“This is not a C paper!” “This answer deserves more points.” “Half of my work on this problem is correct, but I got less than half credit.” Grades are terribly important to most students, so ...
It's a question on every student's mind, especially those just starting their college careers. Sometimes they ask other students, peers they know and can speak to without feeling foolish. Rarely do they ask the teacher, ...
Although still not at all that widely used, there’s long-standing interest in letting students work together on quizzes or exams. Upon first hearing about the approach, teachers’ initial response is almost always negative. Here are ...
As professors, we have all been there—trying to decide the best way to assess students to determine whether learning has taken place. The goal of education is, after all, to get the information into the ...
Here’s one of those articles that really shouldn’t be missed, particularly for those with interest in making teaching and learning more evidence-based. Current thinking about evidence-based teaching and learning tends to be more generic than ...
Most entry-level science classes are test-centric, meaning that the course grade is based primarily on tests and only minimally on homework, quizzes, or other grades. For students with test anxiety, that can be devastating.
The “testing effect,” as it's called by cognitive psychologists, seems pretty obvious to faculty. If students are going to be tested on material, they will learn it better and retain it longer than if they ...
How much will students remember from your course tomorrow, next week, next month, next semester, or next year? Let's be honest, in most cases, not as much as we would hope or as much as ...
A recent survey of 175 economics professors who teach basic principles of economics courses revealed a widely diverse set of grading practices for the course. These instructors taught at 118 different institutions, including doctoral degree-granting ...
Good study skills are the key to successful performance on exams in college, and good study skills are what many of today’s college students don’t have. We can spend time pontificating about who bears the ...