Practical Solutions for Faculty: Assessing Learning

Practical Solutions for Faculty: Assessing Learning

For faculty looking to improve assessments and feedback to help students better succeed, this Online Course provides practical solutions from experienced educators who understand the time restraints you face.

Assessing student learning is an essential part of any college-level class, yet it can be stressful for students and time consuming for faculty. Assessing learning is not just about giving students an exam. It’s about measuring learning throughout the course, helping students retain course content as they learn it, and providing meaningful and valuable feedback on assignments and exams.

Practical Solutions for Faculty: Assessing Learning is your guide to helping students succeed through meaningful assignments, well-written assessments, and thought-provoking feedback.

Practical Solutions for Faculty: Assessing Learning is an 8.5 hour course that begins with strategies to create a culture of excellence and foster intrinsic motivation. You’ll also be introduced to teaching practices directed to improving cognition and retention as well as guidance in creating assignments and exams to assess learning. Finally, you’ll receive proven advice on not only simplifying the grading process, but also how to maximize feedback to impact learning.

This asynchronous course also features transcripts, note-taking guides, supplementary materials, and regular assessments to enhance your learning, as well as a certificate of completion at the end of the course.

Help students master your content! Learn from your brilliant colleagues who have been there before and get the tools to succeed with Practical Solutions for Faculty: Assessing Learning!

Learning Goals

After completing this course, you’ll be able to:

• Customize academic-integrity strategies to the discipline taught and level of rigor expected of learners
• Adopt academic-integrity strategies to create and sustain a climate of ethical behavior
• Understand why reusing your old exams is a big mistake
• Have effective strategies for discouraging cheating on assignments
• Construct an assessment system designed to promote mastery learning and reduce cheating
• Reframe or redesign courses to foster intrinsic motivation and reduce the incentive to cheat
• Incorporate frequent, low-stakes assessments that will create deeper learning and increase student self-efficacy, thereby reducing the incentive to cheat
• Encourage communication and honesty in your students
• Define metacognition and explain its role in learning
• Identify how microactivities might be integrated into your class
• Create multiple-choice questions that effectively target different cognitive levels
• Write multiple-choice questions that trigger retrieval learning processes that are known to enhance later recall
• Understand assessment as a holistic, transformative, and authentic means to enhance student learning
• Develop specific strategies for authentic assessments
• Design tests and quizzes to elicit honest responses from students
• Apply principles of positive psychology and neuroscience to create a climate of academic honesty for individual assessments
• Optimize feedback provided to students while being strategic about the time invested in grading
• Create activities to be used in the classroom that reduce the need for individual grading
• Restructure feedback to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes
• Improve the effectiveness of standardized testing by re-conceptualizing the post-exam review into a powerful teaching and learning tool
• Investigate the benefits of classroom teaching through post-exam reviews to deepen student learning
• Identify curricular designs that support the integration of post-exam reviews into course design

Who Will Benefit From This Course:

• Faculty
• Educational Developers
• Instructional Designers