Category Archives: Best Practices

2013 GSI Symposium Breakout Session 2: Formative Assessment

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A Report from the Trenches

We’re continuing with our reports from the JHU Gateway Sciences Initiative (GSI) 2nd Annual Symposium on Excellence in Teaching and Learning in the Sciences. Next up is “Assessing Student Learning during a Course: Tools and Strategies for Formative Assessment” presented by Toni Ungaretti, Ph.D., School of Education and Mike Reese, M.Ed., Center for Educational Resources.

Please note that links to examples and explanations in the text below were added by CER staff and were not included in the breakout session presentation.

The objectives for this breakout session were to differentiate summative and formative assessment, review and demonstrate approaches to formative assessment, and describe how faculty use assessment techniques to engage in scholarly teaching.

Summarizing Dr. Ungaretti’s key points:

Assessment is a culture of continuous improvement that parallels the University’s focus on scholarship and research. It ensures learners’ performance, program effectiveness, and unit efficiency. It is an essential feature in the teaching and learning process. Learners place high value on marks or grades: “Assessment defines what [learners] regard as important.” [Brown, G., Bull, J., & Pendlebury, M. 1997. Assessing Student Learning in Higher Education. Routledge.]  Assessment ensures that what is important is learned.

Summative Assessment is often referred to as assessment of learning. This is regarded as high stakes assessment – typically a test, exam, presentation, or paper at the midterm and end of a course.

Formative Assessment focuses on learning instead of assigning grades. “Creating a climate that maximizes student accomplishment in any discipline focuses on student learning instead of assigning grades. This requires students to be involved as partners in the assessment of learning and to use assessment results to change their own learning tactics.” [Fluckiger, J., Tixier y Virgil, Y., Pasco, R., and Danielson, K. (2010). Formative Feedback: Involving Students as Partners in Assessment to Enhance Learning. College Teaching, 58, 136-140.]

Effective formative assessment involves feedback. That feedback has the greatest benefit when it addresses multiple aspects of learning. It includes feedback on the product (the completed task), feedback on progress (the extent to which the learner is improving over time), and feedback on the process (If the learner is involved, feedback can be given more frequently.)

Diagram showing the Three Ps of Formative Assessment

 From this point on in the session, the participants engaged in active learning exercises that demonstrated various examples of formative assessment including utilizing graphic organizers (Venn Diagrams, Mind Maps, KWL Charts, and Kaizen/T-Charts – practices that focus upon continuous improvement), classroom discussion with higher order questioning (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy),  minute papers, and admit/exit slips.

Classroom discussions can tell the instructor much about student mastery of basic concepts. The teacher can initiate the discussion by presenting students with an open-ended question.

A minute paper is a quick in-class writing exercise where students answer a question focused on material recently presented, such as: What was the most important thing that you learned? What important question remains? This allows the instructor to gauge the understanding of concepts just taught.

Admit/exit slips are collected at the beginning or end of a class. Students provide short answers to questions such as: What questions do I have? What did I learn today? What did I find interesting?

There are many ways in which faculty can determine learner mastery. These may include the use of journaling or learning/response logs to gauge growth over time, constructive quizzes, using modifications of games such as Jeopardy, or structures such as a guided action or Jigsaw. There are also ways to quickly check student understanding such as using thumbs-up–thumbs-down, or i>Clickers.

Assessment may also be achieved by using “learner-involved” formative assessment.  Some ways to achieve this are through the use of three-color group quizzes, mid-term student conferencing, assignment blogs, think-pair-share, and practice presentations.

When incorporated into classroom practice, the formative assessment process provides information needed to adjust teaching and learning while they are still happening. Finally, faculty should look on formative assessment as an opportunity. No matter which methods are used it is important that they allow students to be creative, have fun, learn, and make a difference.

Faculty may also use assessment methods as research. This allows them the opportunity to advance hypotheses-based teaching, gather data on instructional changes and student outcomes, and to prepare scholarly submissions to advance the knowledge on teaching in their discipline. Teaching as research is the deliberate, systematic, and reflective use of research methods to develop and implement teaching practices that advance the learning experiences and outcomes of students and teachers.

Cheryl Wagner, Program/Administrative Manager
Center for Educational Resources

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Macie Hall

 

2013 GSI Symposium Breakout Session 1: Practical Tips for Active Learning

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A Report from the Trenches

The next several posts will be in the form of reports from the JHU Gateway Sciences Initiative (GSI) 2nd Annual Symposium on Excellence in Teaching and Learning in the Sciences. The symposium featured five breakout sessions and many of us attending wished we could clone ourselves and attend more than one, as the topics were so interesting. So to those who couldn’t bilocate, and to those who couldn’t attend the symposium, these posts are for you.

First up is “Moving from Lecture-based Teaching to Active Learning Instructional Approaches: Some Practical Tips” facilitated by Robin Wright, PhD, Associate Dean and Professor of Biology, University of Minnesota.

Robin Wright practiced what she preaches in this breakout session, quickly moving the participants into an active learning activity.

Engaging in active learning discussion.To begin she told faculty to “…start where you are, you don’t need to start over. Start with your current lecture notes and identify the key learning outcomes. What can you do instead of telling your students?” (Remember that the one who does the work does the learning. When you tell your students, you are doing the work.)

She asked participants to think about their favorite lecture, or their worst one. She then discussed the principle of backward design – an instructor looks at what s/he wants students to know and/or be able to do at the end of the course.  Dr. Wright noted that the advantage of backward design is by starting with defining the desired end result, instructors can create appropriate assessments and activities. As well, students can be told what they can expect to learn. Setting clear expectations helps students achieve the goals set for them.

She then asked everyone to define a learning outcome and design an assessment to determine how well students reached the outcome, directing three questions to the participants:

  1. What do you want students to know or be able to do [think in terms of the lecture you’ve selected – what do you want the students to learn from that lecture]?
  2. How will you assess their learning?
  3. What activities will you plan to help them reach your specific goals?

Dr. Wright walked the participants through an example from her own class, defined the outcome, described activities that moved students from a lower level  to a higher level (Bloom’s Taxonomy) with activities, and described how assessed.

Then the participants were set to work on writing one higher level learning outcome and an appropriate assessment and discussing these with the people sitting near them. Everyone appeared to be very enthusiastic about this exercise. In sharing after the small group exchanges we heard the following comments:

It was difficult for many to get started.
It was a powerful tool for determining what the class should focus on.
Participants refined their learning outcomes and assessments in discussion with others.

Dr. Wright then talked about the “tools in her toolkit” that she uses as activities and gave examples of some of these:

  1. Figures from the textbook projected and used as a basis for questions for small group discussion.
  2. Trick questions (questions which may seem to have an obvious answer, but the “obvious answer” is not the correct one).
  3. Videos used to challenge thinking and promote discussion, often used as a way to introduce broad subjects (e.g., evolution) to her classes.
  4. Case studies used to get students to think critically and to begin to learn on their own, outside of the classroom.

She introduced each “tool” with a specific example, and had participants briefly discuss possible answers to questions she would ask her students. Again, the participants gained an understanding of how to incorporate active learning into the classroom through an active learning process.

View the video of Robin Wright’s 2013 GSI Symposium keynote address “Teach What Really Matters; Use What Really Works.” 

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Microsoft clip art

Flipping Your Class

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At the 2nd Annual Johns Hopkins University Symposium on Excellence in Teaching and Learning in the Sciences, we heard a lot about flipping the classroom.

From lecture hall to interactive learning - two images with arrow connecting.

The term, flipped classroom, might bring to mind an anti-gravity experiment, but it actually refers to a different way of thinking about teaching and learning. In a traditional pedagogical model, a faculty member is a “sage on the stage,” lecturing to students (who are frantically taking notes in an effort to capture all of the professor’s pearls of wisdom).  Assignments – readings, problem sets, projects, papers – are all done outside of class, often with little or no direct guidance from faculty.

In the flipped classroom (also called the inverted classroom), the process is turned around. Instead of doing problem-based homework outside of class and coming to class to hear the professor lecture, the student watches a version of the lecture content online, and comes to class to work on problems in an interactive, collaborative setting. The faculty member becomes a “guide on the side” or a coach, perhaps injecting a mini-lecture when needed to help students struggling with a common problem.  The focus shifts from teaching to learning.

This is not an “either/or” or an “instead of” situation. Students view the online content at their convenience, do the assigned readings, AND come to class.  They must come to class because that’s where the active learning will happen, where they are going to work on problems individually or in groups, and perhaps most importantly, where they will develop skills that will enable them to be life-long learners, not only in the discipline that you teach, but in any subject. Some professors choose to insert quick (graded) quizzes at the start of the flipped class as a further inducement to attendance.

Two high school teachers, Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, are credited with developing the model for the flipped classroom in 2007. Sams was awarded the 2009 Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching, and he and his colleague have written extensively about this model and its evolution. See the blog post The Flipped Class: Shedding Light on the Confusion, Critique, and Hype; an article available as a PDF for JHU affiliates, Before You Flip, Consider This; and their book, Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day.

One quote from the blog post describes the classroom scene and is particularly compelling:

As we roam around the class, we notice the students developing their own collaborative groups.  Students are helping each other learn instead of relying on the teacher as the sole disseminator of knowledge.

One of the greatest benefits of flipping is that overall interaction increases: teacher to student and student to student.  Since the role of the teacher has changed from presenter of content to learning coach, we spend our time talking to kids.  We are answering questions, working with small groups, and guiding the learning of each student individually.

When students are working on an assignment and we notice a group of students who are struggling with the same thing, we automatically organize the students into a tutorial group.  We often conduct mini-lectures with groups of students who are struggling with the same content. The beauty of these mini-lectures is we are delivering “just in time” instruction when the students are ready for learning.

Changing the focus in the classroom from the faculty teaching to the students actively learning may prove to be challenging to the instructor used to actively teaching. Terry Doyle, a professor and author of two books on learner centered teaching, tells us, “It’s the one who does the work who does the learning.” [Helping Students Learn in a Learner Center Environment: A Guide to Teaching in Higher Education, Stylus, 2008, p. 25].

Robert Talbert, who teaches mathematics at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education, has posted about his experiences with flipping his classroom on his blog, Casting Out Nines. His posts speak honestly about his experiences including receiving pushback from some students. One of his recent pieces, We Need to Produce Learners, Not Just Students, looks at the concept of producing life-long learners mentioned above.

On the practical side, there are DIY guides. Julie Schell, a post-doc working with Eric Mazur – the Harvard University physics professor who developed Peer Instruction, a research-based, interactive teaching method – has created a Quick Start Guide to Flipping your Classroom with Peer Instruction. Closer to home, JHU Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Michael Falk, has been flipping his classroom since 2010. In an article for the Innovative Instructor Pedagogy Forum entitled Lectures on Demand, he outlines the technology solutions he has used to produce the video content.

Faculty writing about the applied components of the flipped classroom agree that using shorter, topic-focused videos for the out of class content is more effective than video-taping their traditional 50 minute (or longer) lectures. As was discussed in our post on micro-lectures, students’ attention begins to wander after 10 minutes. Professor Falk notes in his article that creating the online content requires thought and up-front time, but pays off later, as this content can be reused in subsequent offerings of the course. Faculty can use video-recordings of themselves explaining key concepts or problems, borrow from Khan Academy or similar materials available on YouTube educational channels, offer animations or other didactic resources.

Faculty who have made the flip are enthusiastic about the benefits for their students. After the discussions at the GSI Symposium, we hope to see more flipping at JHU.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Microsoft clip art edited by Macie Hall

Quick Tips: Managing the End-of-Semester Crunch

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Stressed female with stacks of paper, clock in background.

CER staff member Cheryl Wagner came across a timely post on another educational blog and we wanted to share it with you. Professor Hacker, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, is one of our favorite blogs. It’s an advice column for faculty and future faculty that focuses on using technology to simplify the lives – professional and personal – of instructors in posts that give “tips about teaching, technology, and productivity.”

This post, entitled From the Archives: Getting Through the End of Term, has some great ideas for managing the end-of-semester crunch with tips on grading, handling stressful meetings, and taking care of yourself in the process.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Microsoft Clip Art

Discouraging Cheating in the Classroom

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Research has shown that colleges and universities with honor codes that are backed by an institutional culture of ethical behavior experience fewer incidents of student cheating than those with no codes or codes that are not reinforced with institutional expectations. (Donald L. McCabe, Linda Klebe Trevino & Kenneth D. Butterfield. 2001. Cheating in Academic Institutions: A Decade of Research. Ethics & Behavior. 11(3):219–232). Even in the absence of an honor code, these researchers found that creating a culture of ethical behavior, even at the level of the classroom, could have a significant positive impact on the likelihood of student cheating.

StudentsCheatingAs to implementing such a culture, the University of North Carolina’s Center for Faculty Excellence’s blog, CFE 100+ Tips for Teaching Large Classes, offers practical and concrete examples in Tip #27: Discourage Cheating by Providing Moral Reminders and Logistical Obstacles. They suggest having a brief discussion about cheating before a test, and asking students to write out and sign the honor code. Even if there is no specific honor code at the institution, faculty can ask students to write a statement on their exams saying that they will not give or receive assistance.This is most effective if done before, rather than at the end of the test.

The UNC blog post also offers examples for making it logistically impossible to cheat. These tips will be particularly useful for faculty teaching large classes and using multiple choice questions on exams.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image source: Microsoft Clip Art

Teaching Your Students to Avoid Plagiarism

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As the semester passes the midterm mark and papers and reports come due, we begin to get requests from faculty for ways to teach students how to avoid plagiarism. Most often students plagiarize unintentionally, because they don’t know how to cite sources properly, cut and paste from e-resources, and aren’t skilled in the arts of paraphrase and summary.

Recently a colleague, Lynne Stuart, the MSEL Librarian for Economics, Government, Law, Policy Studies, pointed me to a great web site on plagiarism at Arizona University that addresses this, and is called, appropriately, Accidental Plagiarism. There are two tutorials that provide background information on what plagiarism is and provide examples of how to properly summarize, paraphrase, and quote sources. The first has a sidebar menu for navigating; the second is an interactive tutorial that resembles a series of slides. In both cases students can practice skills and test themselves.

Sign with hand and text reading prevent plagiarism.A Google search “plagiarism exercises college” yielded many, many more examples. Here’s an editor’s pick of some of the best.

Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education offers the Principles of Paraphrasing, How to Avoid Inadvertent Plagiarism in Three Easy Modules, which is pretty slick and comprehensive. The format is PowerPoint with audio, worksheets with answer keys and handouts. Exercises are included.

Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences recognizing and avoiding plagiarism site is divided into three sections: principles, logistics (how to recognize and check for plagiarism), and exercises. It provides a good overview, plus the exercises (quizzes), which you can take as a guest. The quizzes cover a variety of disciplinary examples.

Indiana University School of Education Understanding Plagiarism site provides an overview, links to real plagiarism cases, plagiarism examples and explanations, self-practice, and a test that is available for non-IU visitors.

The University of Southern Mississippi, University Libraries’ Plagiarism Tutorial has a tutorial adapted from  tutorial was adapted from Robert A. Harris’s The Plagiarism Handbook : Strategies for Preventing, Detecting, and Dealing with Plagiarism (Los Angeles, CA : Pyrczak Publishing, 2001), combined with a true-false pre-test and two interactive quizzes.

WISC-Online [Wisc-Online is a digital library of Web-based learning resources called “learning objects.”] There is a short learning object on plagiarism that provides a basic overview then presents six examples for self-testing.

Purdue University’s OWL [online Writing Lab] is a great general resource for scholarly writing. It includes sections on using research you’ve conducted in your writing: Quoting, Paraphrasing and Summarizing, Paraphrasing, a Paraphrasing Sample Essay, Paraphrase Exercises, and Avoiding Plagiarism. There are some plagiarism exercises; however these are less useful than those found on other sites, as there are no answers or comments provided. These are meant for class discussion.

The Center for Educational Resources also supports Turnitin, a plagiarism prevention application. Find out more about using Turnitin at JHU on the CER website.

And don’t forget the Sheridan Libraries Research Help where you can find information on a variety of topics including proper citation and evaluating materials found on the Internet.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Microsoft Clip Art edited by Macie Hall

Tips for Regulating the Use of Mobile Devices in the Classroom

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If what we are hearing in the CER is any indication, student use of laptops (and increasingly, tablets and smartphones) in the classroom for non-academic purposes has become a widespread problem at Homewood. Faculty we have talked to have done everything from banning all computer use in their classes (potentially a problem for students with disabilities) to having TAs roam the lecture hall to discourage inappropriate web surfing. Are there better solutions?

no cell phones icon

One option is to have a clear statement of policy about mobile device use in your course syllabus. This combined with a discussion of “digital etiquette” during the first class meeting can be an effective solution. Even better, consider creating a contract with your students at the beginning of the semester. The contract is a two-way street. By engaging your students in the process, you increase the likelihood of their compliance. The scope of your contract may go beyond the use of mobile devices and should include your obligations as a professor as well as your expectations of student behavior. For a more in detailed discussion of this method see the CER’s Innovative Instructor article Creating a Convenant with Your Students by JHU Professor P. M. Forni. An alternative option might be to encourage students to use their mobile devices to record class information – see  a posting by Stanford faculty member Rick Reis from his Tomorrow’s Professor mailing list.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image source: Microsoft Clip Art

Teaching Tips: Classroom Assessment

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Increasing emphasis is being placed on assessment, and many faculty are looking for evaluation practices that extend beyond giving a mid-term and final exam. In particular the concept of non-graded classroom assessment is gaining traction. In their book Classroom Assessment Techniques, Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross (Jossey-Bass, 1993) stress the importance of student evaluation that is “learner-centered, teacher-directed, mutually beneficial, formative, context-specific, ongoing, and firmly rooted in good practice.”

Students in a classroom.

While the authors describe in detail numerous techniques for ascertaining in a timely manner whether or not students are learning what is being taught, here are several quick and easy to implement methods:

 

The Minute Paper: At an appropriate break, ask students to answer on paper a specific question pertaining to what has just been taught. After a minute or two, collect the papers for review after class, or, to promote class interaction, ask students to pair off and discuss their responses. After a few minutes, call on a few students to report their answers and results of discussion. If papers are turned in, there is value to both the anonymous and the signed approach. Grading, however, is not the point; this is a way to gather information about the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

In Class Survey: Think of this as a short, non-graded pop quiz. Pass out a prepared set of questions, or have students provide answers on their own paper to questions on a PowerPoint/Keynote slide. Focus on a few key concepts. Again, the idea is to assess whether students understand what is being taught.

Exit Ticket: Select one of the following items and near the end of class ask your students to write on a sheet of paper 1) a question they have that didn’t get answered, 2) a concept or problem that they didn’t understand, 3) a bullet list of the major points covered in class, or 4) a specific question to access their learning. Students must hand in the paper to exit class. Allow anonymous response so that students will answer honestly. If you do this regularly, you may want to put the exit ticket question on your final PowerPoint/Keynote slide.

Tools that can help with assessment

Classroom polling devices (a.k.a. clickers) offer an excellent means of obtaining evidence of student learning. See http://www.cer.jhu.edu/clickers.html for information about the in-class voting system used at JHU. Faculty who are interested in learning more should contact Brian Cole in the CER.

Faculty at the JHU School of Nursing have been piloting an online application called Course Canary to obtain student assessment data. Formative course evaluation surveys allow faculty to collect student feedback quickly and anonymously. A free account is available (offering two online surveys and two exit ticket surveys) at: https://coursecanary.com/.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image source: Microsoft Clip Art