There’s advice and there are activities that can help develop students’ abilities to offer constructive feedback and use the feedback they receive from peers to more accurately self-assess and improve their work. Those aren’t skills ...
It has been said that experience is the best teacher, and for this reason, many instructors and educational programs are adding experiential components to their curriculum. One form of experiential learning is service learning, where ...
How can a popular party game help students become better evaluators of the credibility of the information they find on the internet? Two Truths and a Lie involves making three statements about yourself, one of them ...
Exemplars are “carefully chosen samples of student work which are used to illustrate dimensions of quality and clarify assessment expectations” (p. 1315). In addition to offering this definition, Carless and Chan (2017) provide a rationale ...
Pete Burkholder recently published an interesting article in this newsletter questioning the widespread push in higher education for “engaging” student activities. He first adopts Jose Eos Trinidad et al.’s (2020) definition of engagement as “enjoyment” ...
Teachers can’t monitor what’s happening in multiple groups. Students, on the other hand, know exactly what’s happening in their group—who’s contributing what in the group as well as what they’re doing. From that position they ...
Too often, faculty make content coverage the focus of lesson planning. They plan their courses around the topics they need to cover, which usually leads to them motoring through information that their students are supposed ...
In last week’s column I highlighted work that proposes ways of increasing the impact of the feedback teachers provide students. Doing so requires more feedback opportunities and activities—bottom line: more work for teachers. That got ...
When my institution closed because of the pandemic, I was asked to teach an entirely virtual organic chemistry course (class and lab) in the 2020 summer semester. This was the first entirely virtual organic course ...
As educators, we assume that students are learning what we teach. But students often do not learn as much as we expect, and high-stakes assessments reveal their knowledge gaps when it is too late to ...