Grading and Feedback

Study for the Exam

How Should I Study for the Exam?

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.

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learning assessment techniques

Three Learning Assessment Techniques to Gauge Student Learning

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

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group exams

Group Exams and Quizzes: Design Options to Consider

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.

  • Grades are measures of individual
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Students in a large lecture hall

But Does It Work in the Classroom?

There’s been a noticeable increase in the amount of pedagogical literature that references what’s been documented about learning in cognitive psychology. It seems to be part of the ongoing interest in making instructional practices more evidence-based. But there’s an issue that makes the application of

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Oral Exams

A New Approach to Oral Exams

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 student’s long-term memory so that he or she can draw

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college student studying

Ten Study Strategies for Students and Their Teachers

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 specific. Use any active learning strategy intermittently or even regularly,

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Tackling Testing Anxiety

Tackling Testing Anxiety

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.

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Feedback to Students

Figuring Out Feedback to Students

How do we get students to act on the feedback we provide? When papers are returned, they look at the grade first and then (but not always) briefly peruse the comments. Do they read them more carefully at home? When asked, they say they do,

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Grading and feedback

Grading Practices: More Subjective than Objective?

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 universities, two-year colleges, and everything in between. The findings are

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Breaking the Cramming Cycle and Improving Memory

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 they should. What’s at the root of this problem? Students

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