Assessing Student Learning
Exams and grades are not the only ways that faculty can assess student learning and their own teaching. Myriad classroom and learning assessment approaches and methods have been developed to help faculty improve student learning.
Mid-semester evaluations are a powerful formative assessment tool for faculty and students. Paul Furth's "Simple But Scary Mid-Semester Evaluation Instrument" is an excellent article which outlinines the use of such evaluations, presents an instrument that can be adapted for any course, and outlines content analysis approaches to use the data collected.
If you would like to administer a mid-semester survey through Blackboard, visit this site for sample questions and downloadable survey module.
Assessing Your Classroom Teaching explains that classroom assessment is both a teaching approach and a set of techniques. The more you know about what and how students are learning, the better you can plan learning activities to structure your teaching. The techniques are mostly simple, non-graded, anonymous, in-class activities that give both you and your students useful feedback on the teaching-learning process.
Classroom Assessment Techniques describes the purposes for and characteristics of effective classroom assessment and offers faculty methods to obtain useful feedback on what, how much, and how well their students are learning.
Designing "Scoring Rubrics" For Your Classroom by Craig A. Mertler at Bowling Green State University helps faculty design rubrics that are used when evaluating student performances or products resulting from a performance task.
FLAG -- The Field-tested Learning Assessment Guide offers classroom assessments that have been field tested and are described in detail by university faculty who have incorporated them into their courses. These assessments were created specifically for science and technology courses, but are broadly applicable.
For more information on this or any teaching related topic, please contact the Pew Faculty Teaching and Learning Center at 331-3499 or ftlc@gvsu.edu.
Page last modified August 1, 2012
