Penn State University

Tools and Resources

Top Downloaded Tools and Resources at Penn State

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

Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent describe their approach to Collaborative Learning Strategies.

Brief explanation of several easy-to-use Classroom Assessment Techniques, with examples.

Three-page overview of the steps in documenting one's teaching through a portfolio.

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.

Student ratings are not the only option to provide evidence in the evaluation of teaching. There is a broad range of alternatives to consider beyond student ratings in the delicate decision-making processes to improve teaching and determine the promotion and tenure of faculty. Yet, despite the constant barrage of attacks on the integrity, reliability, and validity of student ratings, their use in higher education is at an all-time high.
So what do student ratings actually contribute to decisions about teaching and faculty? Should they be abandoned? Should you focus on the other options? This article examines student ratings and 14 alternatives to guide your plans to evaluate teaching in your department.

This document describes the use of student peers to provide feedback on written assignments by fellow students.

Calendar for 2025 showing the dates for full-semester (15 week) courses. This calendar does not apply to short-courses.
For short-course:
--MSEEQ dates are determined in consultation with the instructor
--SEEQs are always offered the last week of the classes (inclusive of weekend days).

An easy to use graphical representation of updated Bloom's Taxonomy congitive domain, including definitions.

This is curriculum matrix was completed by the faculty in the Elementary and Kindergarten Education program at Penn State Berks. It is used to determine which program goals/objectives are addressed in the various courses included in the program. A curriculum map is an important step in the process of learning outcomes assessment (program assessment).

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

PowerPoint presentation on Blended Learning from Abington Colloquy, January 18, 2012 by Stephen Pyser.

This file is an example of a rubric that can be used to grade a science experiment. The use of a rubric can help instructors to grade more accurately and more quickly.

This is a peer-reviewed article published in the journal of Studies in Educational Evaluation. Its focus is the accurate interpretation of student ratings data (including Penn State's SRTE) and appropriate use of the data to evaluate faculty. It includes recommendations for use and interpretation based on more than 80 years of student ratings research. Most colleges and universities use student ratings data to guide personnel decisions so it is critical that administrators and faculty evaluators have access to the cumulative knowledge about student ratings based on multiple studies, rather than single studies that have not been replicated, studies based on non-representative populations, or that are from a single discipline.

The article provides an overview of common views and misconceptions about student ratings, followed by clarification of what student ratings are and are not. It also includes two sets of guidelines for administrators and faculty serving on review committees.

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