment using your rubric. Afterwards, have another educator among the same discipline grade the assignment using your exact rubric. Does your colleague’s grade and yours match? How far off are the two grades? If your assessment is truly objective, the grades should be exact. Not close but exact. Anything else reduces the reliability of your assessment.

November 16, 2015

An Objective Approach to Grading

By: Betty Anne Buirs PhD

It was always the same scenario. I’d be feeling a great sense of accomplishment because I had spent hours grading a set of English papers—painstakingly labeling errors and writing helpful comments. Everything was crystal clear, and the class could now move on to the next assignment. Except it wasn’t, and we couldn’t. A few students would inevitably find their way to my office, plunk their papers down on my desk, and ask me to explain the grade. Something had to change. I knew exactly why I was assigning the grades, but I obviously needed to find a more effective way of communicating these reasons to my students.

November 13, 2015

Examining the Benefits of Cumulative Tests and Finals

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD

With the academic year nearly over and final exams upon us, it’s a good time to consider how we assess student knowledge in our courses. Cumulative finals are still used in many courses, but a significant number of faculty have backed away from them because they are so unpopular with students, who strongly voice their preferences for exams that include only questions on content covered in that unit or module.

October 22, 2015

Dropping Scores: The Case for Hope

By: Nicholas F. Skinner PhD

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).

October 20, 2015

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

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD

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.

October 8, 2015

Student-Written Exams Increase Student Involvement

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD

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)

October 1, 2015

Provide ‘Feedforward’ with Exemplars

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD

There is growing interest in the pedagogical literature in something called feedforward. It is, as the name implies, the opposite of feedback, which provides input after the fact. Feedforward offers input focused on the future. It lets students know what they should be doing or could be doing differently next time. If it’s a similar assignment, the “do differently” is specific advice on changes that will improve the next assignment. If it’s a different assignment, the “do differently” identifies what’s not the same about the next assignment and what needs to be done in a different way.

September 22, 2015

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Types of Test Questions

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD

It’s good to regularly review the advantages and disadvantages of the most commonly used test questions and the test banks that now frequently provide them.

Male professor in classroom with students

August 10, 2015

Four Assessment Strategies for the Flipped Learning Environment

By: Robert Talbert, PhD

Flipped learning environments offer unique opportunities for student learning, as well as some unique challenges. By moving direct instruction from the class group space to the individual students’ learning spaces, time and space are freed up for the class as a learning community to explore the most difficult concepts of the course. Likewise, because students are individually responsible for learning the basics of new material, they gain regular experience with employing self-regulated learning strategies they would not have in an unflipped environment.

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