One major impediment to learning is the “forgetting curve,” the fact that people rapidly forget what they learn without reinforcement (Smolen et al., 2016). Assessments are a good method of combating the forgetting curve as they call up past information and, in doing so, encode
It was midway through week four of the fall semester. The preservice teacher candidates sat in small groups, reviewing their assignments from the previous week. One student’s brow furrowed as she read her feedback, stopping on the comment “Add more differentiation for diverse learners.” She
If you use team projects and the grade comes only from you, you’re missing an essential opportunity. Including peer evaluations in your grades provides necessary information for you and gives your students a valuable team experience. Given that teamwork is one of the top skills
We’ve all faced it: the daunting stack of student work, each submission representing hours of potential grading. The familiar weight of this task can feel overwhelming, leaving us searching for more effective ways to provide meaningful feedback that truly fuels student learning. While the desire
About a year ago, I decided to combine the ideas of a syllabus activity and a get-to-know-students activity. Using Microsoft Forms, I created an introductory exercise to share with students a week before the first day of classes. This optional activity included short videos related
A variety of factors can undermine performance on a test beyond lack of knowledge, such as anxiety and misinterpretations of the questions. But there are four simple things that instructors can do with their tests to minimize these confounding variables.
AI has become a part of nearly all facets of teaching, from lesson development to exam creation to answering student questions. But grading is the last bastion of education where it has yet to make meaningful inroads. This is partly due to the visceral reaction
Over 40 years of teaching, I’ve been to enough departmental grading norming sessions and scoring workshops to notice that not even English teachers agree on exactly what the term grammar means. For example, some of my colleagues get really bent out of shape when a
Quizzes provide both students and teachers with a snapshot of student learning. But students often just look at the grade rather than think about the learning that it represents and what to do about it. Similarly, instructors often only look at class performance rather than
Proponents of rubrics champion them as a means of ensuring consistency in grading, not only between students within a class but also between instructors teaching the same class. Rubrics, they say, also clarify to students the standards of excellence on which they’re being assessed (Taylor
