Reminder: Follow-up sessions begin September 11. Check your session here.

Reiterate, reiterate, reiterate: Students should hear, read, or see material at least three times.

Assisting Students and Assessing Their Learning

1. What's your role in assisting students with non-academic issues?

The immediate answer: to refer. You haven’t been hired as a graduate counseling assistant so don’t try. Being empathetic is different from offering advice or trying to solve a student problem that’s not a direct part of the coursework you teach.

Suggest students contact the KU Student Success office, the primary center for student concerns. Its professionals are the ones who can assist students with issues such as schedules, landlord woes, roommate squabbles, mental and physical health, learning disabilities, family concerns, minority questions, major advising, or personal counseling. These issues aren’t the business of GTAs. To repeat, your only role is to refer.

The KU Student Success web site has contact information for the many campus resource centers. Check here for Student Success web site and look below for selected departments.

DEPARTMENT LINKS:

Career Counseling and Planning Service
Helps you find jobs, both now and when you graduate.

Counseling and Psychological Services
Helps students with issues related to psychological, interpersonal, and family problems.

Emily Taylor Women’s Resource Center
Provides information, resources, and assistance on women's and gender-related issues.

Freshman-Sophomore Advising Center
Establish and maintain positive advising relationships between students and advisors.

Legal Services for Students
Provides enrolled students with assistance on commonly occurring legal issues.

Multicultural Affairs
Enhance the educational experience and opportunities of all students, but more specifically African American, Asian American, Hispanic American and Native American students.

Services for Students with Disabilities
Works with all units at KU to insure that every student has an equal opportunity to succeed.

Student Involvement and Leadership Center
Provides support to registered student and campus organizations

2. Planning tests and assessments, or focus on learning

On-the-Spot Assessment: The One-Minute Paper; The Muddiest Point

Are students learning what you think you’re teaching? If you wait until the end of the semester for one large evaluation, you’ll miss the chance to make useful changes during the course. Use this brief but effective method to get feedback on what’s working and what needs bolstering.

Method:

• Students take one minute and list two things: the most useful thing they’ve learned and an area that’s still not clear.

• Use these forms for feedback after individual sessions or larger units.

Why?

• By limiting the question and response time, teachers get the topmost concerns before students can hide them under "acceptable" ideology.

• By asking for a positive response, it pushes the students to balance their answers.

• You can make mid-semester teaching updates--while it matters.

• Students are nudged into an active role in the learning process.

Adapted from Angelo, T. A. and K. Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. 2 ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993. 148-153.

Testing and evaluation: An integrated approach

At this point in the semester you may be approaching the first assessment of student work, such as a test, a paper, a project, or a report. Do your thinking about the assessment first, and when you’ve clarified its purpose, begin working out the details.

1. Decide what you need to gain from this evaluation.

2. Look at the course goals in the course syllabus and aim the assessment towards them.

3. Make sure that you can answer these questions:

   What learning are you assessing?

   Why is it important?

   How will a grade from this assessment reflect progress towards that learning?

Testing and evaluation

The following material looks at both the large and small issues involved in testing. It provides a general checklist to help you pinpoint learning goals from an assessment.

Effective assessment leads to:

• Enhanced learning

• Clear relationship between personal effort and course outcomes

• Teaching feedback about instructional strategies

Ineffective assessment leads to:

• Diminished student-teacher rapport

• No clear guideline for evaluating instructional effectiveness

• Discouraged, disappointed, sour students

What are your course expectations?

How will you assess this expectation?

Master substantive subject matter; knowledge

Daily assignments; projects; tests

Demonstrate higher order thinking skills

Problem-solving that requires students to compare, infer, and evaluate

Demonstrate achievement-related behaviors

Presentations; group work; independent work; performances

Create products with specific attributes

Writing; research reports; art products

Demonstrate affective characteristics

Effort; personal responsibility; respect for others

Adapted from "Testing and Evaluation." About Teaching: A Conference for Graduate Teaching Assistants. Handout. August 1998.

Improving essay tests

William Cashin addresses the elements involved in creating and scoring essay tests. He notes that essay tests, while having limitations especially in respect to reliability, can create an especially valuable learning experience when combined with feedback.

Benefits of essay tests:

• Can test complex learning outcomes not measurable by other means.

• Can test thought process, such as the ability to select, organize, and evaluate facts; ability to apply, integrate, think critically and solve problems.

• Pose a more realistic task than multiple choice or objective items.

Limits of essays tests:

• Only limited content can be tested.

• Yield unreliable scores.

• Scores may be influenced by extraneous factors beyond content, such as handwriting, grammar, spelling, or scorer’s impression of student.

When should essay questions be used?

• To test writing skills.

• When the time to construct a test is more limited than the time to score it.

• When the teacher wants to explore student attitudes and critical readings more than objective details.

Constructing essay tests:
1. Allow time to construct and review essay questions.
2. Limit its use to learning outcomes that cannot be measured with objective items.
3. Test only one or a few specific objectives per item.
4. Give preference to focused questions that can be answered briefly.
5. Questions precisely indicate the content and process of the desired response.
6. Clearly note the number of points for each question.
7. Use novel questions that force students to go beyond memory.
8. Avoid optional questions.
9. Spend class time on a sample question, but don’t give a list of questions before the test.
10. Have a colleague read your test and give pointed feedback.

Scoring essay tests:
1. Outline a model answer before you read the essays.
2. Decide beforehand how you will handle grammar, spelling, handwriting, etc.
3. Keep student identity anonymous.
4. Read and score all the answers to a single question at a time.
5. Shuffle the exams after scoring each question.
6. Use multiple readings and average your two scores.
7. Provide extensive comments.

Adapted from Cashin, William E. "Improving Essay Tests," Idea Paper No. 17. Manhattan, KS: Center for Faculty Evaluation and Development, January 1987.

Improving multiple-choice tests

Multiple-choice tests can assess higher levels of learning, such as integrating material, crucially interpreting data, and contrasting and comparing information. They also are useful for diagnostic purposes—to help students see their strengths and weaknesses.

Benefits of Multiple-Choice Tests:

• Assess the ability to integrate information from several sources.

• Provide an excellent basis for post-test discussion of learning topics.

• Provide a comprehensive sample of subject material as you can ask many questions.

Limits of Multiple-Choice Tests:

• Open to misinterpretation by students who read more into questions than was intended.

• Difficult to construct effectively so all students will have the same interpretation.

• Often fail to show higher levels of thinking or knowledge beyond the options listed.

Use Multiple-Choice Items When:

• You want to test the breadth and variety of student learning.

• You have time to construct the test but limited time to score it.

• It’s not important to determine how well a student can formulate a correct answer.

Before You Write a Multiple-Choice Test:
1. Have a thorough mastery of the subject matter.
2. Develop and use a set of educational objectives to guide what you want students to learn.
3. Be a master of written communication so your can write with precision and simplicity.

Constructing Multiple-Choice Items:
1. Spread the work across time.
2. Use note cards for writing the items.
3. Write items that evaluate higher levels of thinking.
4. Write the stem first—a single, definite problem significant to the course that includes essential information.
5. Concentrate on evaluating student ability to understand, apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate.
6. State the problem concisely but completely.
7. Avoid unnecessary repetition in the options; include those phrases in the stem.
8. State the problem or ask the question in a positive form.
9. Write the correct or best response after writing the stem, and then write the distractors.
10. Avoid making the correct option longer than the distractors.
11. Make all distractors plausible, distinct responses in language students are familiar with.
12. Critique for changes in style, format, and grammar between the stem and options.
13. Be careful in using specific determiners such as "all," "never," or "always."
14. Use "none of the above" with caution.
15. Arrange options in logical order—i.e., alphabetical or numerical—if one exists.

Test Layout:
16. List options on separate lines, arranged in a vertical column.
17. Use capital letters for response options.
18. Check for random distribution of the option positions.

Adapted from Clegg, Victoria, and William E. Cashin. "Improving Multiple-Choice Tests." Idea Paper No. 16. Manhattan, KS: Center for Faculty Evaluation and Development, September 1986.