Tools and Resources

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.

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 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.

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

The questionnaire includes seven items, which are the same for every instructor. Responses to items 1-4 are available to the instructor and their academic unit head. Items 5-7 are provided only to the instructor. Fall semester 2023 is the first to use this questionnaire. It replaces the SRTE.

One-page handout of information about the Schreyer Institute and Student Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness (SRTE)

This PowerPoint presentations describes the instrument called the Perceived Difficulty Assessment Questionnaire and provides its theoretical background. A few examples of its use are also included.

This brief document addresses academic integrity by outlining which students cheat, why they cheat, how they cheat and how instructors can reduce cheating and plagiarism.

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

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.

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.

This document describes several active learning methods for helping students learn how course concepts are organized.

This is a pdf diagram that can help instructors determine whether intellectual property can be legally used in courses under the Fair Use Doctrine. It was developed by Becky Albitz a former Penn State Librarian. Becky is currently the Associate Librarian for Collection Management at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

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