Group items tagged

"Learning to write means making choices in the interests of fulfilling all dimensions of a rhetorical situation, and one of those choices should be length." I remember multiple teachers telling me that a paper should be "long enough", but none who gave me the tools Warner describes to figure out what that means.

A good discussion of how on professor uses multiple choice quizzing to measure comprehension of the major concepts in the course, instead of just testing for the ability to recall facts.

The author uses multiple-choice exams to make sure that students have at least read the material, and as a counterweight to any bias she might have about the content. What is your "theory of exams"?

An interesting design suggestion for multiple-choice tests - after the student gives an answer, ask them to identify the core principle which makes it right.

Using the AP History exams as an example, Rick Warner from Wabash College shows how carefully-designed multiple choice questions can assess cognitive skills beyond "factoid recall."

This study examines the Internet sources higher education students use in their written work and the implications of their choices. It is based on an analysis of over 112 million content matches from more than 28 million student papers submitted to Turnitin between July 2011 and June 2012. Included are recommendations for educators on how to improve student research and citation skills.

What are the benefits of having students compile a portfolio of their work, and what are the critical choices you make as a teacher in creating a portfolio requirement? This list of 11 key issues is a good place to start.

This paper serves as a guide to starting a portfolio project. It focuses on the "learning portfolio" as a tool which encourages the student to reflect on their own learning, with special attention to their own progress. I was particularly taken with the point that a portfolio can be an appropriate tool at any level of the curriculum - an individual course or set of courses, the program or department level, or the whole institution - though of course, that choice will change the purpose of the portfolio, and therefore its design.

Michael Feldstein says that "there is a moral imperative to protect students' privacy" - but then rightly questions whether we're "protecting" privacy by taking choices away from students.

"Students select or reject majors based in large part on the quality of the first college instructor they have in the discipline, new research finds."

Now is the right time to engage students in discussion about what is and isn't cheating. Stress and bad scheduling can lead some students to make wrong choices at the end of the semester; a reminder about some of these "grey area" issues might save a lot of heartache later.

Podcast discussion of a new book which addresses some of the differences between work at research institutions and teaching-focused institutions. The synopsis highlights new faculty, but about halfway into the podcast they also start discussing mid-career (and even late-career) choices too.

Any one of these principles could be a guiding statement for an interesting course. Do you actually have to do all 10 of them? I'd argue not, although many do go hand in hand.

Have you considered running a blog, and how that blog might be part of your professional presence? This set of articles (blog posts, really) look at the choices professors make when they choose to write an academic blog.

How can you write test questions which both assess learning and promote it?

A fair number of faculty have told me that their remote teaching experience showed the benefits of a more flexible syllabus. Here's one example of how to give students options for a final paper/project, but the most important part may be the discussion of how Professor Katopodis generates these options with her students.