This article starts with the results of a question 170 students in cell biology courses answered during the first week of the semester: “What percent of the information you have learned in your university courses do you still remember 6 months after those courses are
Authors Kulasegaram and Rangachari propose moving beyond our understanding of formative assessments as “interim measures” that lead to the real, final assessments—the ones that generate the all-important grades. They suggest we stop calling them formative assessments and start thinking about them as assessments for learning.
Twenty years ago, many faculty didn’t know what rubrics were, but today they are well known and widely used, both in practice and research. And like many other instructional innovations, they have come to be used and defined differently. Dawson (2017) aspires to sort through
Tests cause most students considerable anxiety. That’s good, because it usually motivates them to study. However, when it’s time to take the exam, excessive anxiety can compromise how students perform. They miss questions that they knew the answer to, or so they tell us. We
They’re questions that grew out of theology professor Barbara Blodgett’s move to a new grading system. They’re questions that poke at the premises beneath grading and they’re relevant regardless of the grading system used. They’re not questions with easy answers but rather vexing queries with
It’s a choice Susan Taft gives her MBA students. The class can choose to take a written quiz at the beginning of every class session (they meet once a week) or they can participate in an oral activity she’s dubbed the hat trick. Here’s how
“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 when they object to a grade, they often do 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, but they occasionally ask a tutor or other learning professional.
A learning assessment technique (LAT) is a three-part integrated structure that helps teachers to first identify significant learning goals, then to implement effectively the kinds of learning activities that help achieve those goals, and finally—and perhaps most importantly—to analyze and report on the learning outcomes
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 the most common objections.
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