Tools and Resources

This document describes a specific strategy that provides a collaborative learning experience for students.

Item Analysis (a.k.a. Test Question Analysis) is an empowering process that enables you to improve mutiple-choice test score validity and reliability by analyzing item performance over time and making necessary adjustments. Knowledge of score reliability, item difficulty, item discrimination, and crafting effective distractors can help you make decisions about whether to retain items for future administrations, revise them, or eliminate them from the test item pool. Item analysis can also help you to determine whether a particular portion of course content should be revised or enhanced.

Round Robin is a systematic technique that allows students to brainstorm answers to questions. It allows all students an opportunity to contribute.

What the Best College Teachers Do
Ken Bain, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (2004)
The publication, What the Best College Teachers Do, is based on a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers from various fields and universities. Author Ken Bain tries to “capture the collective scholarship of some of the best teachers in the United States, to record not just what they think, but most of all, to begin to conceptualize their practices.” In this book, you will find insights on how to engage and challenge students

Brief discussion of characteristics that case-writers should aim for in order to promote students' learning. Traits discussed include realism, alignment with students' needs, complexity, adequate background information, and clear writing.

Students may feel uncertain about the ethical use of AI in a given course and academic/professional field, and instructors may find it helpful to understand how students think about the ethical aspects of using AI and how they are using AI tools as learners. This resource offers recommendations for starting conversations with students about AI.

The Faculty Senate revision to Student Policy 42-27 Class Attendance states that instructors may provide remote asynchronous instruction on a November election day so students can participate in or work the polls at local, state or federal elections. We offer this guidance in preparation for such instruction.

This list of inclusive teaching strategies was created as part of the Schreyer Institute's Creating Inclusive Courses workshop. The workshop activity is also available in this repository. The list was compiled over many years and is intended to help instructors recognize what they might already be doing to demonstrate that all students are welcome contributors to the course learning community. This is not a "checklist." Creating inclusive course environments requires sincerity, intentionality, and reflection, not simply enacting a list of strategies. These strategies are most effective when combined with other efforts such as critical self-reflection reflection, learning about antiracist pedagogies, and taking steps to decolonize our classrooms.

In this rationale, Natalie Parker, Director of CETL and Distance Education, Texas Wesleyan University, advocates for replacing high stakes exams with multiple-attempt, low-stakes quizzes. The “testing effect”, in which students recall more information about a topic after testing than after re-reading the material, was first reported by Abbott in 1909. Subsequent studies have confirmed that repeated testing is an effective way for students to recall material.

These PowerPoint slides accompanied a presentation by Linda Suskie delivered via Zoom on Tuesday, Apr. 25, 2017. Multiple-choice tests can have a place in many courses. If they’re well designed, they can yield useful information on student achievement of many important course objectives, including some thinking skills. An item analysis of the results can shed light on how well the questions are working as well as what students have learned. Viewers will be able to use principles of good question construction to develop tests, develop test questions that assess thinking skills as well as conceptual understanding, and use item analysis to understand and improve both test questions and student learning. Be sure to open the handouts file listed below as you view the presentation!

Heavily abridged version of Weinstein, Y., Madan, C. R., & Smith, M. A. (in press). Teaching the science of learning. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, prepared for and presented at "Reframing Testing as a Learning Experience: Three Strategies for Use in the Classroom and at Home" on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017.

Six key learning strategies from research in cognitive psychology can be applied to education: spaced practice, interleaving, elaborative interrogation, concrete examples, dual coding, and retrieval practice. However, a recent report (Pomerance, Greenberg, & Walsh, 2016) found that few teacher-training textbooks cover these principles; current study-skills courses also lack coverage of these important learning strategies. Students are therefore missing out on mastering techniques they could use on their own to learn effectively. This handout contains the six key learning strategies to address those concerns.

Instructors are the most important determinant of student participation in the Student Educational Experience Questionnaire (SEEQ). Students are more likely to complete the questionnaire if they know that instructors read their feedback and value it as a source of ideas to improve the course.

This resource offers principles of trauma-informed teaching and recommendations instructors
might consider as they are developing trauma-informed practices for their own courses.

This is a 2-page flyer provided by the CIRTL Network (Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning). It includes quotes from participants about how participating benefitted them. Many are now professors. The second page is focuses on additional benefits for students, faculty, and academic units.