Seminar Materials
Each of the following links leads to a PDF file. These are the resources that were provided during the seminar. These materials provide useful insight into some of the major concerns involved in grading. · Seminar Handout o This PDF file contains all of the other documents in this tutorial. It is split into a main section and a series of appendices. · Articulating Goals for Learning and Planning Assignments o Some grading methods do not measure student success appropriately or accurately. In this document, Barbara Walvoord argues for the importance of framing assessment tools around your learning goals. Learning goals should be described with specific verbs. These goals should make clear what abilities and knowledge students will take away from the course. Your testing and assignments should be designed to assess the degree to which your learning goals have been met. These goals should be clearly communicated to your students, and you should periodically them to assess their own learning. The combination of planning and communication will hopefully lead students to be more invested in the course and improve your own teaching. · Helping Students Put Full Effort Into the Work You Grade o Walvoord acknowledges that students in your courses will often be motivated by different goals. Some will be focuses primarily on getting a grade, and some will be more interested in thoroughly learning from the course. She suggests that you should try to focus your grading on the intersection between these two types of goals. Instead of designing a course in which a student can receive an A without successfully learning the content and methods presented, there should be a direct correlation between mastery of the course and high grades. o For example, if you integrate pass/fail assignments into the course, make sure that, in order to pass, students must do more than regurgitate content. These assignments should allow for a demonstration of critical thinking. As a result, these smaller assignments should become valuable additions to the learning process. · The Ideal System o The “Ideal System for Information-Gathering and Improvement of Student Learning” provides a flow chart that describes how various factors should affect each other. It makes clear that there is much more to assessing student learning than the giving of individual grades, and provides a model of how instructors, administrators, and institutions should view the learning and assessment process. By looking at assessment beyond the classroom and beyond the institution itself, Walvoord’s ideal system extends the assessment process beyond the academia and argues for active engagement with the community in which an institution is located. o The ideal system is something to be strived for under the awareness that it cannot be perfectly implemented. While there are “manageable factors that affect learning,” there are factors that are completely beyond the control or influence of faculty or the institution that play a role in student’s lives and their academic careers. The goal, then, is to couple a sense of systemic idealism with consideration for the complex and messy realities of life. · Sample Grading Sheets o These grading sheets provide examples of imperfect but interesting criteria used to grade assignments in actual classrooms. These examples range across multiple disciplines and numerous assignment types. · Ten Research-Based Teaching Strategies o These teaching strategies are to help you structure your course so that student learning and assessment are as efficient and effective as possible. The strategies emphasize the importance of clear communication with and among students, student analysis of their own learning, flexibility, and awareness that students learn in different ways. · Using Time and Space for Learning o This document posits that there are three aspects of the learning process: first exposure, process, and response. It provides case histories that argue against using class time as the place for first exposure, and suggests providing both response and facilitating the processing of information while student are in the classroom. This will encourage students to do work beforehand and come to class prepared, and it also forces faculty to deviate from traditional content delivery methods. The case studies all involve low-technology solutions to problems, but Walvoord asks the question of how (or if) other technologies could provide different means of solving the problems. · Student Self-Assessment o A self-check can be a valuable method of communicating your learning goals and criteria for grading to students. It allows you to set clear standards for their work, and it promotes a sense of accountability in the course. · Student Survey on Teaching Methods o Surveying students about the teaching methods used in a course can provide enormously valuable feedback for faculty and institutions. It can, if framed correctly, point towards areas of strength and weakness in the course, suggest areas that require refinement or removal, and provide an overall sense of how students reacted to how a course was taught. Administering such a survey can help you to truly reach your course objectives. · Sample Departmental Assessment Methods o These sample assessment methods demonstrate the importance and benefits of focused collaborative assessment. By stating the overall goals of the department’s courses and evaluating how major assignments relate to each goal, the department is able to determine how it needs to improve and change. This method of assessment demonstrates the basic connection between course assignments and departmental goals, suggesting that it is imperative to be aware of the goals of the department (and, indeed, the institution itself) when designing a course. Previous: Overview Next: Quiz
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