Teaching Effectiveness
How to assess your teaching
What are your strengths, what specific skills and strategies would enhance your teaching effectiveness?The Education Specialists in the Engaged Teaching Hub can help you identify opportunities for improvements. The following are examples of methods that are available to you:
- One-one-one Teaching Consultations
- Classroom Observations
- Student Surveys
- Early Course Feedback
How to assess students’ prior knowledge
To gauge how much students have learned it is important to assess students' knowledge, ways of understanding and ways of knowing when they enter your class. Students' prior knowledge impacts directly their learning in your class.
Assessment at the beginning of a course
Classroom assessment techniques (CATs) are simple, non-graded, anonymous, in-class activities designed to give you and your students useful feedback on the teaching-learning process as it is happening. Examples:
The standard reference on CATs is Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd edition, by Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross (Jossey-Bass, 1988). This book includes 50 CATs, indexed in a variety of useful ways.
Concept Maps
Concept maps are visual representations of connections between major concepts students have learned. Concept maps can be used as a diagnostic tool to assess students' knowledge and understanding at the beginning of a course and or unit of instruction.
Concept Tests
Faculty from numerous science disciplines have used concept inventories. Concept inventories are research-based instruments that measure students’ conceptual understanding of topics for which students share common alternative conceptions. These inventories help faculty recognize students’ prior knowledge and ways of understanding and identify learning gains
- Computer Science
- Math
How to assess students’ learning and performance
