This chapter focuses on intentional educational development activities designed to prepare faculty for effective teaching and assessment of student learning. Some benefits of such activities include improved alignment of courses with programmatic outcomes, higher success rates in course reviews, and better demonstration of student learning on…

Many introductory computer science (CS) courses are intended to address the increased demand for computer literacy and the development of cross-cutting concepts and practices of computational thinking (CT). Colleges and universities offer introductory CS courses every semester toward this end. The issue is centered on how to support CT learning in…

Classroom assessment techniques (CATs) provide instructors with the opportunity to get feedback about what students are learning, where they need help, and provide instructors with an important tool to tailor course design and student learning.

We studied Brazilian faculty and psychology undergraduates' perspectives on excellent teaching using the Teacher Behavior Checklist. In two studies, we found that students and teachers showed strong agreement with those TBC items relevant to developing a profile of excellent teachers and that students valued some qualities more than others in…

This chapter advocates for a more contemporary ecological neuropsychology approach, where brain-learner-environmental interactions are the focus of study, assessment, and evidence-based intervention.

The evaluation of teaching has sparked much debate for many decades. There are several reasons why the debate about evaluation and ratings continues, but the underlying problems in evaluation are more complex than a simple, valid-invalid or reliable-unreliable dichotomy suggests. The issues are often buried beneath bipolar rhetoric that has been…

In general, people associate college and university teaching with lecture-based methods, in which an expert (the teacher) delivers information to a group of nonexperts (the students), who subsequently show their newfound "knowledge" by answering examination questions. Because of the common notion that knowledge and intelligence are…

The field of school psychology has undergone a significant paradigm shift in service delivery philosophy over the past decade. As part of this paradigm shift, practitioners typically are encouraged to target context-specific skills and processes that facilitate or enhance students' achievement in school rather than traditional traitlike abilities,…

Concerned that her students "knew" Spanish but could not use it in real life situations, the author created new learning goals, new learning activities, and new assessment activities. As a graduate student at the University of Illinois, the author was introduced to "Creating Significant Learning Experiences" (Fink, 2003) while studying with Steven…

In contrast to traditional courses, in which students are accountable only to the instructor, effective implementation of any group-based instructional format, including team-based learning (TBL), requires that students be accountable to both the instructor and their peers. Unfortunately, some instructors resist using groups because of concerns…

Teaching--and assessing learning--about diversity through service-learning is full of challenges, especially if the learning goals are affective. The teacher has no good way of knowing exactly where the starting point is for each student. The student may only know where the starting point was once he or she has moved beyond it and sees it in…

A study investigated whether Biglan clusters of academic disciplines (hard/soft, pure/applied, life/nonlife) could be used to explain disciplinary differences in college student ratings of instruction. It was found that Biglan clusters do not explain the differences, many disciplines still emphasize knowledge acquisition over higher-order skills,…

Of great importance in large class instruction is the need to ensure that students learn how to learn. Course organization and evaluation methods grow out of a recognition of the course's learning goals. (MLW)

For three biology professors, visualizing molecular processes is central to thinking in their discipline. This chapter reports their attempts at getting students to make this same cognitive move and the results of their assessments. (Contains 2 figures.)