assessment

Providing validated tests for instructors to use (#AAPTsm11)

August 4, 2011

Our plenary speaker this morning was Thomas Holme, of Iowa State University, speaking to us about the standardized assessments in chemistry.  Sounds boring, but he raised some interesting and insightful thoughts about assessment. He started out by describing the fine line he has to walk as an instructor: “Teaching is inherently personal and inescapably corporate.  [...]

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The disappearance of the final exam

October 13, 2010

Today we have a guest post from Olivia Coleman (who contributes to another blog).  Her post on the decline of the final exam follows on the heels of an interesting article in the Boston Globe — “The Test Has Been Canceled” — which generated quite a bit of buzz on the PHYSLRNR listserv, where geeks [...]

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Taking tests helps you learn (maybe)

April 9, 2010

photo by Patrick Hannigan (click for Wikimedia link) I’ve written before on some interesting psychology studies on the benefits of retrieval for learning and memory.  I recently heard a talk on the subject (by Sean Kang of UCSD) that spurred me to think about it again, and also generated some interesting discussion with a thoughtful [...]

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We learn by taking tests (even when we get the wrong answer)

November 25, 2009

photo by Patrick Hannigan (click for Wikimedia link) We think of taking tests as something to assess whether we learned something, but there is a fascinating set of literature that shows that it does more than that.  Tests can be learning events in their own right.  It makes sense when you think about it.  How [...]

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Eliciting student ideas with little toy cars (Blogging from the AAPT)

July 26, 2009

Today’s session is all about using diagnosis, or assessment, in your teaching (“Designing a Diagnostic Learning Environment in the Pre-College Classroom”; Lezlie DeWater, Eleanor Close, and Hunter Close). In the last post I talked about one way to elicit students ideas, using a video and brainstorm.  This time, they gave us a bunch of pull-back [...]

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Eliciting student ideas (Blogging from the AAPT)

July 26, 2009

Today’s session is all about using diagnosis, or assessment, in your teaching (“Designing a Diagnostic Learning Environment in the Pre-College Classroom:; Lezlie DeWater, Eleanor Close, and Hunter Close). Formative assessment is assessment that happens before or during your teaching, to help students learn.  Summative assessment is what we more typically think of as assessment — [...]

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A tool to diagnose your students’ learning difficulties

May 12, 2009

One of our main messages here at the Science Education Initiative is that it’s important that teachers both find out what their students difficulties are, and then choose their instructional strategies accordingly. That sounds easy, but for the average college faculty (facing a sea of 200 faces) or the average K12 teacher (who has to [...]

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New ways to assess your students’ learning

February 12, 2009

Why is it that we make tests multiple choice, when the world isn’t multiple choice?  We’re not an industrial society anymore, where following directions is the key to success.  Instead, we’re problem-solvers, and knowledge is the important commodity.  But our education system hasn’t quite caught up with this shift.  We’re still testing our students like [...]

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