CTLT and Friends

This paper reviews the corpus of research on feedback, with a particular focus on formative feedback—defined as information communicated to the learner that is intended to modify the learner’s thinking or behavior for the purpose of improving learning. According to researchers in the area, formative feedback should be multidimensional, nonevaluative, supportive, timely, specific, credible, infrequent, and genuine (e.g., Brophy, 1981; Schwartz & White, 2000). Formative feedback is usually presented as information to a learner in response to some action on the learner’s part. It comes in a variety of types (e.g., verification of response accuracy, explanation of the correct answer, hints, worked examples) and can be administered at various times during the learning process (e.g., immediately following an answer, after some period of time has elapsed). Finally, there are a number of variables that have been shown to interact with formative feedback’s success at promoting learning (e.g., individual characteristics of the learner and aspects of the task). All of these issues will be discussed in this paper. This review concludes with a set of guidelines for generating formative feedback.

First, the faculty has designed a unified curriculum.

Second, the faculty members are organized under a single academic unit, no matter their disciplinary backgrounds.

Third, the program plans to collect an enormous amount of data about student performance and to analyze those data in new ways.

What we want is for assessment to become a public, shared responsibility, so there should be departmental leadership.

If assessment is going to be required by accrediting bodies and top administrators, then we need administrative support and oversight of assessment on campus, rather than once again offloading more work onto faculty members squeezed by teaching & research inflation.

Outcomes assessment does not have to be in the form of standardized tests, nor does including assessment in faculty review have to translate into percentages achieving a particular score on such a test. What it does mean is that when the annual review comes along, one should be prepared to answer the question, "How do you know that what you're doing results in student learning?" We've all had the experience of realizing at times that students took in something very different from what we intended (if we were paying attention at all). So it's reasonable to be asked about how you do look at that question and how you decide when your current practice is successful or when it needs to be modified. That's simply being a reflective practitioner in the classroom which is the bare minimum students should expect from us. And that's all assessment is - answering that question, reflecting on what you find, and taking next steps to keep doing what works well and find better solutions for the things that aren't working well.

Colleges and universities have plenty of tools, but they must learn to use them more effectively. That is how George D. Kuh describes the state of assessing what college students learn.

But in fact the number of talented college graduates in the sciences is "quite in excess of the demand," said Harold Salzman, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University. In a new paper, he and a colleague argue that the real problem is at the employment end of the pipeline.

It may not be so easy to convince companies, however, that they're the main problem. Susan L. Traiman, director of public policy at Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives of the largest American companies, said the analysis by Mr. Salzman and Mr. Lowell has some potential shortcomings that may explain why its findings contradict the experience of many engineering companies.

The fundamental suggestion by Mr. Salzman and Mr. Lowell—that science and engineering companies perhaps should be doing more to grab science and engineering students—may even have trouble winning support on university campuses, where engineering deans increasingly take pride in graduating students with a diverse set of talents, who are able to take on a range of professional challenges, rather than simply follow traditional engineering paths.

Today, Shavelson, Klein & Benjamin published an online article on Inside Higher Ed entitled, "The Limitations of Portfolios." The comments to that article are even more illuminating, and highlight the debate about electronic portfolios vs. accountability systems... assessment vs. evaluation. These arguments highlight what I think is a clash in philosophies of learning and assessment, between traditional, behaviorist models and more progressive, cognitive/constructivist models. How do we build assessment strategies that bridge these two approaches? Or is the divide too wide? Do these different perspectives support the need for multiple measures and triangulation?

Fortify Your Institutional H1N1 Plan with Lecture Capture: Mediasite at Washington State University Tuesday, November 10, 200911:00 – 11:45 a.m. Central Washington State University’s main campus is currently experiencing what the New York Times called perhaps the largest college outbreak of the H1N1 flu virus. More than 2,000 students report symptoms of swine flu, which has led the entire Washington State system to take measures to avoid the spread of the disease between and beyond campuses. And for WSU Spokane, which specializes in health science programs, lecture capture has become central to their pandemic and academic continuity planning. The campus began using the Mediasite webcasting platform just a year ago when its new nursing building came online. Since that time, capturing courses – both on-campus and from faculty home offices – is a key element to span the time, distance and space constraints that are dramatic factors when flu preparedness is introduced on today’s scale. Saleh Elgiadi, Director of IT Services for WSU Spokane, has agreed to share his fundamental principles and practices included in the campus’ comprehensive H1N1 and disaster recovery plans

This is certainly not a trivial challenge-particularly for schools. The workplace, where our work has been concentrated, is perhaps the easiest place to design because, despite the inevitable contradictions and conflict, it is rich with inherently authentic practice-with a social periphery that, as Orr's (1990) or Shaiken's (1990) work shows, can even supersede attempts to impoverish understanding. Consequently, people often learn, complex work skills despite didactic practices that are deliberately designed to deskill. Workplace designers (and managers) should be developing technology to honor that learning ability, not to circumvent it.

International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which drew 650 people. The scholars who gathered here were cautiously hopeful about colleges' commitment to the study of student learning, even as the Carnegie Foundation winds down its own project. (Mr. Shulman stepped down as president last year, and the foundation's scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning program formally came to an end last week.) "It's still a fragile thing," said Pat Hutchings, the Carnegie Foundation's vice president, in an interview here. "But I think there's a huge amount of momentum." She cited recent growth in faculty teaching centers,

Mary Taylor Huber, director of the foundation's Integrative Learning Project, said that pressure from accrediting organizations, policy makers, and the public has encouraged colleges to pour new resources into this work.

The scholars here believe that it is much more useful to try to measure and improve student learning at the level of individual courses. Institutionwide tests like the Collegiate Learning Assessment have limited utility at best, they said.

October 26, 2009, 02:53 PM ET Most Colleges Try to Assess Student Learning, Survey Finds A large majority of American colleges make at least some formal effort to assess their students' learning, but most have few or no staff members dedicated to doing so. Those are among the findings of a survey report released Monday by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, a year-old project based at Indiana University and the University of Illinois. Of more than 1,500 provosts' offices that responded to the survey, nearly two-thirds said their institutions had two or fewer employees assigned to student assessment. Among large research universities, almost 80 percent cited a lack of faculty engagement as the most serious barrier to student-assessment projects.