Recently in Assessment Category

There is a lot of attention these days on using ePortfolios for students to post their work, track their progress, and even implement as part of an assessment strategy. I know at least a few of you are interested in such a concept, and the education department has all their students doing some type of portfolio, so what I'd like to know is how many of you would like to engage in a discussion on how to implement eportfolios: what they are, what they could look like, how they might work, what tools you would use to create and maintain them, how they relate to students' courses, degree programs, and/or life at the college overall. I think this is a highly relevant topic that we should pursue, so send me a line to share your thoughts.

Card sorts are an easy and effective way to peer into students' brains to see how they perceive your course material. Each person assimilates and organizes new information differently, and typical exams do not reveal how the learner "sees" things. There are several excellent techniques for eliciting mental models, but the card sort is easy to develop, administer, and analyze. Here is a PDF of the presentation from the CETL Teaching Matters discussion, and here is the website developed by B. Hill on mental model analysis in general. Call me with questions and if you would like to give it a whirl. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised at the results.

How do we really know what students are getting from our courses? Do they truly understand the material, or are they merely memorizing content? Elicitation of students' mental models is a powerful approach that goes beyond traditional assessment methods. What's a mental model? Tune into this website to find out. The site will also describe an easy technique for doing a quick assessment of how your students are organizing course material in their minds.

You know, we spend so much time discussing great things to try in our classes we often don't think to mention the things you really should not do. Here are a few examples that occur more than you think--usually because instructors simply don't realize what they're doing:

It's near the end of the semester and your students just don't seem to get it. Or perhaps you thought they were getting it, but the final exams and projects were not what you expected. You can head this off earlier through quick assessment techniques that provide helpful feedback from your students as to what they're not getting. There are a variety of ways to do this, a couple being the minute paper and an informal mid-course evaluation. The minute paper

If you read any of my documents or keep up with recent literature in education, you'll see the word authentic quite a bit. Authentic learning is not merely a buzzword--it's an approach to designing learning environments that helps students connect to what you want them to get from your course or program. Authentic does not mean practical, or vocational, or anything like that. Authentic means that the course goals, content, activities, and assessments reflect what real experts would actually do in that field. It means that you design experiences that are what happens in the real world. Don't make them

No, I don't mean failing classes. I'm talking about providing a safe environment in your class where students can try things, experiment, explore, without fear of penalty (such as a grade). Did you write an elegant essay the first time you picked up a pen? Was your first research experiment an unqualified success? As brilliant as you undoubtedly are, I doubt it. It takes