Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons^™

Teac 413m: Teaching Multilingual Learners In Content Areas – A Peer Review Of Teaching Benchmark Portfolio, Lydiah Kananu Kiramba

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

The purpose of this benchmark portfolio was to trace the process of designing, teaching and assessing TEAC 413M: Teaching Multilingual Learners in Content Areas, a required course for the B.Ed secondary education major. My objectives for this portfolio are to: a) document the impacts of different instructional strategies employed in TEAC 413M, and to b) reflect on the course success and shortcomings and develop pathways for the future course design and development. A secondary goal was to examine translation of course content into students’ own teaching and planning for their students through a variety of activities and assessments throughout the …

Walking The Talk: Embedding Standards-Based Grading In An Educational Leadership Course, Matt Townsley

Journal of Research Initiatives

The purpose of this paper is to provide a model for educational leadership faculty who aspire to walk the talk of effective feedback by embedding standards-based grading (SBG) in their courses. Rather than focusing on learning, points are the currency of K-12 classrooms across the country. Over 100 years of grading research suggests typical grading practices are subjective at best. Some schools are responding by implementing SBG, yet few articles describe how higher education embeds this philosophy in educator preparation coursework. In this essay, the author documents how to design assessments, align rubrics, and provide feedback to aspiring school leaders …

Broaching Threshold Concepts: The Trouble With “Skills” Language In Defining Student Learning Goals, Angela J. Zito

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This essay argues that description of student learning goals as various “skills” presents a conceptual threshold lying between and connecting routinely dichotomized characterizations of student learning—most notably, “concrete” versus “abstract.” Qualitative analysis of instructor interviews shows that “skills” language tends to conceal abstract (that is, affective) learning goals behind more concrete (that is, cognitive) ones. Ultimately, this essay proposes that cognitive and affective student learning goals might be more clearly articulated using threshold concepts within and across disciplines, and that the recognition of “skills” as both affective and cognitive is itself a threshold concept in educational development.

The Fearless Teaching Framework: A Model To Synthesize Foundational Education Research For University Instructors, Alice E. Donlan, Sandra M. Loughlin, Virginia L. Byrne

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

There is often a disconnect between the unit of analysis in rigorous education research, and the types of recommendations that instructors find the most useful to improve their teaching. Research often focuses on narrow slices of the student experience, and university instructors often require broad recommendations. We present the Fearless Teaching Framework to address this gap between research and practice. In this framework, we define four pieces of effective teaching: classroom climate, course content, teaching practices, and assessment strategies. We argue that these are appropriate areas of focus for instructor growth, based on their relations to student engagement.

Listening To Our Graduate Students' Feedback: Graduate Student Exit And Alumni Surveys, Alison W. Hong-Novotney

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Student and alumni surveys have become some of the most widely-used methods of assessment of student learning in higher education. While the majority of literature on student surveys and assessment focuses on undergraduate students, this study looks specifically at why graduate student exit and alumni surveys can be valuable tools within a comprehensive assessment plan. Listening to the feedback of current and former graduate students, and then acting upon that feedback, is crucial for the engagement and success of this unique population of students who bring their particular strengths and needs to their educational experiences. This study examined how master’s …

Vmed 646: Animal Physiology Ii—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Renee M. Mcfee

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This Peer Review of Teaching Project portfolio focuses on the Animal Physiology II course which is required for first year veterinary medicine students. Weekly quizzes assess baseline knowledge and had been administered individually and in groups. I hypothesized the discontinuation of group quizzes would increase student effort when preparing for quizzes. Unit exams involve scenario-based questions and require students to apply information. I hypothesized the implementation of group exams would help under-performing students improve their ability to apply information they had learned. Exams were still taken individually prior to being taken in groups to encourage adequate preparation. Student impacts were …

Educational Development Efforts Aligned With The Assessment Cycle, Phyllis Blumberg

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Using an assessment cycle as an organizing framework, this article illustrates how educational development and assessment mutually complement each other. It describes an assessment study conducted to determine if two colleges at a small university met their strategic goals to increase the adoption of learning-centered teaching. This study served the parallel function of assessing the impact of sustained educational development efforts by the Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) to promote learning-centered teaching. The majority of interviewed faculty reported using learning-centered approaches. The data collection method itself also served as a teachable moment for faculty who do not attend CTL …

The Aspirational Curriculum Map: A Diagnostic Model For Action-Oriented Program Review, Eric Metzler, George Rehrey, Lisa Kurz, Joan Middendorf

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

When the process of curriculum mapping begins with the faculty’s articulations of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students should master upon graduation, a curriculum map results that enables faculty to review the curriculum for effectiveness, see the workings of the whole curriculum at a glance, plan assessments, and recognize where adjustments or changes need to be made. This article explains these benefits and lays out a step by step process for building such a curriculum map that can be adapted to any institutional context. We also describe a variety of outcomes from and reactions to our process.

Evaluating Centers For Teaching And Learning: A Field-Tested Model, Susan R. Hines

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This paper provides a program evaluation model, along with field-testing results, that was developed in response to the need for an evaluation model able to support systematic evaluation of teaching and learning centers (CTLs). The model builds upon the author’s previous studies investigating the evaluation practices and struggles experienced at 53 CTLs. Findings from these studies attribute evaluation struggles to contextual issues involving evaluation capacity, ill- structured curricula, and ill-conceived evaluation frameworks. This field-tested Four-Phase Program Evaluation Model addresses these issues by approaching evaluation in a comprehensive manner that includes an evaluation capacity analysis, curricular conceptualization, evaluation planning, and plan …

Assessment From An Educational Development Perspective, Mary C. Wright, Molly Goldwasser, Wayne Jacobson, Christopher Dakes

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

As assessment, already well established in higher education, gains attention in the field of educational development (ED), we ask: What does it mean to practice assessment from an ED perspective? In response, we examine four principles that are central to this endeavor: (a) bridging work across communities and multiple institutional levels; (b) collective, collaborative ownership; (c) action-oriented focus on student-centered learning; and (d) intentionality about inclusiveness to recognize diverse experiences of participants and stakeholders. We apply these principles to four examples of assessment practice at different institutions and offer a rationale for why this lens has utility for the improvement …

“Are We Playing A Game Today?” Classroom Engagement And Assessment Through Gamification, Tracy A. Hudson Ms, Kendall Lentz

Winthrop Conference on Teaching and Learning

Today’s classroom demands a different style of engagement and assessment, primarily due to the changing nature of today’s learners. In fact, according to Liz Dwyer in “How Gaming is Changing the Classroom,” by the time students are age 21, they will have participated in over 10,000 hours of video gaming. As a result, using traditional pedagogies and “skill and drill” teaching strategies aren’t as effective with students who are more inclined to favor a controller over a book. Therefore, regardless of the discipline, adding gamification to the classroom can dramatically increase student engagement and also provide instructors with instantaneous assessment …

A Case Study: Using Blackboard Tools To Measure Correlations Between Student Engagement And Student Achievement, Andrew Vorder Bruegge

Winthrop Conference on Teaching and Learning

The Blackboard course management system includes the tool "statistics tracking." An instructor can use this tool to generate a report that "displays the summary of usage for that content item and [the students] enrolled in the course. The access date, hour and day of the week are all reported for the selected item and [students]." In this case study the researcher will correlate aggregate data about students' visits to numerous content items in a course and their final grade in the course. The instructor will also correlate aggregate data from a study log created to track the number of hours …

Are We Teaching Them Anything?: A Model For Measuring Methodology Skills In The Political Science Major, Christi Siver, Seth W. Greenfest, G. Claire Haeg

Political Science Faculty Publications

While the literature emphasizes the importance of teaching political science students methods skills, there currently exists little guidance for how to assess student learning over the course of their time in the major. To address this gap, we develop a model set of assessment tools that may be adopted and adapted by political science departments to evaluate the effect of their own methods instruction. The model includes a syllabi analysis, evaluation of capstone (senior) papers, and a transcript analysis. We apply these assessment tools to our own department to examine whether students demonstrate a range of basic-to-advanced methodological skills. Our …

An Exploration Of Fairness In The Assessment And Process Of Student Group Work, Rita Gibson, Emma Geoghegan, Oscar Macananey, Andrew Hines, Lorraine D'Arcy

Practitioner Research Projects

This project was driven by a motivation to be as fair as possible in the assessment of students' group work. Achieving fairness in assessment is a recurrent them in group project assessment literature (Nordberg, 2009). All authors of this report teach modules with group projects, and acknowledged that discrepancies often exist between a mark assigned to a group and an individual's contribution. Our aims were to (a) collectively enhance our understanding of the issues that need to be considered when assessing a group work project and (b) collectively build our confidence in approaches chosen to overcome these challenges. The findings …

Methods For Deriving Individual Marks From Group Work, Miriam Delaney, Lucy Bowe, Breiffni Fitzgerald, Peter Maccann, Christina Ryan

Practitioner Research Projects

Group assessment is a valuable teaching and learning method (Springer et al., 1999). This has been comprehensively demonstrated in the teaching and learning literature both in general (Johnson et al., 1991) and in specific contexts. This assessment practice promotes questioning, discussion and debate and encourages students to become active team players (DIT, 2013). However, when using this form of assessment, it is important to recognise that it is "individuals who graduate and gain qualifications" (Gibbs, 2009, p.4). The problem of freeloading has been identified and one of the suggested methods of reducing this is to incorporate individual assessment into the …

Facilitating Group Work: A Guide To Good Practice, Ronan Mccrea, Irene Neville, David Rickard, Ciara Walsh, David Williams

Practitioner Research Projects

Oakley et al. (2004) and Gibbs (2009) observe that owing to the extensive literature on group work, lecturers searching for a succinct guide on how to facilitate this activity effectively would find it challenging to digest such a large corpus. We extensively reviewed the literature in order to produce a quick and accessible guide for lecturers to use. It is our aspiration that this could be referred to when planning and facilitating group work projects with insights and recommendations informed by our research. Moreover, as this work draws on publications from educators in a wide range of disciplines, we expect …

Don’T Box Me In: Rubrics For Ártists And Designers, Natasha Haugnes, Jennifer L. Russell

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Two faculty developers at a professional art and design university were met with uneasy faculty attitudes toward grading when they opened their CTL 13 years ago. Conversations revealed that the faculty artists and designers suspected that grading would somehow shatter the fragile muse of creativity, which is so central to the processes of producing art and design. The developers’ quest for transparent, consistent grading, and assessment practices resulted in an approach to rubric creation that taps into artists’ reverence for the critique. This narrative account reveals how the approach allowed an interactive introduction of rubrics as teaching tools, ensured their …

“Assessing Big History Outcomes: Or, How To Make Assessment Inspiring.”, Mojgan Behmand

Mojgan Behmand

Authentic Assessment, Sinead Freeman, James Fox, Vanessa Murphy, Nicola Hughes

Practitioner Research Projects

No abstract provided.

Msym 109: Physical Principles In Agriculture And Life Sciences—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, David Mabie

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This benchmark course portfolio was developed for MSYM 109 - Physical Principles in Agriculture and Life Sciences. The class is a general service course taken by majors as a prerequisite for future coursework along with several other CASNR majors to fulfill their physics course requirement. MSYM 109 is a high enrollment course, with 115 students in lecture, along with four separate 30 person recitation sections. This portfolio was developed to assess the following objectives: 1. Identify, evaluate, and justify the course objectives 2. Assess and evaluate the course pedagogy and assessment methodology 3. Analyze the historical students assessment results against …

How Service-Learning In Spanish Speaks To The Crisis In The Humanities, Terri Carney

Terri M. Carney

Service-learning is a transformational pedagogy with timely application to the teaching and learning of foreign languages. In our current climate of assessment outcomes, language study and the humanities more generally tend to be devalued and rendered invisible by utilitarian models of evaluation. Incorporating service-learning courses and experiences into the foreign language classroom provides real- world immersion for students in their local linguistic and cultural communities, satisfies teachers’ desires to connect teaching and research to local community issues, and allows departments to meet institutional and educational goals. Indeed, service-learning points us to new definitions of old concepts—such as the role of …

Liberating Insight By Walking In Other People's Shoes, Gail Rathbun, Jane Leatherman, Rebecca Jensen

Rebecca S Jensen

The researchers framed this program evaluation project as an investigation of the influences on teaching practices of a teaching center program participants and non-participants. Changes in teaching practices and the motivations for these changes of fifteen randomly chosen faculty were studied. Session participants will develop and analyze brief case studies using abbreviated data sets and three of the methods that were used in the study. Through hands on analysis of data, session participants will enhance their ability to evaluate the conclusions drawn by the researchers and become familiar with useful analytical frameworks that they can use in their own research. …

Teac 452v/852v: Curriculum Principles And Practices—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Elizabeth B. Lewis

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

Objective: My goal for this teacher action research project was to better understand how to improve students' learning of how to teach science through active and inquiry-based learning experiences.

Abstract: I framed the course under study around an essential question which was: How does a scientific classroom discourse community support student learning? Inquiry-based instruction is a cornerstone of science teaching, thus I investigated preservice science teachers' learning about how to teach science through inquiry-based instruction. By the end of the course all of the students had improved their understanding of inquiry-based instruction and were able to generate better science lessons …

Measuring The Promise: A Learning Focused Syllabus Rubric, Michael Palmer, Dorothe Bach, Adriana Streifer

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

To enrich the resources for measuring the impact of educational development work, we have created a rubric to assess the degree to which a syllabus achieves a learning orientation. The rubric provides qualitative descriptions of components that distinguish learning focused syllabi and uses a quantitative scoring system that places syllabi on a spectrum from content focused to learning focused. It is flexible enough to accommodate a diverse range of levels, disciplines, institutions, and learning environments, yet nuanced enough to provide summative information to developers using the tool for assessment purposes and formative feedback to instructors interested in gauging the focus …

Title: How Do Preservice Teacher Education Students Move From Novice To Expert Assessors?, Peter R. Grainger, Lenore Adie

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Despite the acknowledged importance of assessment in education, there has been minimal research into the preparation of preservice teachers for the important role of involving preservice teachers in marking, grading, moderating and providing feedback on student work. This article reports on a pilot project in which preservice teachers participated in an ongoing peer assessment and social moderation process in a dedicated course on assessment. The purpose of the project was to investigate specific ways in which key assessment processes can be effectively taught to preservice teachers. The research involved 96 preservice teachers who completed a Likert scale survey and free …

Best Practices & Resources For Teaching Esl Written Communication, Linda S. Bergmann, Vicki Kennell

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Presentations

This presentation, given at the Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE) Series II: Expanding Your Teaching Toolkit, offers instructors information on understanding and accommodating the ESL writers in their classrooms. Material is presented on the language abilities of the writers, on the ways in which cultural differences may be manifested in the writing itself, and on the types of accommodations that can be made in writing assignments and assessments. The talk includes information on best practices in writing for all writers and a bibliography of resources about L2 writers.

A New Way To Assess Student Learning, Dr. Deborah Bracke

Education: Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works

This article describes an alternative to the traditional pre-test, post-test assessment of student learning.

Muop 356/856: Intermediate/Advanced Opera Techniques—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Jamie M. Reimer

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

I began the investigation of this course and subsequent course portfolio with the following objectives in mind:

1. To solidify and articulate the skills I intend students enrolled in this course to achieve by the end of the semester;
2. To think creatively about the presentation of course material to most effectively engage and empower students' success; and
3. To assess the effectiveness of the course activities in achieving course goals stated in the syllabus.

I am also excited to explore the options available for different methods of content delivery in this course, particularly the application of recorded performance for assessment. In the …

Chme 223: Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics I—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Hossein Noureddini

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This portfolio was intended to provide a broad overview of the course. Initially, when I decided to write this portfolio my intention was for it to help me in the student's outcome assessment of teaching for the course and in a broader scope, for my department's effort in establishing a systematic student outcome assessment process. However, as I became more familiar with the program I realized other aspects of the course could also benefit from this portfolio. My goal for this portfolio is to be broad with emphasis on course objectives, delivery methods and their assessment. I like for this …

Metr 200: Weather And Climate—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Matthew S. Van Den Broeke

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This benchmark portfolio is meant to be an assessment of how well the objectives of METR 200 (Weather and Climate) are being attained by students in several classifications of academic major. Students from a wide range of backgrounds enroll in this course as a general science elective, and for many, it will be the only science course taken in college. Thus, it is important that course material be sufficiently accessible for all students, while providing meaningful information which will be applicable by students of all backgrounds once they leave the course. In this portfolio, an analysis will be presented showing …