Tools and Resources

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

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

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.

This two-page handout provides a basic explanation of how to make and use rubrics to improve grading. Print references included.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 document was created to provide you with a source of options for gathering data on teamwork assignments and projects. You may choose to adopt one of the examples as is, combine elements from several of the examples, or use the examples to identify characteristics that correspond to particular aspects of your assigned work, course content, or student population.

FERN WILLITS AND MARK BRENNAN (2015) The University as a Community of Learning
Perceptions of Students and Teachers in Three Settings, The Journal of the World Universities Forum
Part of the Quality of Instruction (QOI) series supported by a Schreyer Institute grant

Practical suggestions for writing exams and techniques for creating questions from Boston University School of Public Health.

Penn State’s Faculty Assessment of Teaching Framework assesses teaching using evidence from three sources, peer review, self-assessment, and student feedback. The framework also identifies four Elements of Effective Teaching, which provide a foundation of understanding, advance a shared language for communication, and serve as standards against which the combined sources of evidence are judged. Academic units may also use the elements as an invitation to discuss other important aspects of effective teaching. This document includes teaching examples by element.