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There is considerable evidence showing that assessment drives student learning. More than anything else, our assessment tools tell students what we consider to be important. They will learn what we guide them to learn through our assessments.

Assessment is more than grades To many, the word "assessment" simply means the process by which we assign students grades. Assessment is much more than this, however. Assessment is a mechanism for providing instructors with data for improving their teaching methods and for guiding and motivating students to be actively involved in their own learning. As such, assessment provides important feedback to both instructors and students. Assessment is Feedback for Both Instructors and Students Assessment gives us essential information about what our students are learning and about the extent to which we are meeting our teaching goals. But the true power of assessment comes in also using it to give feedback to our students. Improving the quality of learning in our courses involves not just determining to what extent students have mastered course content at the end of the course; improving the quality of learning also involves determining to what extent students are mastering content throughout the course.

Assessment Drives Student Learning The types of assessment usually performed in first-year science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) courses--giving students tests--merely inform students about their grade, or ranking, after they have received instruction. In addition, these common testing techniques--which typically test for fact-based knowledge and algorithmic problem solving--tell our students that this is the type of knowledge we think is most important. That is, we appear to value the understanding of concepts at a relatively low level. Given that this is the type of assessment our students most frequently encounter, and that it will eventually lead to their final course grades, students learn to study the content in our courses in an expeditious way that allows them to succeed in passing many first-year STEM courses without necessarily developing deep understanding of concepts. It is our assessment that drives students learning.

Making appropriate right/wrong judgments is important in interpersonal communications to prevent cyber-bullying problems between children

The rubric does allow for that, but there is a strong sense that some of these dialogic purposes are not as highly valued as others, but I value them all as essential components to class community.

conflict that occurs between jobs and classes. This is followed by health or family problems, then financial reasons, and finally by students who couldn't keep up with course work.

the first students to drop courses were the ones who didn't keep up with assignments.

The authors (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991; Collins, Brown, & Newman,1989) as well as other researchers (Herrington & Oliver, 2000) have refined this model to the belief that useable knowledge is best gained in learning environments featuring the following characteristics:   Authentic context that allows for the natural complexity of the real world Authentic activities Access to expert performances and the modeling of processes Multiple roles and perspectives Collaboration to support the cooperative construction of knowledge Coaching and scaffolding which provides the skills, strategies and links that the students are initially unable to provide to complete the task Reflection to enable abstractions to be formed Articulation to enable tacit knowledge to be made explicit

The goal of learning, therefore, is to engage learners in legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991). Through community, learners interpret, reflect, and form meaning. Community provides the setting for the social interaction needed to engage in dialogue with others to see various and diverse perspectives on any issue. Community is the joining of practice with analysis and reflection to share the tacit understandings and to create shared knowledge from the experiences among participants in a learning opportunity (Wenger 1998).

The goal of cognitive apprenticeship is to address the problem of inert knowledge and to make the thinking processes of a learning activity visible to both the students and the teacher.  T

The Internet is an amazing tool that provides both opportunities and risks. It is a source of endless information, but must be used with good judgment. When you log on to the campus network (or any network), what you do online could have impact not only on your one computer but other students and the network as well. By combining up-to-date security tools with good judgment, you and your college community are much less likely to encounter a security violation, loss of data, or system problems.

Dyslexia does not resolve over time.  Longitudinal studies indicate that dyslexia is a persistent, chronic condition; it does not represent a transient "developmental lag.”    The  image on the left shows the  trajectory of reading skills over time in good and poor readers. The vertical axis on the left is the reading achievement score

Dyslexia reflects a very specific difficulty with reading and has nothing to do with intelligence. In fact, understanding ideas and concepts are often at a very high level in dyslexia as are other higher-level reasoning skills. Dyslexia is a localized problem, one involving the sounds, and not the meaning, of spoken language. Consideration of the differences between spoken and written language provides a helpful understanding of why some bright children struggle to read.

In dyslexic readers, converging evidence from many laboratories around the world has demonstrated “a neural signature for dyslexia,” that is, a disruption of the two neural systems in the back of the brain observed during reading (shown in the image below).

Wikipedia and other social networking sites provide a space or platform upon which all kinds of activities can flourish, with the idea of a platform transcending any particular technology or application and referring to either virtual or physical worlds. Collaboration among many users upon such a platform often produces unplanned and emergent

results—results frequently unattainable in a command-and-control management setting

the logic of commons-based peer production, and the logic of platform management transform the idea of the university and the very activities—teaching and learning, research, and publishing—that lie at the heart of this enterprise

Jigsaw Method

assign specific group roles to each student which they carry out in an effort to solve a lengthy, multi-step problem that requires creative thinking, and which may be solvable by various methods, such as algebraic, geometric, or even the results of experimental

how you will grade your students

Automate parts of the course whenever possible.

Create a “What’s New” section to let your students focus on new assignments or learning materials without having to review the entire course. This also minimizes the amount of e-mail questions you will receive regarding assignments

Communicate with students early in the semester about how to best use the course

performance

A few students indicated it was hard to have discussions when they did not know with whom they were discussing. One student said, “It was weird because I was having this online in-depth discussion with someone I had never seen before, and it felt a little creepy.”

In general, the more contact between students and faculty both inside and outside the classroom, the greater the student development and satisfaction

"When using active learning students are engaged in more activities than just listening. They are involved in dialog, debate, writing, and problem solving, as well as higher-order thinking, e.g., analysis, synthesis, evaluation."