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
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
Face-to-face instructors who give in-class exams have a challenge when moving their courses online: How to ensure that students do not cheat on the exams by collaborating? Different methods have been developed to address the problem. For instance, institutions can send each student a 360-degree
Like many faculty members, I started teaching as a subject matter expert without a formal background in education. My examination questions were either based on questions I recall from my personal experience as an undergraduate or questions provided to me by more senior faculty. Since
As many classes and exams migrate online, many professors are increasingly concerned about an uptick in cheating. Preliminary numbers indicate those concerns are valid. In August 2020, Derek Newton in The Hechinger Report disclosed that at North Carolina State University, for example, 200 students in
Tests provide one measure of our students’ learning according to the standards of the instructor and the field. But tests also affect our students socially, emotionally, and financially and influence their science-minded identities for years to come. We owe it to students to create fair
Every year I teach a compulsory first-year course on the basics of psychology, which includes an introduction to developmental psychology. Lately I have also been teaching a follow-up elective course on child development. When I discovered that many of the students in the elective had
A few years ago, a student came to see me because she was having trouble passing the Praxis exam, which was delaying her student teaching and her ultimate career goal. She had taken the exam three times and had met with another professor to get
In a 1992 article in College Teaching, authors Mealy and Host identify three types of students who report high levels of anxiety during exams; those who lack adequate study skills, those who can study but are easily distracted during an exam, and students who mistakenly
Self-assessment is important for effective learning. Students who are skilled at examining their own thought processes can use the resulting information to learn and perform well in testing situations. In addition, those who effectively use feedback from exams can raise their level of learning. I
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