How can you infuse your classes with lively, productive experiences that nurture awake and alert minds in your students? What sort of instructional practices prime students to be cognitively active “learners on the go”?
It’s your turn to take one. Find the answer key at the bottom (no peeking).
We’re ready to share responses to our call for insights, experiences, and opinions on quizzes. You can expect to see them over the course of the next several weeks. I’ll start here with an overview of the issues to consider if you want to start
“Response shows a complete lack of understanding.”
“Piece had no style or voice.”
“Position is incoherent.”
“Thesis is utterly incompetent.”
“Weak.”
“Ineffective.”
“Unsatisfactory.”
This is some of the discouraging feedback that we found in an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional survey of
Multiple-choice questions get a bad rap, and it is easy to see why. Most do not assess higher-order thinking—you either know the answer or you don’t. And if you do know the correct choice, it does not reveal depth of knowledge. So how can we
The digital revolution has given faculty far more tools for assessment than the traditional paper or worksheet. Now students can better exercise their creativity in presenting their learning through a combination of text, images, videos, and other media in a portfolio-like format. Book Creator, a
There is an unfortunate tendency among higher education publications to measure the quality of online education by surveying faculty on whether they think online education is as good as face-to-face learning. But do these surveys ask whether the faculty answering have actually taught an online
Given class sizes, teaching loads, and a host of other academic responsibilities, many teachers feel as though multiple-choice tests are the only viable option. Their widespread use justifies a regular review of those features that make these tests an effective way to assess learning and
If there’s a perfect grading system, it has yet to be discovered. This post is about point systems—not because they’re the best or the worst but because they’re widely used. It is precisely because they are so prevalent that we need to think about how
Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are valuable tools for helping faculty find out what students are learning and how well they’re learning it. Since the 1988 release of Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers by Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross, college teachers have been
