Partially Ordered Thoughts

I firmly believe that for effective teaching and learning in a class, you need two-way feedback. That means that not only do I give the students feedback, but they also get to give me feedback. Georgia Tech, like most places, have a standardized end-of-term course survey. However, I want to be able to fix things on the fly. To do this, I implement a quick midterm survey through our course management system. I provide a modest incentive to the students to take the anonymous survey (free credit for a reading assignment or three clicker questions), and this time I got a phenomenal response rate. (The survey really is anonymous since our course management system can record a score in the gradebook for taking the survey without attaching a name to the responses.) Read more »

Feedback and assessment serves as the second leg of the three-legged stool that is course design. Once the goals have been developed, you have to figure out how to determine if your students have met the goals and give them feedback along the way to help them do so. (Yeah, yeah, this is not rocket science, but until you actually start thinking about it in depth, you don’t realize how complex of a problem it can be.) Fink has a lot to say about assessment, and most of it is good and summarizes Walvoord and Anderson’s excellent Effective Grading or Wiggins’ Educative Assessment. The idea behind educative assessment (as opposed to the more traditional “audit-ive assessment” focusing on regurgitation) is to get better learning through forward-looking (or authentic) assessment, student self-assessment, clear criteria and standards (usually via the use of rubrics), and FIDeLity feedback. All of this makes sense until you get to “FIDeLity feedback”, and then you say “WTF?!”. Fink decided to get cutesy here, but the concept is good. He’s suggesting that we make plans for feedback that is Frequent, Immediate, Discriminating, and Lovingly (or caringly) delivered. Definitely a good idea, just way too cutesy of a way to express it for my tastes. My feedback and assessment plans with questions for readers after the jump