Three weekly tidbits from the Center for Teaching & Learning plus upcoming events.
Rubrics are handy tools for providing clear expectations and consistent feedback to learners, but students also welcome authentic feedback that sounds like it came from you. You can add your own “voice” through the commenting tool on the rubric in Brightspace or by adding multimedia feedback.
罢丑别听聽has a fantastic team supporting their CBE program, including a psychometrician (an expert in the measurement of mental capacities and processes) who developed a taxonomy of assessment types. While it is still in development, you can find the verb used in your learning outcome in the list in this database (such as 91桃色) and see helpful related information. This includes:
Chew & Cerbin propose a research-based framework of nine interacting cognitive challenges that teachers must address in order to promote 鈥渙ptimal learning鈥� rather than merely acceptable performance. They emphasize that teaching is not just delivering content but聽creating the conditions in which students learn. Each of the nine challenges represents a characteristic of how students think, learn, or struggle 鈥� the idea being that failure to address any one of these can undermine learning. The authors describe each challenge, provide examples, and suggest instructional strategies for mitigation.
I had the pleasure of attending a session on the Science of Meaning with Dr. Todd Kashan from the聽聽at George Mason University. According to his research, the three primary drivers of meaning in life are: (1) coherence, (2) significance, and (3) purpose. How can you use this in your teaching?
Ready to level up your learning outcomes? Break them down into individual skills that can be mapped to currently in demand occupations.
This systematic review examines how instructional materials that embed errors (so-called 鈥渆rroneous examples鈥�) or juxtapose incorrect and correct solutions (鈥渃ontrasting erroneous examples鈥�) can influence student learning across a variety of domains (mathematics, medicine, science). The authors reviewed 40 studies and found that these approaches can enhance learning 鈥� especially by helping students grasp both what not to do (negative knowledge) and what to do (positive knowledge) 鈥� but the benefits depend strongly on how the errors are used, what scaffolding (prompts, feedback) is provided, how complex the task is, and how much prior knowledge the learner has.
How do you know if your instruction is effective? What evidence do you look for? Are you looking to see if your students are engaged? Are you looking for performance on assessment?