College teachers are always on the outlook for ways to help students better understand why their paper, essay answer, or project earned a particular grade. Many students aren’t objective assessors of their own work, especially when there’s a grade involved, and others can’t seem to
Talk with almost any faculty member and they will tell you that many (sometimes it’s most) of their students are unprepared for college. They lack basic skills in reading, writing, and computation but also don’t have very effective study habits and techniques. Most teachers try
Most student rating instruments include a question related to the feedback provided by the instructor. It may ask whether it was constructive, actionable, delivered in a timely manner, or some combination of these characteristics. Most teachers are conscientious about giving students feedback. Because they devote
While most faculty stick with the tried-and-true quiz and paper assessment strategies for their online courses, the wide range of technologies available today offers a variety of assessment options beyond the traditional forms. But what do students think of these different forms?
One of the biggest failures of higher education is punishing student failure. A bad performance on an assignment is preserved and carried all the way to the final grade. This makes students adverse to risk and obsessed with grades.
“When are you going to retire?” “Why are you still working?” These are questions I’m asked regularly. Worried that the question is motivated by signs of diminished mental acuity, I scour old and new writings looking for evidence. Should I stop working? I wonder.
When students are talking with each other about content, most of us worry, at least a little bit. We’ve all heard less-than-impressive exchanges. For example, four students are in a group discussing three open-ended questions about two challenging readings. It’s less than five minutes since
Evidence-based teaching seems like the new buzzword in higher education. The phrase appears to mean that we’ve identified and should be using those instructional practices shown empirically to enhance learning. Sounds pretty straightforward, but there are lots of questions that haven’t yet been addressed, such
The flipped classroom reverses the traditional teaching formula by putting the “lecture” online and using class time for engagement with the material. But many faculty trip up when trying to find activities for the face-to-face component of the class, and often end up reverting to
The traditional online course structure violates a fundamental principle of learning by separating the process of getting information from the process of engaging it. The student is asked to go through some sort of resource in its entirety—be it a video, website, or reading—and then
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