Quick Hits for Teaching with Technology: Successful Strategies by Award-Winning Teachers

3. Enhancing Evaluation

Assessment: An opportunity to demonstrate excellence Robin K. Morgan Indiana University Southeast Whatever else the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) may represent, the discipline clearly embraces an uncompromising ethic of quality control and accountability in the teachinglearning dynamic. Simply put, those who are passionate about being good teachers recognize the necessity of placing their teaching practices under the microscope, evaluating the results of such assessment, both good and bad, and reflecting on how to use such findings to improve teaching outcomes. This exercise in continuous assessment exemplifies, in many ways, the scientific attitudes of critical thinking and skepticism, and benefits a multitude of stakeholders, including the faculty themselves, their home institution, and, most notably, the students who stand to gain the most from this self-reflective endeavor. The submissions in Chapter 3 converge on several dimensions of this assessment process. Evaluating teaching effectiveness requires that the spotlight fall on both principal players, teacher and student alike. Neither has escaped the scrutiny of the present authors. Proper assessment benefits both, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the decision to engage both formative and summative assessment in one’s class. Formative assessment provides important early data for the instructor while simultaneously offering useful and timely feedback to the student, ideally reducing “surprises” on more summative measures. Several of the current submissions demonstrate methods of providing formative feedback. Three submissions, for example, outline various techniques of using personal responses systems, or clickers, in providing real time formative feedback . Similarly, Amy Zink, in her submission, describes how she uses Google Docs to gather feedback on what students know so that she can plan her lessons accordingly. She then describes how she uses the same data to evaluate the effectiveness of her teaching. Although some form of course and instructor evaluation is in place in most colleges and universities, the data generated by such tools seldom engender confidence. Such instruments may offer valid information regarding student likes and dislikes, for both content and instructors, but may tell us precious little about what has and has not been mastered by the student as a result of their exposure to the course. Several of the present submissions address this issue. Michelle Gacio Harrolle, for example, describes her efforts to have students create a personal video demonstrating skills learned in class. Robin Lightner uses WebQuests specifically designed to meet the course’s learning objectives. Both of these approaches provide much more detailed information about the quality of student learning than traditional course evaluations. The authors of the current offerings remain of one voice in advocating for the ongoing assessment of teaching effectiveness. That this task can take many forms and provide an assortment of meaningful information is also apparent. For those of us who entered the academy roughly a generation ago, such developments are nothing short of remarkable. However, in spite of the varied and innovative ideas contained in these submissions, it is clear that, as a profession, we have a long way to go in ‘closing the loop’ on course evaluation. Technology holds promise as a quick and efficient method of collecting data about how well our teaching methods Enhancing Evaluation 3 www.quickhitstech.com enhance student learning. The next step is to adjust our methods based on our collected data and then, once again, assess our effectiveness. Through reflecting on these efforts, it may be that changes that benefit student learning may occur beyond the classroom. That is, curricula or student advising changes may be necessitated to truly assist students in achieving their academic goals. Quick Hits for Teaching with Technology 64 For additional resources and quick hits please visit www.quickhitstech.com You can also submit your own Quick Hit to be peer reviewed and added to the collection of materials. www.quickhitstech.com Google-Doc surveys for teaching Hispanic culture Amy Zink Indiana University Southeast Keywords: Google, survey, culture, Spanish Framework My mother always said “Fall in love with a doc” and now I have. A Google-Doc. One of the advantages of teaching Spanish is the opportunity to expose students to the values and practices of the Hispanic culture. Recognizing that behavior, including our own, has a cultural context helps students progress from an ethnocentric to an ethno-relative point of view. I use Google Survey Forms in my Spanish classes, both small and large, to help me teach this ethno-relative viewpoint. Making it Work Here’s...