OSU-Cascades / Teaching Excellence
We are fortunate at OSU to have a robust Center for Teaching and Learning with skilled support staff to help us prepare our courses for delivery in multiple modalities. If you have not yet explored some of these options, please do this NOW in preparation for Spring term so that you’re ready to launch your class in a revised format if needed:
For a FULL list of ideas and resources, please visit: https://learn.oregonstate.edu/keep-teaching. Continue reading
In several of my classes I have students complete projects of some kind. My WIC class requires a research paper and other faculty in my program have students write large research papers as well, so I try to spice up my “project” options whenever I can. I have found that students are more invested in their final product when they are allowed some choice and creative license around what that final product looks like.
In my aging class, I assigned a final project where groups of students were asked to demonstrate their knowledge about how to work with older adults with various physical limitations. I gave them several prompts indicating what their final project must contain (exercise instruction with and without modification, progression, special considerations for the particular limitation, etc.) but allowed them to demonstrate that knowledge in a paper, Powerpoint presentation, video, podcast, or in any other format that I approved ahead of time. Continue reading
Research on group testing is interesting. Before you stop reading because you think you would never do something this inhumane to your students, consider this — in virtually every study conducted on group testing, exam scores improve the most for low- and middle-achieving cohorts. Students report lower test anxiety and generally enjoy this form of collaborative problem solving over standard testing methods. In addition, they report that it promotes deep learning of difficult content.
The assumption is that students are debating, negotiating, sharing, and working through what they collectively know about a complex problem to come to a solution. Isn’t that what we do at work every single day? How many times in a week do we listen to each other’s ideas, debate an issue, and yes, sometimes compromise, to reach a final answer? I wonder if by NOT having students engage in activities like collaborative testing, we are doing them a disservice as we send them out into the world where employers expect them to have these skills. Continue reading
About 20 years ago, I participated in my very first item-writing workshop with the American Council on Exercise as part of a three-day exam validation exercise. This was one of those paradigm-shifting experiences for me as an educator because I had never been that immersed in exam accreditation before, but also because I never knew that there was an actual art and process to writing valid multiple choice questions. The key here is the word “valid.” Who knew that carefully constructed multiple choice questions could actually utilize all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy? I thought multiple choice questions were only for the two lower levels of the pyramid: remembering and comprehending. The experience of exam question item writing for accreditation completely changed the way I assessed my students.
Here are some of the basics, but if you search the internet for “writing better test questions” or “writing better multiple choice questions,” you will find some very good resources to help you write really good stems for all types of questions. As with everything we write, nothing can substitute for good planning before you start. Continue reading
Once again, we have the pleasure of Jenna Goldsmith’s presence on our Teaching Moment blog!
This term, I am participating in a course run by the Office for Advancing Academic Equity for Student Success on the main campus called Black Minds Matter. According to their mission, the course “draws parallels between the Black Lives Matter movement and the ways that Black minds are engaged in the classroom. The course will balance a discussion of issues facing Black male students as well as offer research-based strategies for improving their success.” I am also in Erin Rook’s Monday evening book club in where we are reading Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race?, COCC’s Season of Nonviolence book selection this year. While the synergies between these meetings seem obvious now, I did not anticipate how much my participation in one group would inflect and inform my engagement in the other. Ijeoma’s book is informative, accessible, and indispensable (in my opinion) for educators at all levels: highly recommend.
