The
Council for Teaching and Learning now has a classroom quality survey
for faculty. Go
to the Ideal Classroom
link. and scroll down to the red font. Enter the survey there.
Please complete this when you have a moment, because the information
will be used to prioritize facility upgrades.
It's near semester’s
end when we become exhausted alongside our students—engaged
to the point of sleep deprivation in our least favorite endeavors
of testing and grading. At semester's end, all courses seem to turn
simultaneously into all-consuming rituals of measurement. Students
fear both low performance on exams and the humiliation that accompanies
poor performance. Faculty fear for low performance too; we'll see
student failure as reflecting poorly on our instruction. Finally,
there is that gnawing suspicion that traditional short-answer tests
may not be reliable indicators of students’ knowledge or abilities.
That suspicion is correct. Evaluation for grading purposes should
come from much more than conventional short-answer tests. An attribute
of good testing is to test important outcomes in multiple ways—a
corollary to teaching content material using multiple modalities.
Good testing practice
begins early, long before the first test or quiz. Success requires
early attention to two details: understanding our students and understanding
our responsibilities. Our students' levels of thinking should be
foremost in our minds. We'll need to teach and test at the level
of their needs. Our course likely comes with responsibilities to
our department or our institution for particular learning outcomes.
"Academic freedom" doesn't mean we can ignore those. By
conveying solid representations of outcomes and expectations in
our syllabus, and ideally by conveying these in both the syllabus
and a knowledge survey, we begin to prepare our students for finals
on day one. Once we have focus, we can plan reasonably to meet those
outcomes, without undo cramming or crises at end of term.
"Fear,"
already noted here, is commonly associated with tests. Edwards Deming
saw fear as detrimental to performance and listed "Drive out
fear!" as one of his fourteen management principles. With tests,
we should first remove fear of the unknown. It's obvious that we
should test on what we teach, but the format of most tests and graded
challenges can reduce fear if it's consistent with instruction.
The pedagogical choices we use to present content will likely be
a good basis from which to create the form of test we'll use for
that content. For example, we can expedite very low-level thinking
challenges such as learning vocabulary (the discourse of a discipline)
with teacher-created crossword puzzles. Students can engage terms
repeatedly in several take-home or on-line crosswords until they
master the vocabulary. A quiz on vocabulary can then be delivered
in a format consistent with teaching—as a crossword puzzle—simply
because the format is consistent and familiar.
A second way to
remove fear is to use authentic testing conditions for authentic
challenges. Little professional work involves timed tests or projects
in which we professionals are denied resources, time to reflect,
to converse with colleagues, or intervals to set aside a project
while ideas gel. We can deliver student tests that require thinking
and use of evidence under the similar authentic work conditions
we use. Take-home tests that challenge students to respond under
authentic conditions can be very appropriate for some topics and
purposes.
Tests actually reinforce
emphases about what is important, and it's ideal if we can map test
items back to stated goals and outcomes. Ideal content for learning
and testing at the very end of a course might involve "clean
up" such as polishing up some low level learning in review
or engaging unifying topics that are "icing on the cake."
Classes with knowledge surveys have a great advantage in planning,
pacing, and in visualizing progress. Some believe comprehensive
finals have attributes they really want. If so, one can better prepare
students for comprehensive study by making quizzes cumulative, so
that comprehensive study occurs throughout the course instead of
at the end.
Learning should
not end with a test grade. Post-test debriefings are valuable enough
to use as a part of all tests. The debriefing contains three questions
that spur student self-assessment. (1) In what way(s) did I perform
well on this test? (2) In what ways did I perform less well? (3)
What am I going to do about the problem area of greatest concern
the next time I encounter a similar challenge? We can use debriefing
ourselves for our own improvement. (1) "What did I teach well
in this course?" (2) "What are the areas that are showing
up now as troublesome?" and (3)"What am I going to do
about this next term?" If we do our debriefing immediately
in writing, perhaps tweak a syllabus now when problems are evident,
it helps immensely to fine-tune our plans for next term.
