As someone who mostly teaches composition and the occasional literature or creative writing class, I use quizzes most semesters, and occasional midterms and final exams.
Have you considered adding five-minute student interviews to your teaching tool kit? Before you calculate how long it would take to interview all of your
I found the article, “Testing and Assessment: Looking in the Wrong Places” by Dr. Caristi (Faculty Focus, 11 Sept. 2019) interesting. But, if I am
A bunch of guys had a late afternoon game of touch football in a field. As it started getting dark and the players moved toward
As faculty design their syllabi for the upcoming semester, they consider how to have students demonstrate the vast knowledge they acquire throughout the semester. Enter
There has been a long discussion within our college about whether or not teaching to the test is appropriate. Of course, the test that we
Among the trickiest decisions teachers make is whether to round up the final grade for a student who is just a few points shy of a passing score.
Although some students need a “second lap” to master academic skills needed for later coursework, repeating courses makes it harder for students to progress toward a degree. Time is money (literally, in higher education), and when students are asked to spend more of both on a class they already took, they may get discouraged or drop out. This is a consequence we need to take seriously, as nearly half of students do not complete a bachelor’s degree in four years.
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.
Are you one of the many instructors who loathe makeup exam requests? Makeup exams often create more work and can put us in the awkward position of judging the truthfulness of our students’ excuses. Although we can’t avoid makeup requests entirely, we can better prepare ourselves and our students by having a transparent and fair makeup exam policy. When designing your policy, always ask yourself: Does the policy allow students to learn what you want them to learn in your course?
Providing detailed feedback is a critical component of effective teaching. Feedback serves as a one-to-one conversation with students and can be a powerful tool to teach course content, mentor students, and help them to develop a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006). Decades of research have identified the characteristics of good feedback as expedient, specific, and related to the expectations of the task (Nichols & Macfarlane‐Dick, 2006). Feedback must also provide students with information about how to improve their work, which is focused on future learning (Sadler, 1989).
