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Examples of Formative and Summative Assessments

Both forms of assessment can vary across several dimensions (Trumbull and Lash, 2013):

Informal / formal

Immediate / delayed feedback

Embedded in lesson plan / stand-alone

Spontaneous / planned

Individual / group

Verbal / nonverbal

Oral / written

Graded / ungraded

Open-ended response / closed/constrained response

Teacher initiated/controlled / student initiated/controlled

Teacher and student(s) / peers

Process-oriented / product-oriented

Brief / extended

Scaffolded (teacher supported) / independently performed

Recommendations

Formative Assessment Ideally, formative assessment strategies improve teaching and learning simultaneously. Instructors can help students grow as learners by actively encouraging them to self-assess their own skills and knowledge retention, and by giving clear instructions and feedback. Seven principles (adapted from Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, 2007 with additions) can guide instructor strategies:

Keep clear criteria for what defines good performance - Instructors can explain criteria for A-F graded papers, and encourage student discussion and reflection about these criteria (this can be accomplished though office hours, rubrics, post-grade peer review, or exam / assignment wrappers). Instructors may also hold class-wide conversations on performance criteria at strategic moments throughout a term.

Encourage students' self-reflection - Instructors can ask students to utilize course criteria to evaluate their own or a peer's work, and to share what kinds of feedback they find most valuable. In addition, instructors can ask students to describe the qualities of their best work, either through writing or group discussion.

Give students detailed, actionable feedback - Instructors can consistently provide specific feedback tied to predefined criteria, with opportunities to revise or apply feedback before final submission. Feedback may be corrective and forward-looking, rather than just evaluative. Examples include comments on multiple paper drafts, criterion discussions during 1-on-1 conferences, and regular online quizzes.

Encourage teacher and peer dialogue around learning - Instructors can invite students to discuss the formative learning process together. This practice primarily revolves around mid-semester feedback and small group feedback sessions, where students reflect on the course and instructors respond to student concerns. Students can also identify examples of feedback comments they found useful and explain how they helped. A particularly useful strategy, instructors can invite students to discuss learning goals and assignment criteria, and weave student hopes into the syllabus.

Promote positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem - Students will be more motivated and engaged when they are assured that an instructor cares for their development. Instructors can allow for rewrites/resubmissions to signal that an assignment is designed to promote development of learning. These rewrites might utilize low-stakes assessments, or even automated online testing that is anonymous, and (if appropriate) allows for unlimited resubmissions.

Provide opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance - Related to the above, instructors can improve student motivation and engagement by making visible any opportunities to close gaps between current and desired performance. Examples include opportunities for resubmission, specific action points for writing or task-based assignments, and sharing study or process strategies that an instructor would use in order to succeed.

Collect information which can be used to help shape teaching - Instructors can feel free to collect useful information from students in order to provide targeted feedback and instruction. Students can identify where they are having difficulties, either on an assignment or test, or in written submissions. This approach also promotes metacognition, as students are asked to think about their own learning. Poorvu Center staff can also perform a classroom observation or conduct a small group feedback session that can provide instructors with potential student struggles.

Instructors can find a variety of other formative assessment techniques through Angelo and Cross (1993), Classroom Assessment Techniques (list of techniques available here).

Summative Assessment Because summative assessments are usually higher-stakes than formative assessments, it is especially important to ensure that the assessment aligns with the goals and expected outcomes of the instruction.

Use a Rubric or Table of Specifications - Instructors can use a rubric to lay out expected performance criteria for a range of grades. Rubrics will describe what an ideal assignment looks like, and "summarize" expected performance at the beginning of term, providing students with a trajectory and sense of completion.

Design Clear, Effective Questions - If designing essay questions, instructors can ensure that questions meet criteria while allowing students freedom to express their knowledge creatively and in ways that honor how they digested, constructed, or mastered meaning. Instructors can read about ways to design effective multiple choice questions.

Assess Comprehensiveness - Effective summative assessments provide an opportunity for students to consider the totality of a course's content, making broad connections, demonstrating synthesized skills, and exploring deeper concepts that drive or found a course's ideas and content.

Make Parameters Clear - When approaching a final assessment, instructors can ensure that parameters are well defined (length of assessment, depth of response, time and date, grading standards); knowledge assessed relates clearly to content covered in course; and students with disabilities are provided required space and support.

Consider Blind Grading - Instructors may wish to know whose work they grade, in order to provide feedback that speaks to a student's term-long trajectory. If instructors wish to provide truly unbiased summative assessment, they can also consider a variety of blind grading techniques.

Considerations for Online Assessments

Effectively implementing assessments in an online teaching environment can be particularly challenging. The Poorvu Center shares these recommendations.

References

Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher Education 31(2): 2-19.

Theall, M. and Franklin J.L. (2010). Assessing Teaching Practices and Effectiveness for Formative Purposes. In: A Guide to Faculty Development. KJ Gillespie and DL Robertson (Eds). Jossey Bass: San Francisco, CA.

Trumbull, E., & Lash, A. (2013). Understanding formative assessment: Insights from learning theory and measurement theory. San Francisco: WestEd.

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Examples of Formative and Summative Assessments Examples of Formative and Summative Assessments Formative Summative In-class discussions Instructor-created exams Clicker questions Standardized tests Low-stakes group work Final projects

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[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: On today's episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, Michelle M. Miller joins me for Your Must Remember This episode 348.

[00:00:12] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[music]

[00:00:21] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

[music]

Michelle M. Miller is back for today's episode. Dr. Miller is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President's Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller completed her PhD in Cognitive Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include memory, attention and the impacts of technology on learning and the mind.

Dr. Miller co-created the first-year Learning Initiative at Northern Arizona University and is active and course redesign serving as a redesign scholar for the National Center for Academic Transformation. She is the author of Minds Online, Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about Evidence-Based Pedagogy in scholarly as well as general-interest publications, including College Teaching, Change, The Magazine of Higher learning, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Conversation.

Michelle is currently working on a book for the University of West Virginia press tentatively titled, Remembering and Forgetting In The Age of Technology, what the science of memory tells us about teaching, learning and thriving in a wired world. Michelle, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:15] Michelle M. Miller: Thanks. It's great to be here.

[00:02:17] Bonni: I saw on Twitter, you sharing that you had developed a new talk and I instantly had a song come into my head, do you know what song it was by chance?

[00:02:26] Michelle: I think I have a feeling.

[laughter]

[00:02:29] Bonni: You must remember this.

[laughter]

I have to know did you think of the song first or the title first or it's a chicken-egg thing we can't quite identify here today?

[00:02:41] Michelle: Well, you know, it did grow out of some talks that I even did in the community years ago for our science on tap event, which is on pause right now. Years ago, I called it Everything You Wanted to Know About Memory But Forgot to Ask.

[laughter]

There are lots of different ways. This is a little bit more refined version of this same kind of topic that I've been talking about for years, but it's really come together in this brand new way. Yes, you must remember this.

[00:03:09] Bonni: There's so much that we could talk about and I know we're already both thinking, "How do we do this?" Because it's designed to be a 75-minute talk when this podcast is not designed to be a 75-minute podcast. I just want to start with you sharing a bit about some of the ways in which conversations around lower stakes testing, what that has helped with and small stakes assignments and a lot of these emerging practices in teaching.

Sometimes then I know from learning from you, makes us think, well, then, it's not important than to memorize things. That's quite the opposite of what you'd like to share. Talk a little bit about what we're learning about learning, but how that doesn't mean that we have to then say memorization, just isn't important.

[00:04:01] Michelle: Right. Finding that great middle path, that's so often what we're doing when we try to bring learning sciences into our teaching, but still make it absolutely unique to our teaching so unique to our students. I think it's perhaps part of a familiar dynamic in a way. Some of this also goes back to the very first conversations that I started having with fellow faculty and when I was lucky enough to reach out to some leaders in the teaching and learning space about this topic.

Even when I first started really saying, "Oh, I want to reach out to fellow faculty about Cognitive Psychology, so the findings of my discipline of psychology and flow that out into this great stuff and marry it with some of the really neat innovations and new ways of looking at teaching and learning in higher education."

Right away, I knew that memory was a hot topic. You're right, it did sometimes come up. We talked about more concrete things like, why should we have frequent low stakes testing in a course? I would notice when I would be able to be in front of a group, this is maybe 10, 12 years ago, that I really started doing this work. I'd started talking about memory and memory research.

In cognitive psychology, that is what we have studied more than anything else. This is really at the core of it and so naturally, I'm jumping into that. I would say the M word, memory or memorization, there'll be a few people in the group who would start- you'd feel that disapproval coming off of them. I'd say, "Oh, I must have said something wrong." For some people, they had this very negative reaction to it of saying, "Oh, shouldn't we be moving away from that in our teaching and learning?"

At the same time, people would come up to me after talks like this and say, hey, I teach Anatomy and Physiology or I teach electrical engineering or something like that, and my gosh, you came out and said it, what I have not said for all this time, I've avoided asking about, which is the memory component of teaching and learning.

There's a lot of different dynamics that go into it but at the end of the day, I recommitted to saying, okay, I'm going to find a way to frame this in a way that's appealing to people who really do care about teaching and learning but to get into some of the nuances and then lastly, to get into the concrete aspects of how we reinforce memory and even memorization sometimes in our teaching.

[00:06:46] Bonni: Now, the second half of the title of your newly developed talk is Why Memory is Important for Learning Even in the Age of Google. I don't know if the track I'm about to go on is going to resonate with you. One of the things I love to teach, I teach a Technology and Leadership class and we talk about personal knowledge mastery. One aspect of personal knowledge mastery is introducing them to the idea of digital bookmarks.

As you can imagine, digital bookmarks can be sorted, they can have tags and I get often a lot of resistance saying, if I wanted to know something, I would just search for it on Google. It's very hard for me to explain, I hopefully, I'm getting a little better at it, Michelle, but it's hard to explain, "Yes, but see, you don't always know what you want to search for." Your brain just doesn't work that way with some of this stuff.

One very personal example, I think I've given it before on the show, but we had infertility in our family for many years. There's a lot of garbage out there, Michelle, [laughs] on the internet about infertility. I don't need to revisit it.

[00:07:57] Michelle: Oh, yes.

[00:07:57] Bonni: I found those treasures and then not only did they help me both from just a personal standpoint, the grief of it and that kind of thing, but also from an informational standpoint, but then I had this top collection of things that would be helpful. Again, that's a very personal thing but within our disciplines, of course, building that network of knowledge.

Now, again, I mentioned, I don't know if this is gonna resonate, I sense, Michelle, that the next thing is then, memorization because having it tucked away in my digital bookmarking tool, there's still love a barrier for me in terms of that opportunity for that deeper learning. I'm I on the right track that this is on the way to what you're advocating?

[00:08:40] Michelle: Yes. You're bringing out yet another kind of layer that's introduced by technology and yes, that I was alluding to in my own way with that little tagline of "even in the age of Google", we need to know things, but you're talking about this other layer of, even knowing what the best sources are and the way to search is also something that is part of knowledge and learning and knowledge is knowledge management in a way in today's world.

Yes, if students are, Heaven forbid, they're researching for things that they're going to need over and over as they progress in a discipline, there's many reasons why it's not going to work. I will say that what you're describing does remind me of one intriguing line of research we're actually going- it's funny, we're going to talk about this today in one of my seminar classes. A line of research that quite provocatively and pretty convincingly showed that when we expect to be able to get back to something, like if we've saved in a particular folder, it dampens or inhibits our memory for it in the moment.

We don't, what we call, encode it as readily and this was very systematically manipulated in this series of studies where people were told some things about trivia facts. It really obscured stuff and they worked it all out and they said, okay, you can either save these in your folder and you can have them later but you have to remember the name of the folder. Just so you know, we're going to erase all this, but we will have a test at the end of this study. If you're really good at remembering and saying, okay, it was in the folder called, bird facts or something, then you didn't remember the facts themselves.

Is this a huge hefty effect that it's going to leap out in real life? Maybe not. This is not the converging lines of lots and lots of evidence, but it was a well put together study. We have to keep that in mind too, that while that may have suited your purposes, to have those bookmarks, memory for the facts themselves might have been a little bit inhibited by going through that process. As those authors also pointed out, I thought- one of the reasons I assign my students to read that article is that they say, you know what, memory has always been collective. It's always been shared.

The net is not necessarily dramatically different than knowing, hey, my dad knows the brand of paint that I should buy or there are certain things that I'm never going to remember because my husband remembers them and vice versa so may be ... it may be part of that too not just some one time thing of it's just specific to Google. What you're describing is a very deliberate way of talking about what do you need to know, at what level do you need to know it and you've really thought that through as part of your teaching.

[00:11:46] Bonni: Yes. I didn't know about that study but it doesn't surprise me at all because I can see it in my own brain. That is not necessarily a bad thing if it's not something that you need to know. Like you said, all of these is in terms of degrees. If we have decided that something is central enough to a discipline, to a skill, attempting to be taught, what have you, what then does your research tell us about the best ways to go about that?

[00:12:19] Michelle: Right. As with a lot of aspects of very mindful learner-centered teaching, it does first come down to that process of very consciously deciding, okay, what do students need to know like the back of their hand? You do not pull out a phone, thinking that through. For many of us, we may not have done that for particular courses. Even if we've taught these courses for years and years, we maybe have never reflected on that so I think it does start with a reflection component.

We're not just saying, well, I'm going to be- What I did when I was a beginning teacher, I used to say, what am I going to put on this test? I'm going to open up the glossary in the back and start picking things so be mindful about that. Now, beyond that, once we've zeroed in on okay, here's what students do need to know, for fluent, good useful practice in a discipline, how do we then make sure that we do not have to spend all of our study time and interaction time just on those things?

Tapping into the findings or core findings of applied memory research, which is this wonderful aspect of the literature that's out there. Top of the mind, retrieval practice, ask any cognitive psychologists, we will evangelize about this. It's so wonderful because this is such a success story. Again, when I think back to 10, 12, 13 years ago, if I said, hey, retrieval practice is this process where you actively pull information out of memory. It can be a quiz. It can be a formal test of some kind, but it can also be sneakier stuff like, hey, let's all have a brain dump and write down what we remember. All that's retrieval practice.

If I said that, people would stop in their tracks and say that's very counterintuitive. That can't be- but now when you say it, then more and more hands go up and say yes, I've heard of this or sometimes it's called the testing effect. We found that this is just a super accelerator to memory. These days, I know I'm always referencing this one example about online shopping and you've got your credit card. It's got the three numbers on the back and you always have to type them in.

If you always pull out your card and look at the numbers, you're not going to remember them but if you just leave that card face up for one or two times and just try to pull it out of memory and type it in, actually, you'll start to remember them a lot better. You may make a mistake or two here and there but that's what we find as well is even when students answer a question incorrectly, then if they have the opportunity to go back and review, then you have a better chance of actually picking it up.

That's one of the biggest things we can share with students, we can build into our courses, we can pick technologies that are really geared to retrieval practice, all that. That's a very big one but there are some other principles as well, ones that many skilled teachers have probably hit on intuitively in their own practices.

[00:15:26] Bonni: I'm smiling so big right now because I'm remembering back to, it was a very early episode, I got to speak with Robert Bjork who's at UCLA and runs a memory lab there. Still, I don't forget his quote, "Forgetting is the friend of learning". I recall very vividly standing up in front of hundreds of people and not remembering his name. It is rather ironic to not get the name of the memory researcher you're trying so hard, guess what, never forgotten it since.

I will say that sometimes when we're able to model this with our students because I forget stuff, you forget stuff, for sure, then they can see that, oh, wow, this actually does work. That everybody forgets stuff, but it doesn't have to be this high anxiety-producing thing. The other thing I'd love to have you share a little bit is how the interleaving and how spacing also get together and do a dance with retrieval practice. [laughs]

[00:16:32] Michelle: Love the imagery here. Well, interleaving is one that does spark so much curiosity and so much interest among those of us who are really looking to innovate with teaching and learning these days. Here's the thing though, is that it's a little tricky. People think the term interleaving, and it's a very evocative term. We think, oh, that means switching it up so 10 minutes on my English class and five minutes on my math class. Here we go back to English and now I'm going to work on my research methods class. That's technically not what interleaving really is. Now, as per the value of taking breaks or setting something aside when you hit an impasse, there's a case to be made for that.

Technically speaking, interleaving is really most relevant when we're selecting from different ways of solving a problem or a lot of the research is actually on learning to identify and classify examples of categories. That may be a little involved like, for example, a lot of the research, we'll have people study different art styles and different artists and that's a category and there's examples within the category. They're not identical, but they share some features.

Your mind and your brain are doing some computations that are still not totally well understood when you're learning to do that. When I see a new painting and say, okay, how if I have to slot this in a style and an artist, what I would do. Biological categories, bird examples or some neat research that's on? All right, what general bird? Specifically what bird is it? If you've learned on this set of examples, can I show you a new example and can you do that? That's not everything we're doing in teaching but it is occasionally what people are doing and so here's where interleaving comes in.

People do tend to retain more and to pick up this learning more quickly when they study in this interleave fashion, where maybe I'm going to study some paintings from this artist and a few from that artist and I'm going to toggle back over to this kind. Instead of saying, okay, I'm going to sit down with all the impressionists and I'm going to spend an hour on them and then switch gears. That wouldn't be that big a deal, except that that's the way the textbooks are organized and that also tends to give us what a lot of ineffective study techniques do, which is a false sense of fluency or security.

After I've seen the 20th impressionist, I go like I got it, but maybe I don't got it. If I saw that counter juxtaposed against a completely different painting, it would put a little bit more taxing for me to go back and figure that out. The other big thing is that interleaving is still a scientific work in progress. There's research goes back quite a bit. We're not talking about just one or two studies but we're also not talking about this big, deep well of research that we have, for example, with retrieval practice.

That's something I think is also something that I think you know if this is the learning problem, the categories of different ways of solving problems, you know that if that applies to you. If so, yes, take a look at some of the interleaving stuff and see if that would affect how you say set up a homework set or something like that.

[00:20:01] Bonni: What I've tended to do in the past is I'll often create flashcards, maybe using a tool like Quizlet, just as an example, there are a lot of tools out there, but then start with, this is where we just looked at ethical thinkers and frameworks and then we're going to go into this new area, but I keep this in the set. I keep it in the deck and I bring it forward.

A lot of these tools are actually designed to already do this for us, where if I've had a lot of success on one of the cards, I can mark it as, "I got it" or it can mark it for me as, "I got it" and I might see it less frequently and that kind of thing. Should I be thinking more carefully about what goes in that ever-growing deck in the sense of- Because I think I might be- I appreciate what you said about it's a growing area. There's no absolute right or absolute wrong, but I think I might be getting bird examples in there with art examples. Is there something I should be thinking about in terms of that as I help to try to support students in this way?

[00:21:05] Michelle: Yes. This is one of those inside baseball issues but it is a very practical one. Just simply, do you drop an example out of a deck if you've answered it correctly once? There is a school of thought that says, actually, no. Even if you've answered a question or a type of question correctly once, twice or something like that, that there's still benefit to the retrieval practice. I might balance it too. If it's key, if it's an absolute core, that might be good to stay in that deck till the last day of the course.

I think, for example, in psychology with research methods or something like that, P-values, that's a statistical decision. This decision but it's not a complicated thing to learn, but you have to know these and students forget. That it is a bedrock thing that maybe should be in there all the time. There are probably other terms I might want to drop out if they're a lower priority. Other people will say, well, from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to concentrate more on what you miss and keep those in the deck even if the deck is more of a figurative thing.

I think as students get that metacognitive, savvy and insight developing, that's something that they're probably naturally going to do as a function of quizzes and tests. That's yet another wonderful thing the tests do, is we can't just gravitate unconsciously towards the stuff we already got, which I always did that ... when I was a college student. It's like, "I like this part. I'm going to stay on this. I'll just pretend that this isn't over here." Tests, really, they lay it on the line for you. You look at it and go, "Yes, I got that one wrong again." There's a real balance there.

[00:22:55] Bonni: I like your example of the teaching a research methods class. You mentioned the P-value. I don't think that you're saying keep the quantitative stuff separate from the qualitative stuff because how it's going to show up to me in real life as a researcher, I might be doing a mixed method. Because, again, I think I might be caught up on the categories of stuff, okay to mixed categories, yes?

[00:23:19] Michelle: Yes, mixing categories during the study phase or maybe a way to make this intuitive for some, say, in STEM disciplines. Ecuador's working with a lot of faculty in one of our first-year programs. I would hear some version of this from different STEM faculties. They say, well, students come into my course, a chemistry course, and they're like, they've got all this math coursework under their belts. They've got the pre reqs. They've got good grades. We know that they can do the mechanics of the problem. The issue is when I haven't set the problem up for them and said, okay, it's this kind of problem. That's where they get stuck. They'll be so frustrated, like, why? What is it with today's students?

Well, that's a practice issue. You can just say, well, that is a skill unto itself, identifying and setting up the problem. We see versions of that. I saw it at research methods too, just like, first, you got to figure out how to break this down and identify the parts of it or figure out what statistical test is appropriate, then you can go run and do the test. Well, if students are never in that position of, I got to set it up for myself and it's messy, and it's frustrating, and I just want to get to that solution part, if they're not sitting in that stage, well, what do you know? Like anything else, we don't practice it, it doesn't happen.

[00:24:46] Bonni: That's such a good example too because we wouldn't want to be giving the impression that retrieval practice is only practiced in something akin to flashcards, that there's different ways. It's that practice part or what is it that you're trying to practice? Anyway, I know you had something to share about spacing as well and now that we've touched on these other dance partners for retrieval practice.

[00:25:10] Michelle: Spacing is another one of these that I think a lot of students hit on for themselves, faculty hit on for themselves, although they may not really have this full grasp of why it works. It works for various reasons. Now, spacing is sometimes called distributed practice. That's a really descriptive term. It's the anti-cramming principle that if you recurs or retrieve or study something in small, small bites more distributed over as much time as you can, that each one of those bites will deliver more than it would if it were aggregated into one big mass.

We tell students, ... they may not really understand that it's not just about an organizational issue, it's also a memory issue and they're getting more out of the time. You've described Quizlets, for example. Those are great because you can do those while you're waiting for your Zoom meeting to start. I think, as students, they can start to develop some of these neat techniques for themselves and practices for themselves. They also hit on, "Well, hey, I can fit this in here and fit that in there."

If we're talking about academic work where I'm really getting involved in producing something, I'm writing a paper, I'm setting up a study, I'm conducting analyses, well, there, the takeaway is not memory. I'm not saying, "Work on your paper for 10 minutes and then put it in." There are times when you do need momentum and you do need that, I guess, what Cal Newport calls the Deep Work. We're just talking about, let's establish, get those basic facts down in this course. That's where spacing is absolutely your friend.

[00:26:57] Bonni: We've talked about different ways of enhancing our memory. I know a big part of your work then is that that's not where it's over. It's not an either/or. It's not that I either focus on memorization or deep learning. Could you talk about the connection between memorization and that deeper learning?

[00:27:18] Michelle: Right. Or another metaphor is higher learning. I think it's wonderful that Bloom's taxonomy, that now-famous pyramid, it's set up like a pyramid for a reason, there's a hierarchy here and that's fine. It's great that we all know about Bloom, and we're thinking about it, but it does, I think quite naturally, we want to shoot straight to the top. We want to hit the good stuff. I want my students to be doing critical thinking and analyzing and finding different ways to interpret or critique articles that they read and setting up their own studies someday. I want that. I want that really badly.

I do think that many of us have absorbed, I know absorbed early on, a real false dichotomy. Well, do you want this lame thing where they can tell you where Sigmund Freud was born, or do you want this thing where they can critique his theory? This is a timely example. We actually touched on this a week or two ago in one of my Introduction to Psychology courses. Well, if I say, hey, I want you to be able to look at Sigmund Freud's psychodynamic theory of the mind and look at how that really reflects his culture and it's not universal, you need to know where he was born.

I had a student I always talk about from Austria and blah, blah, and they'd chat, go, "Wait a minute, he was from Austria? What? I didn't know that." These things do naturally go together. I would invite all of your listeners to, again, reflect, sit back and think, "Where are those touchpoints between things that I really just know, again, not without googling it, and things that have the complements, these higher things that I really want students to know?" There's that kind of really intuitive way we can come at this and start to break down that dichotomy and see how these complement each other.

There's also, again, more emerging research out there. A lot of it is actually anchored in looking at retrieval practice, but I guess the bottom line of some of these newer studies is that they show when students are doing study practices that are more efficient for memory, like retrieval practice instead of just passively review. When they're doing that, you see a quicker shift towards some aspects of higher thinking that we can actually pin down. Things like being able to draw inferences when you're given a set of facts saying, okay, you're looking at this, therefore, this.

I want to caution people here that there's not really a study or a line of research emerging about thinking skills in general. In fact, I'm not sure that that sort of global, I can think about anything ability exists. I'm just going to say that. In these very specific things that we can pin down, we can measure, that's pretty exciting. Probably what's going on is I'm establishing this more strongly, I've got down past these facts about Freud or I know about the Impressionists. Now I can think about them more. There's also that argument to be made.

[00:30:31] Bonni: I experimented a bit with having students memorize the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That's from a book by Stephen Covey from long ago. The reason why I had them do it- and you talked about this, Michelle, the importance of reflecting on what's important, it wasn't important. I never gave them a test that was a graded test that they had to show me that skill, but we would do regular practice. You can do that pretty quick within our class sessions, but the reason why I did it was because, otherwise, I was not sure that it would be enough in their mind to be able to look in for the ways that these habits did or did not show up in their life.

Because a lot of what was graded, what was assessed, one of them is, be proactive. Being able to see examples of that showing up in their lives and in the lives of other people that they know, it's really hard to do that kind of reflective work, and again, I'm speaking not as a researcher, this is very anecdotal, but if they're not already in your mind to be thinking about.

Since I don't have the opportunity to send them all little messages to their phones or- those studies where they're like, "How are you feeling right now?" That wasn't set up for this given class, it seemed like that was a way from my understanding of how to help them have the deeper reflection. I don't know if that sits well with this example. I just thought I'd throw that out there and see what you think.

[00:32:05] Michelle: Well, among other things, I think you hit on other than retrieval practice, one of the powerful things that we do do to get students to really, really remember. Stephen Covey's principles, five years later, 10 years later, they're going to know that and understand them. You asked them to link it to their own lives. I think you're doing both. Here, there's that dance again. We're doing the tango, and here's, "Okay, I remember what the principles are. Here's what they look like. Here's why I care about them."

Both of those are going to carry each other forward. We call it self-reference effect, hugely powerful. Who couldn't stand to bring this into their classroom more to say, "Okay, you give me three examples of whether this has ever applied to you and if not, let's talk about that too." You are getting those, down-pad. I think a really conscious teacher too, they'd it's not just enough to say, "Okay, now my exam's list of principles." Maybe it has that, but it's both-and, and we also want to look at the application of it.

My money would be on the active learning that your students, years from now, will have that deeper understanding and also be able to characterize it. Even if they don't remember all seven, they can probably get a few of them and they can characterize that group in general. That's what we want.

[00:33:36] Bonni: The reflection is just so key, and we also need to be doing it with each other, with colleagues. I say colleagues specific to our universities where we work, but also collectively in our disciplines, to be having an inter-discipline- Is there a place where this kind of reflection doesn't bode well? Really so crucial to be thinking and talking about those things. That's, I think, one of the ways that your research in this area is just so hopeful because we can get so many different examples that can both challenge us and inspire us in these areas.

Speaking of which, I guess before we get to the recommendations segment, I'd love to hear from you if there's anything that's really inspiring you. You've already shared a number of examples in this episode, but is there anything that I didn't ask you about where you think, "Wow, this practice is inspiring me or this person is inspiring me or here's some of the thinking I'm doing in these areas that's really creating a spark" in your own work?

[00:34:38] Michelle: The faculty who are so patient with my follow-ups that I do get to work with now remotely, that is a big inspiration. Each group that I get to work with bootstraps me up to bring more insights to the next group and so on. We've really done a good job I think in the professional development area and in higher learning in general to make the most of these remote events. I would say to all the folks who've sat with me on many a Zoom conference or a workshop that we did in Teams and you responded to the key questions that I asked folks are, "Okay, you tell me, what are the key things in your discipline?"

It's so amazing that every single time, well, not as frequently as I used to, but I'll get to talk to somebody in a discipline that I'm not familiar with. I teach Civics and Government or I teach Air Conditioning Repair. There's always a first. That ties in as well to my great love of and advocacy for whenever we can, working across disciplines and across specialization. That's a really, really big one.

[00:35:55] Bonni: I don't know if you've seen this but I can't imagine that you wouldn't have. So much of it prior to the pandemic was, "Oh, you could never do that online." Or technology would never provide those affordances. While I do not want to dismiss the devastation of the pandemic and I always have to be very careful when I say this because it's had awful effects all around the world, and so I never want to be a silver lining kind of person, that's not at all.

In this very bad time, in this very time of devastation, there are still those people, though, that conversation feels like it's shifted to me to "How could I do this?" Those have been some really interesting conversations, and so much with our colleagues and faculty.

[00:36:45] Michelle: Yes, I agree too. The silver lining narrative is going to be one that we are going to need to counter that for a long time going forward. Absolutely. With a lot of online learning, with our online interactions, it's also sometimes not, oh, here's this completely other thing that we never could do before, now we can. How do we hang on to that? Now we go back, and many people say, "After I taught online, I picked up things I took in my face to face classrooms." I think that you're absolutely right. There's things that we can take. Instead of just a straight replica, making everything just like it was face to face, sometimes you can find hidden gems.

[00:37:37] Bonni: I've got a perfect segue coming up for the recommendations segment, but I can't quite get to it until I start by thanking today's sponsor, and that is TextExpander. If you've been listening for a while, you know that they are the longest-running sponsor and are a big part of my productivity system. In fact, I just got my annual 2020 report of how much time I saved with it. Let's just say it confirmed, I didn't need it to confirm, it confirmed that it really does save a lot of time.

Also, I noticed that it sends out, not just how much time you save but your common snippets, what they call snippets where you have these easy to remember letters or numbers or whatever it is. For me it's the letter Z, often, followed by a series of letters. Z-E-S-I-G is going to get my electronic signature, for example. It showed me all the ways in which it helps me be more consistent in terms of my writing and correcting things as I'm going. T-H-E is often spelled apparently T-E-H by me as I'm typing. It's just a wonderful tool.

It works across a number of platforms, including Windows and Mac and also on the iOS operating system, so your iPhone and any tablet, if you've got an iPad, for example. It just helps us save time, be productive and it's really easy to set up and get started. You can have it make suggestions to you. It can notice when you are repetitively typing the same thing. I've turned that setting off. Although, maybe I should turn it back on. I find that, if I put my mind to it, I can find really easy ways to save a little bit of time on something simple.

It could be something a little bit more complex. It's not hard to set up but I've got the show notes in there. I just type T-I-H-E, as in teaching in higher ed, S-N as in show notes, and it pops up and says, "Who's the episode with, and when's it supposed to air, and what other information do you have?" It just saves that time of inputting the information so I can spend a lot more time in preparing for the conversations I'll have with the guests and also in putting together the resources for the show.

Once again, I'd like to thank TextExpander for sponsoring today. If you head over to textexpander.com/podcast, you can get 20% off your first year. You also can just try it out for a while as well. Thanks once again to TextExpander for being such an integral part of my computing life and productivity. Thanks for supporting the show in this way.

Speaking of finding hidden gems, I've got one for you. It's time for the recommendations segment, Michelle. I heard about this television show so many different places, and I just resisted it and I resisted it because the premise is that it is based no something about sports, and I'm not a big sports person, so I thought that's not the show for me. I finally succumbed to the temptation and loved it and binged watched it. It's Ted Lasso, which is available on the Apple TV Plus network.

It's an American sitcom television series. I'm reading now from their show description by Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis, and Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt based on a character of that same name, Ted Lasso, that Sudeikis first portrayed in a series of promos for NBC Sports coverage of the Premier League. The premise of it is that a guy is a coach in the United States and then he ends up being selected to be a coach in a totally different sport that he doesn't know how to coach. There are so many great leadership lessons in this show. It is so uplifting.

It's funny and it's heart-wrenching. It is just a delight, but it also is very difficult to describe. Well, in fact, if I just read that description to myself, I'd be like, "There's plenty of other things out there that I'd really want to watch." I just really recommend it. Again, it's one of those things I know not everybody has subscriptions to all these services, but if you happen to have a subscription already, you can't miss it. It's just so, so very good. Michelle, I'm going to pass it over to you for your recommendations.

[00:41:51] Michelle: Oh my goodness. Well, as a psychologist, I would be remiss if I did not tell people that in as much as people are able, exercise, movement, this is just absolutely the thing to keep doing. It's close to a magic remedy for just a cognitive, staying sharp cognitively, mood, memory, that included. There's nothing else like it. Sorry, guys, but brain games don't do it. Crossword puzzle are fun, but it doesn't really "exercise" your brain, but that does. I'll say that in my household, it's mostly teenagers and young adults. We do enjoy the Les Mills OnDemand exercise subscription service.

It's streaming of a variety of different programs. I can usually get somebody in my house to agree to get up a session of yoga Pilates fusion or cardio, weights or something like that. We really enjoy it. It's a lot of the same classes that I was taking at the local gym when that was open, so it's really nice to have that carry over into, yes, an online format. It's form New Zealand. It's a lovely New Zealand company, so it's very international. There's every delightful version of English that's out there. The New Zealand accents are always a kick, so we love that a lot. That's a really, really big one that I would put out there for people.

Brain games may not help you, but some games are just for fun. I think that's okay. I am not a gamer. I have never really liked games, board games, video games, you name it, but one finally got me, SpellTower. I know I have a limit on a phone playing SpellTower. It's a cross between Tetris and Boggle and Chess. It appeals to my very, very word and verbally oriented self.

[00:44:03] Bonni: These sound spectacular. [laughs] They sound just wonderful. I haven't heard any of these. I've never heard of this exercise thing you speak of. Oh my gosh. I tell you what is keeping me going, it does make such a difference and so, thank you so much for joining me today for the episode and for these wonderful recommendations. It was so great to reconnect. What I love about us ending this episode, Michelle, is I know you'll be back because [laughs] you always do so much good stuff.

I now you'll have a book coming out at some point, as of this recording, we don't know exactly when, but I'm just looking forward to our future conversations and just love getting to continue learning from you all these years.

[00:44:46] Michelle: You as well. Thank you for all that you're doing to help people keep growing and developing and doing everything we can for our students.

[music]

[00:45:00] Bonni: Thanks so much for Michelle Miller for joining me on today's episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. It was great to reconnect and be inspired by your work in memory. Thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to our newly rethought, redone, reconceived weekly updates. They are now weekly. If you have yet to subscribe, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. What that will get you is highlights of the most recent episode along with some related episodes and some resources, quotable words, and such. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time on Teaching In Higher Ed.

[music]
[00:46:00] [END OF AUDIO] The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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You Must Remember This, with Michelle M. Miller - Teaching in Higher Ed

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Michelle M. Miller discusses why memory is important for learning - even in the age of Google on episode 348 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

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Maybe you have colleagues who are the first to leap onto technology trends. No doubt you've heard them reminiscing about all the stuff they started using before anyone else - class Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, in-class polling. Or maybe you're a member of Club Early Adopter yourself?

I am, or at least I've aspired to be. (Have I told you about the web pages I put up for my class back in '95?) Back in the day, those of us in the club had to kludge together solutions using tech that wasn't made for teaching. Today, however, you have your pick of hundreds of products, custom-built for education or even for specific disciplines. Furthermore, many of the earliest technologies - think: web pages and blogs - are now something truly anyone can use, no matter your level of technical expertise.

And therein lies the problem: With such a wealth of options, how do you choose what will work best in your classroom?

In technology, as in so many things, just because you can doesn't mean you should. It takes college students one hot minute to figure out when technology is just a useless embellishment, and they're unforgiving when you have no good answer for why you chose to go with digital materials when pencil and paper would have sufficed.

Using technology well means being selective. Choosing the right tech tools for your teaching means making strategic choices, weighing costs against payoffs, and staying laser-focused on your course goals - and that is what this guide aims to help you do. It's for anyone who is in the process of creating a new course or redesigning an old one and needs advice on which technologies to use, how to use them, and why.

What You Need to Get Started

There was a time when advocates naïvely believed that technology would turbocharge learning by its mere presence in class and that "digital natives" craved it in every corner of their lives. Today even the most hard-core technology enthusiasts have moved on from those simplistic ideas, and advocate much more mindful decision-making about how to use technology in teaching. Even if your decision about what to use winds up being "nothing," you can make the choice knowing that you've done right by your students.

I'll go further and suggest that these choices are worth considering every time you update a syllabus. Given that ed-tech companies and products today seem to proliferate, mature, and die at roughly the same pace as fruit flies, chances are good that things have changed since the last time you sat down to plan the course.

So where do you begin? To make good tech choices for your teaching, you first need to know:

What is the technology for? Is it for a course or a set of courses? A module? A particular activity? Thoughtful technology choices aren't generic - they're wedded to a specific discipline and course, and even to specific areas within a course.

What are your learning objectives and outcomes?Successful tech choices are, above all, goal-focused. You'll need to have your course goals and priorities at hand as you consider your technology options.

What are the hardest, or most failure-prone, aspects of what you're teaching? Make a list of the pinch points - material that students repeatedly stumble over or just find boring; concepts that you find yourself having to reteach, time and again. Think about all of those moments when you get a bad feeling that students are leaving your course underprepared for the next one.

That last question might surprise you, especially because it has no obvious connection to technology per se. But it belongs here because, ultimately, you will be weighing the value of dealing with those persistent problems against the costs of technology. And make no mistake, the costs are real. Later in this guide we'll look at exactly what those costs are and how to keep them down. But it follows that technology needs to earn its place in your classroom by providing tangible benefits, and it has the best chance of doing that when it targets the hardest or most time-consuming aspects of a course.

Get a Sense of the Possibilities

The first step is to survey the landscape of educational technology. Because you're an academic, you always risk getting sidetracked by theoretical debates - on things like how to define the meaning of "educational technology," and what does or does not qualify as such. Don't get bogged down by such formalities as you explore the field of options.

I don't mean to disparage that line of scholarly inquiry - it's an important one for specialists in the field, and it has produced some elegant ed-tech taxonomies and other organizational schemes. If definitions, theories, and systems are your cup of tea, you can explore them to your heart's content. There's everything from a John Dewey-inspired framework for classifying forms of technology-aided teaching and learning, to a theoretical discussion of what it means to learn with rather than from technology, to a periodic table of educational technology.

But for the purely practical purpose of course planning, examples are a lot more useful than theory, and a sense of the possibilities is more useful than attempting to delineate the boundaries.

After all, at a basic level, anything students use to enhance their learning - chalk, paper airplanes, protractors, Play-Doh - can count as educational technology. None of those things are what most of us mean when we think about technology for teaching. Our focus here is on digital devices and platforms: apps that run on smartphones, audio and video media, social media, web-based systems for reviewing and practicing course concepts. You get the picture.

For every one of those technologies, there are nearly limitless ways to weave them into your courses. You could, for example:

Set up a fast-paced, low-stakes quiz game that students play in class using their own mobile devices.

Have students use their own smartphones to take a virtual-reality tour of a cultural or historic site.

Ask students to tweet photos of something they see, while going about their day, that illustrates topics they're learning about in your class.

Organize a blog for students to post accounts of their travel experiences during a study-abroad program.

Ask students to make their course assignments public through YouTube or Medium.

Replace a traditional textbook with courseware that presents content in a personalized way and also tests students on the material as they work their way through it.

Use interactive multimedia that students can explore as an illustration of course content.

Produce your own narrated videos that students can watch online on their own time.

Feeling creative yet? Ed tech really does span everything from email to virtual reality, and new ways of using it are being invented all the time. Your institution's e-learning or faculty-development center can probably point you to up-to-date collections of technology ideas - either a web page the center has created itself or similar sites out there on the web. (For a great example, check out Jane Hart's online Directory of Learning & Performance Tools.)

Here are other sources you might tap for inspiration:

Take a look back through scholarly articles you read and saved related to teaching. Do any of them use technology in a way that appeals to you?

Try perusing teaching-oriented journals for ed-tech ideas. A good journal to start with is College Teachin g, but there are many others linked to specific disciplines such as psychology, chemistry, science teaching, and engineering education.

Tap your local colleagues for their expertise. If you hear faculty members enthusing about a new tool or technique they are trying, corner them. Talk with academics who are familiar faces at teaching conferences or who haunt e-learning centers. Take them to coffee and be sure to bring your notebook, because they will have reams of advice and suggestions to share.

After surveying the field, you may be feeling overwhelmed by all the options you've discovered. So it's time to narrow your list.
One way to do that: Decide whether you want to use a general ed-tech tool that is discipline-independent (for example, putting your content into a quizzing application), or one that is discipline-specific (such as interactive laboratory simulations, modules that present content online, or quizzes with premade content).

Making that choice, in turn, might lead you back to the big picture of what you want technology to achieve for you as the instructor and for your students. And that segues neatly to the next step in this process.

Figure Out Your Tech Goals

You need a crystal-clear picture of what you want to accomplish with technology. The task of identifying and refining your desired outcomes can be approached using a couple of different frameworks. Such a framework can: (a) uncover which aspects of your course would be best served by bringing in technology, and (b) steer you away from superfluous, why-are-we-using-this tech choices. I'll outline three frameworks I've found helpful in my own teaching.

Focus on those pinch points. Under this approach, your tech goals seek to resolve the most difficult, challenging, or problematic parts of the course. In choosing technology, people naturally gravitate toward tools that seem fun or easy, even if they're not the most useful. You can counter that tendency by setting tech goals that focus on your biggest teaching problems. This also helps ensure that the payoff from these new tools you've chosen will be worth the costs.

Ask yourself the "magic-wand" question. In my work with faculty members, I sometimes ask them: If you could wave a wand and change one thing - a skill students lack, a misconception that stubbornly persists, a task students opt not to do but should - what would that one thing be?

Try asking yourself that question, too, and you may find an area of your teaching that's ripe for the kind of transformation that the right technology can bring. For example, when I teach my introductory course in cognitive psychology, I find that students are pretty good at picking up terminology and identifying course concepts in real-world situations. But they often struggle to understand how major principles of psychology are derived from patterns of data obtained in laboratory experiments.

Getting students to make that mental leap is my magic-wand issue. To deal with the problem, I turn to technology: I assign an online laboratory application that simulates classic experimental paradigms in abbreviated form. This online lab lets students see and experience - from the perspective of a research subject - the procedures they've read about in the textbook. Most important, as they complete the lab, they can see whether the quantitative results they've generated align with the theories they're learning about in class.

The pinch-points approach is similar to the Decoding the Disciplines framework created by David Pace and Joan Middendorf of Indiana University at Bloomington. Their system encourages faculty members to identify and focus their teaching on the "bottlenecks" - like analyzing primary sources or interpreting data - where students consistently run into difficulty. (This approach also has roots in the Universal Design for Learning movement, which we'll return to later in this guide.)

Use backward design. This is a powerful strategy for figuring out tech goals. Like the name implies, the idea is to start your planning with an end in mind. In the case of teaching, the end goal essentially corresponds to all the things that you hope students will know and be able to do by the end of the course. Once you've defined your end goals, use them to plan the semester - making sure that everything students do (i.e., learning activities) and everything they turn in (i.e., assessments) are tightly aligned to those objectives.

I find that the backward-design concept accommodates technology choices particularly well. Especially toward the end of the design process, when you are figuring out the details of how you'll arrive at the end goals you've laid out, you can dive back into the larger pool of technology options that caught your eye and choose the ones that map onto the goals.

Take as an example some of the features my colleagues and I have added over the years in redesigning our "Introduction to Psychology" course. We started with our big-picture goals, one of which was for students to build a knowledge base of major findings and theories. No surprise there, but we also wanted students to be able to identify connections between the course and the real world.

Our goals drove the kinds of tech-based learning activities we created for the course:

To push development of knowledge, we had students take weekly online reading quizzes and answer factual questions using in-class response devices - not so much to measure their knowledge as get them actively recalling it (a strategy that, as you'll see in the next section, is particularly effective for memory).

For enhancing their understanding of how psychology plays out in interesting real-world contexts, we assigned students to: (a) complete selected interactive activities we found on the web, such as this one that tests how well you can tell fake smiles from real ones, and (b) send in a brief reflection on the experience via the course's learning-management system (LMS).

Make tech choices through the lens of the learning sciences. I use this framework most often to make goal-focused technology choices for my own courses. In my book, Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and elsewhere, I've argued that one of the best reasons to use technology in teaching is that it offers ways to put into practice the extensive body of research in cognitive psychology and related sciences on how human beings learn.

The research on attention, memory, reasoning, problem-solving, and other learning principles is incredibly powerful. But it can be difficult to put those principles to use in your classroom without some kind of technological aid.

Take the concept of retrieval practice, a cognitive principle you can dig into in more depth at this web site, in this article by The Chronicle's teaching columnist James M. Lang, or in this episode of the Tea for Teaching podcast. Retrieval practice is what you do any time you pull information out of your memory. It kicks in when you're taking a test, a practice quiz, or any other kind of assessment. But it can also operate when you are using flashcards or writing in a journal to induce recall.

Multiple studies (for example, here and here) have established the effectiveness of retrieval practice for promoting memory - allowing students to remember more information per minute invested than just about anything else they can do with their time. This is exciting news for teachers because, although building a base of knowledge isn't the be-all and end-all of learning, it is an important part. And it's something that has to be managed if students are going to have time and energy left over to handle other, higher-level learning goals in your course.

Myriad ed-tech tools allow you to take advantage of the research on retrieval practice. For example, you can use your institution's LMS to set up low-stakes quizzes on the assigned readings. There are also quite a few great choices for in-class short quizzes that run on students' mobile devices (see, for example, Kahoot!, Top Hat, and Poll Everywhere) and offer rapid feedback and options to create friendly competition.

These activities can also have the useful side benefit of keeping students attentive during a face-to-face class. That's important because - despite folk beliefs about learning through osmosis - attention is a requirement for forming new memories. When we focus on the fact that memory is one part of learning, and that we can use retrieval practice to promote memory, it sharpens and gives shape to our technology search. Knowing, for example, that you want students to be doing more active retrieval in your course considerably narrows the field of tech options.

Other cognitive principles can produce a similar winnowing effect. One research-proven memory booster is called spacing or distributed practice. It holds that study time yields more - memory-wise - when it's divided across frequent, short sessions rather than concentrated in marathon sessions. Deciding that you want to tap into the benefits of spacing can narrow your tech choices. You might, for instance, decide to offer brief quizzes that students can take outside of scheduled class times. Or send out text reminders of upcoming assignments and class news to get students thinking about course material more frequently than they otherwise would.

Likewise, if your goal is to emphasize reasoning or problem-solving skills, that can point you in the direction of certain technologies. Word of warning, however: Reinforcing thinking skills is a notoriously difficult goal for instructors, and finding the right tech tools to do it is not much easier.

Just having students view certain content won't achieve much. They must be interacting with it repeatedly across varied problems for real learning to occur. So you will want to choose tools that allow students direct, repeated practice and complex, high-level interactions with an extensive base of problem sets, examples, case studies, and other content. Ideally, their practice will also feature feedback and some level of personalization of the sequence, amount, or type of content.

Tech tools with all of those features aren't a dime a dozen. Nor are you likely to find technology that reinforces thinking skills across the board, in a discipline-independent way. Human cognitive processes tend to be wedded to the specific context in which we use them.

Your best bet, therefore, is to start searching within your discipline or even within a specific course topic. See if there's a commercial product you can buy unbundled. If you're lucky, you may even find a good-quality open resource. You can also come at it from a slightly different angle: Start with the type of activity you want - e.g., problem-based learning - and then search for a tool within your discipline that emphasizes that activity (the University of Delaware's online PBL Clearinghouse is a great example).

Turn to the research on multimedia learning. Finally, if you would like some concrete dos and don'ts about the best ways to combine audio, diagrams, and interactive elements in a course, check out the research on multimedia learning - most notably the work of Richard Mayer and colleagues.

Multimedia materials can be highly useful, especially in fully online courses where you don't want to inundate students with page after page of text. It makes sense to use the basic principles from multimedia theory - such as combining audio narration with visual depictions of concepts and processes, and avoiding graphics that are decorative rather than substantive - as a selection guide.

For a full rundown of the theory, it's certainly worthwhile to check out one of Mayer's excellent books on the subject. But even having just the main highlights in mind can help you choose digital resources that let multimedia do what it does best: Combine sight, sound, and language to illustrate complex processes and principles.

Consider the Costs

In choosing technology, you need to balance the benefits against the price tag - especially if you're requiring students to use a tool they have to pay for upfront. There's no standard formula for doing a cost-benefit analysis of ed tech. But in addition to a clear picture of the cash you're asking students to spend, you also need to consider your own costs in terms of time and effort (more on that in a bit).

Then you weigh the costs against the things you hope the technology will deliver, keeping in mind that some of the benefits will be intangible and others concrete. For example, if some technology you've adopted results in more students passing your class, that's a tangible benefit - because every failure means someone has to bear the cost of a retake.

It may be difficult to tease out all of the benefits of a specific technology, especially if it's part of a larger package of improvements you've made to a course, but this is one way to get a ballpark estimate of what students are getting for their money. They won't see the cost-benefit trade-offs that accrue from improved pass rates, but they will see how well (and how often) a technology is used in a course, and that will form a big part of their perception that it's worthwhile.

For example, in the redesign of our intro psychology course, we incorporated student-response systems (allowing students to answer questions and participate in polls via clickers and mobile phones) as a crucial component. Surveys of our students showed they specifically wanted faculty members to use clickers either frequently or not at all: Their perceived value went up markedly once we started using them to administer substantive questions multiple times in a class meeting, and stopped using them as expensive substitutes for paper sign-in sheets.

In your own cost-benefit analysis of a particular tool, be sure to take into account how often students would use it, and what percentage of their final grade would be earned via the technology.

The cost of any piece of technology is a lot easier to justify if it replaces something else that students would have to pay for. Textbooks are the most obvious example - replaced with, say, an interactive courseware system (like this one) or a set of readings drawn from free online content. I've done that myself, for example, by assigning Noba Project modules in lieu of a traditional textbook.

There are other possible substitutions. Instead of clickers that cost money, try free polling apps that run on mobile phones. Professors feeling adventurous could replace an in-person laboratory experience - and its corresponding lab fee - with an online simulation. That last suggestion is somewhat controversial, but there's at least some precedent for it being done effectively under certain circumstances.

Don't think that choosing free products automatically exempts you from weighing costs. Especially if students are registering to use the free version of a tool, what kind of personal data must they provide to gain access? Are there going to be ads involved, and are you OK with exposing students to the number and type of ads they'll see over the course of the semester? In rare cases there may even be questions about what happens to the content that students post on those "free" sites - most prominently, the appropriation of student intellectual property that some critics say is happening with plagiarism checker tools.

I am not a data privacy expert, and I don't think you should have to become one just to take advantage of educational technology resources that are available free of charge. But, particularly if you're designing a lot of the course around one tool, read the fine print first.

Now to turn briefly to the issue of time costs. Before you get too far into a technology project, do the best you can to estimate how many hours it's going to take you to get it up and running. Then estimate how much time you will spend on maintenance, troubleshooting, and answering all the extra email generated by students' questions about the technology.

Your estimate won't be perfect. Just give it your best guess, and ask around to see if someone (like one of your Club Early Adopter colleagues) could let you know what to expect. Remember, however, only you can answer whether the benefit to students and to your teaching seems worth the investment of your time.

Think About Who Has Access, and Who Doesn't

Cost is an access issue for some students, but there are also broader questions of access and inclusivity that are getting some well-deserved, and overdue, attention right now in higher education. As a general principle, all course materials - including technology and digital media - should be usable for people with a wide range of sensory abilities and requirements.

At a bare minimum, putting that principle into practice involves meeting accommodation requirements. But there's more to access than mere compliance, as advocates of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) argue.

The UDL framework is related to, but distinct from, the idea of disability accommodations. An official accessibility policy requires faculty members to accommodate individual students with documented disabilities who need alternative ways to do the coursework. UDL steers instructors away from the idea of singling out a student for individual accommodations on an as-needed basis, and instead encourages them to offer all students alternative ways to complete their coursework. Those multiple pathways are built into the course design. The idea is that these options - such as participating in an online discussion via voice recording instead of text, or reading a transcript of a video instead of listening to it - can benefit all students who use them.

It's worth exploring UDL (here's one excellent resource) in more depth for its own sake. For our purposes, it's useful to look at technology choices through the lens of UDL and find tools that offer multiple routes to the same end rather than standardization. UDL can also reveal unwanted barriers within our technology choices - videos without appropriate captioning, multimedia that is difficult or impossible for students with sensory limitations to access, and other problems.

This played out in my own work a few years ago when a team of designers and I built the Attention Matters! module, an online resource for teaching students about the perils of distraction. Part of the module is an online simulation of a classic research paradigm in cognitive psychology that involves reading words printed in a range of specific colors. But not everyone can see color. So my UDL-savvy design team searched for, and found, an alternative simulation that produces the same kind of results using black-and-white line drawings rather than colored text.

Students are required to complete one of the two versions, although a fair number do both. We are still looking for an alternative activity for low-vision users. But by considering UDL from the beginning, we expanded the number of students who can access the module, and by doing so, we added depth and substance to the exercise as a whole.

Evaluating access is a mandatory step in choosing technology, for reasons both educational and ethical. But don't let that put you off the whole idea of bringing in technology. For one thing, it's often technology that lets you expand the range of options in your course - such as allowing students to participate in an online discussion using microphones or webcams as an alternative to typing in text - in ways that fit with the UDL philosophy.

The more academics demand accessibility when shopping around for course materials, the more pressure will be brought to bear on tech producers to make this a priority.

When Shopping for Technology, Look for These Features

Throughout this guide, I've sought to emphasize the importance of looking at technology choices from both practical and pedagogical angles, and staying focused on your end goals while setting high standards for what you'll adopt. Condensed into a shopping list of sorts, here is what to look for selecting an ed-tech tool for your teaching.

1: Does it align with my toughest course goals? Use one of the frameworks I mentioned above to uncover where technology will deliver the biggest payoff in the course. Look for tools that directly support the course goals that are hardest for students to reach.

Example: Students often struggle the most in mastering high-level thinking skills in a discipline. Developing those skills to a sophisticated level takes a substantial amount of practice. So look for technologies that directly engage students in those thinking skills - through simulations, problem sets with feedback, or opportunities to create and share their own original content with peers.

2: Does it align with what we know about how people learn? In the research on learning, we are at a point where we can safely say that some approaches to teaching are simply more effective than others. Take advantage of this knowledge by fast-tracking technology options that clearly tie in to established principles of learning.

Example: We know from research that quizzes, self-tests, and other tasks that get students retrieving information from memory are all highly effective for building knowledge. Look for technologies that emphasize retrieval practice.

3: Is it high quality? That issue isn't as ineffable as it might seem. With educational technologies, quality breaks down into several concrete aspects, all of which are possible to evaluate ahead of time. They include:

Content. Is it accurate and free of errors and misinformation? Is it clear and engaging? If there are instructions, are they also clear, accurate, and easy to understand? Is the content at the right level for your students? Does it duplicate content from elsewhere in the course? Duplication is not always a bad thing, as it could be a way to reinforce concepts that you want students to know. But if the overlap is significant, consider whether the technology could replace something like a costly textbook.

Capabilities. How well is the product put together, from a technical standpoint? Does it work smoothly and reasonably bug-free? Does it work consistently across a variety of devices and browsers? Does it talk to your campus LMS, or will you have to manually enter course points or other performance data into your gradebook?

Support. Will your institution handle troubleshooting and questions? If not, what is the company or creator offering as far as support? Is there just one or multiple forms of tech support (phone, email, chat, online FAQ)? What kind of turnaround time can students expect, and is it reasonable in light of the timeline students will have for meeting deadlines?

4: Is it a good value? Technology's value is all about trade-offs - between the cost to students, the information they will have to provide to gain access, the amount of instructor time you will have to commit, and the benefits that you think the technology will deliver. Enhancing and deepening learning is the chief benefit. But there could be others, such as more efficient use of study time, replacement of other costly materials, or opportunities to do something fresh and different in class.

Start by making sure you know the full costs. Then consider the question of value from these additional angles:

Are there free alternatives for the type of technology you want to use, and to what extent are they truly free? Will students have to agree to be on a mailing list, give up personal data, or see endless ads? Does the free one really do everything you need it to, or will students likely end up having to spend money on the premium version?

Are there low-tech or no-tech options that would achieve the same thing and cost less? Remember that students are super-sensitive to technology that seems like it doesn't add value. And it's entirely possible that pen and paper, whiteboards, or verbal discussion could be perfectly sufficient, especially within small groups or when you don't need to track student performance in a precise way.

Is there a wow factor? No instructor would advocate for educational technology purely for novelty value, but we can't deny that sometimes it can bring something new and fun into class. It's OK to add that kind of appeal into the value equation as another benefit that can balance out costs.

One more thing: Once you answer these questions for your own teaching, won't you please share what you've learned?

When faculty members swap experiences - be they good, bad, or just interesting - that helps move the whole field forward. It's also a way to counterbalance the inevitable hype, gee-whiz futurism, and salesmanship that tend to come with the ed-tech territory. When you help colleagues sort through the ed-tech options that are best for them, you put the focus of our joint enterprise back on students and learning. Who knows, you might even score a free cup of coffee in the process.

Troubleshooting Common Problems

You've settled on your choices. Now it's time to put into place some safeguards that will keep you and your students out of technology purgatory once the course is underway.

Keep in mind that students are likely to need more coaching than you anticipate on how to use the technology you assign. Especially if you're working with first- and second-year students, even basic things like navigating your institution's learning-management system or setting up a login and password for a publisher's website are going to stump some students. You want to avoid a situation in which the first you learn of their confusion is when you notice they are missing assignments.

As a preventive measure, you can offer one-on-one help on request, orient everyone to the technology in class, set up icebreaker or orientation assignments to introduce the technology, or some combination of those. The point is: You'll need to do something to be sure everyone is conversant with the technology before they start using it for serious work.

If your technology is the type that includes content, you'll also need to check it for consistency and accuracy. Sadly, there continues to be a wide range of quality in courseware and other content-intensive resources. Problems wrought by bad information are not something you want to be dealing with in the middle of the term. Depending on the nature and severity of the content errors, you might be able to excise the problematic material ahead of time, warn students about it, or reinforce concepts in class.

Also be thinking ahead about how you'll manage the grades generated by the technology. Some tools, such as certain online homework systems, can drop grades right into your institution's learning-management system. But that kind of smooth integration with LMS gradebooks is the exception, not the rule. So especially if you intend students to use the tech frequently (and I hope you do), you're going to need to figure out how you will track all of the data points.

Lastly, there's everyone's favorite tech issue: making sure the tools you've chosen are accessible on multiple devices and browsers. This is another area where you don't need to worry about becoming a deep technical expert. However, part of your planning should include reading up on what the product's company or creator says about this issue. Ideally, do some Googling or even run some tests of your own to ensure that the tool will work across at least the major alternatives: Mac versus PC, Android versus iPhone, that kind of thing.

This brings us to the question of tech support. Specifically: Whose responsibility is it going to be? Unless you say otherwise, you as the instructor will, by default, become the 24-hour technical support line.

No technology is reliable enough for you to just set it and forget it. Students deserve to know how to get help - and to have that help delivered to them on a reasonable time frame. That goes double for any software you ask students to install or gain access to via codes, because so much can (and does) go wrong when passwords, credit cards, multiple platforms, and operating systems are all thrown into the mix.

If you want to take on this IT role, fine. But given that you probably don't, you need to find out where students can turn for help. It might be the technology company (in the case of a commercial product) or the help desk of your own institution or some other entity. Post the help-desk contact information (email, phone, social media account or website) not just on your syllabus, but also prominently throughout the assignment materials and on the course website. Be ready to repeat that information regularly in class.

Many institutions, mine included, have specific guidelines about what forms of course-related tech support they will, and won't, provide to students. Colleges do that with the entirely reasonable goal of preventing a crush of student calls to the campus tech-support center about software it's never heard of. When in doubt, get in touch with the campus help desk, e-learning center, or IT staff ahead of time. Explain what you want to do in class, and see if they can provide some or all of the needed support.

Recommendations to Get You Started

Screencast-O-Matic: a video and screen-capture application with captioning capability.

Flipgrid: a platform for disseminating materials and facilitating discussion, in multiple ways (video, text, voice recording).

VoiceThread: an application for presenting media (e.g., slideshows) on which students can comment via video, text, or voice recording.

Padlet: an application for creating customizable, Pinterest-type boards that can be shared publicly or with select people.

Kahoot!: a quizzing and survey tool optimized for fast-paced competitive games played on individual mobile devices.

Poll Everywhere: a general-purpose tool for real-time surveying in class using individual mobile devices.

iClicker: a quizzing and survey system that uses dedicated hardware - much like a handheld remote control device.

Smart Sparrow: a platform for creating interactive digital content.

Here is a list of apps and other tools that I've either used myself and liked, or heard good things about from faculty colleagues:

Plenty of tech tools you may already use in your department or at home are ripe for educational uses. Standouts include YouTubefor ready-made video content and student-created video assignments, Slack for facilitating student-to-student collaboration, Canva and Piktochart for creating visual illustrations, Google Forms for creating interactive assessments, and Google Sites for easy-to-design web pages. Twitter can be a place for students to post reflections about course material. Even Wikipedia can be the basis for interesting assignments in which students collaborate to edit content.

Textbook publishers are another source of useful online content. Test banks, especially ones you can upload directly into your LMS, make it easy to create low-stakes quizzes. You may also find websites, games, and media listed in the textbook or the accompanying instructor guide that you can use as a base for tech-enhanced assignments.

Resources

What follows isn't a definitive list but includes some of the most useful sources of information about choosing technology for your teaching.

Websites

OLC stands for the Online Learning Consortium; this Massachusetts-based organization offers conferences, online workshops, and publications.

Pod Network stands for the Professional and Organizational Development Network; this group offers conferences and publications.

DT&L Conference: The annual Distance Teaching & Learning Conference is in its 35th year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Organizations and Conferences

Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, by José Antonio Bowen.

Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments, by Derek Bruff.

Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching, forthcoming in November 2019, also by Derek Bruff.

Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes, published this year by Flower Darby and James M. Lang.

Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses, by L. Dee Fink.

Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, by Thomas J. Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling.

Books

Podcasts

Choosing technology isn't simple, but it is important. Do all of the things I've listed in this guide, and you'll become not merely an early adopter of technology, but also a thoughtful one.

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How to Make Smart Choices About Tech for Your Course

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Maybe you have colleagues who are the first to leap onto technology trends. No doubt you've heard them reminiscing about all the stuff they started using before anyone else - class Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, in-class polling. Or maybe you're a member of Club Early Adopter yourself?

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Case Studies to promote critical thinking and shared learning

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Case Studies to promote critical thinking and shared learning

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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One of the best practices in teaching and learning is the use of a three-part case study, or a scenario-based story, to help students deepen their understanding of a concept. The three parts of a case study are a scenario-based story that focuses on a specific, hypothetical problem, supporting literature that aligns with the main themes of the story, and guiding questions that help the learner gain the most from understanding the concepts and objectives of the case study by applying critical and higher order thinking skills.

A scenario-based story is a situation, problem, or issue that is used to help students grasp the learning objectives of a lesson. For example, in an educational leadership law course that I teach, one day I might create an elaborate scenario that focuses on several problems and issues that also align with the lesson's objectives and concepts. Another day, the scenario could be a short one- to two-sentence story that is used at the beginning of class to engage students in reviewing key concepts and prepare them for the day's lesson, or at the end of a lesson to review what was discussed during class. Finally, I might present a scenario-based story through a video or news story. There are many great videos on YouTube and many great news stories all over the Internet that offer up scenarios that are easily accessible and provide a visual that may help stimulate learning.

Supporting literature that aligns with the main themes of the case study helps students focus on what is important. This literature can be the texts and supplemental material that are required for students to read for a course, or, for example, it can be state and federal codes that must be followed. Then, the guiding questions are created and used to help students think about the different outcomes that could occur and possibly prepare for confronting an issue in the real-world. These questions can be as elaborate or straightforward as needed.

Like a book study, a case study can provide the necessary platform for students to communicate and collaborate about a situation that concerns a certain group. They can be used to help a group of learners or others focus on a specific concept, or they can help those solve a problem. Additionally, they can be used to analyze a current practice, like an ineffective policy. Although case studies are not a new teaching method, they are a method that can be useful, providing an opportunity for students to think outside the box. Through the use of a case study, students can actively engage in applying learned concepts, objectives, and knowledge to hypothetical situations by using critical and higher order thinking skills to answer tough questions.

Below are brief examples of the three types of case studies that I've used in my graduate course:

1. Elaborate Case Study: A high school senior is caught cheating on an exam. A passing grade on this exam is essential, since the exam grade will be applied to the senior's overall GPA. The teacher respects the student and counts the student as a favorite, especially since the student was accepted to attend Harvard. The teacher decides to ignore the policy and does not report the student's cheating, and allows the grade to be averaged with the student's GPA.

What are the implications of the teacher not reporting the cheating?

How would you have handled this situation differently?

2. One- to Two-Sentence Case Study: You are on campus late one night working on paperwork when you hear laughter and loud talking down the hall. As you approach the raucous, you enter a classroom to find three teachers and their spouses drinking beer.

What do you do next and is your decision based on ethics or fear?

3. Video/News Story Case Study: Please view the assigned videos. As you watch them, keep in mind what you have learned about student speech and academic freedom.

Are there any student speech or academic freedom issues?

Has the student code of conduct been violated with these dances?

Dr. Laura Trujillo-Jenks is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Texas Woman's University.

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Guiding Students to Think Critically Using Case Studies

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One of the best practices in teaching and learning is the use of a three-part case study, or a scenario-based story, to help students deepen their understanding of a concept.

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Great activity to encourage critical thinking and sharing of knowledge in classroom

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Great activity to encourage critical thinking and sharing of knowledge in classroom

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Jigsaw: Developing Community and Disseminating Knowledge

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Students will become “experts” on a topic and then share their new knowledge with peers.

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Seamless Tech Integration given student access to technology

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Seamless Tech Integration given student access to technology

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Techniques to Integrate Technology in the Classroom

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Techniques to Integrate Technology in the Classroom

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Drexel University School of Education
Technology provides instant accessibility to information, which is why its presence in the classroom is so vital. Smart phones, computers, and tablets are already an omnipresent element of everyday life for students and teachers alike. It's only natural that the use of technological devices in the classroom are explored to create meaningful learning experiences for students of all ages.

Utilizing different types of technology in the classroom, including a virtual classroom, creates learners who are actively engaged with learning objectives. The implementation of technology also creates pathways for differentiated instruction to meet the unique needs of students as individual learners within a broader classroom climate.

What Does Technology Integration Mean in Education?

Integration of technology in education simply refers to the use of technology to enhance the student learning experience. Utilizing different types of technology in the classroom, including a virtual classroom, creates learners who are actively engaged with learning objectives. The implementation of technology also creates pathways for differentiated instruction to meet the unique needs of students as individual learners within a broader classroom climate.

How to Integrate Technology in the Classroom

There is a common misconception that the integration of technology in the classroom can be a financial burden for school districts, but students do not necessarily need their own tablets or laptops to succeed with technology. The use of technology during whole-class instruction can foster student engagement for auditory and visual learners. Integrating simple technologies Power Points, games, internet homework assignments, or online grading systems can be difference makers in students' growth in the classroom.

Power Points and Games

Powerpoint presentations can be used to introduce a classroom concept while providing the opportunity for engagement. Along with the use of graphics and bulleted information, links to videos that accompany the ideas presented in the Powerpoint can be embedded within the slides.

Educational apps in the classroom like Kahoot can be used to review information after a lesson or unit. Teachers can create and share Kahoots with one another while students can create anonymous user names to participate in the game. This allows for whole-class participation from students who may usually be reluctant to participate in class. Kahoot is accessible to play on phones or computers and teachers can determine if they want students to work independently or be assigned to teams.

Internet Homework Assignments

Posting homework assignments online (via learning platforms like Blackboard, Brightspace, and Moodle) is one way many teachers can begin to integrate technology in the classroom. Assignments are easily accessible, which can increase student engagement and help students become more organized.

Online grading Systems

Communication is a key element in education that helps teachers, administrators, parents, and students recognize a student's strengths and areas for improvement. Online grading systems such as PowerSchool open and facilitate lines of communication where teachers can post grades, analyze student attendance patterns, and manage transcript data.

Classroom Tablets

For classrooms that are fortunate enough to have tablets for students, technology can allow teachers to implement differentiation throughout instruction. Students can work at their own pace during assignments and teachers have the opportunity for one-on-one instruction.

Listserv

Software such as Listserv allows parents to manage and organize their emails. Parents can receive updates from teachers about important announcements, newsletters, and discussions that keep frequent lines of communication open.

Strategies of Implementation for Age Groups

The benefits of technology can enhance any contemporary classroom. However, the way technology is implemented and used in classrooms of various grade levels and content areas will differ.

Ways to Incorporate Technology in the Elementary Classroom

For younger students, technology can be used to build fundamental skills to prepare them for future independent learning. Students can use interactive games to reinforce math, spelling, phonetic, and reading skills. Sites like Spelling Training permit students or teachers to upload their own word lists to practice word pronunciation and create interactive games. Parents can also use these sites to exercise fundamental skills beyond the walls of the classroom.

Using Technology in the Middle School Classroom

As students begin to take steps to transform into independent thinkers, they can use technology to develop basic life skills. Students at the middle school level will gain independence by having different teachers for each subject. Using technology to acquire skills such as conducting research can be applied to any content area. Websites like Easy Bib guide students to find credible sources through a variety of search engines and teach students to correctly cite those sources to avoid plagiarism.

Technology in High School Classrooms

Once students reach their secondary education, they can discover ways to use technology that can be beneficial for college and career development. Familiarization with Microsoft Office and Google Drive teach students to make spreadsheets, slide show presentations, and share documents where they can receive fluid feedback on their work. Many careers use these elements of Microsoft and Google to organize information and collaborate between colleagues or clients.

Why is it Important to Integrate Technology in the Classroom

Teachers often find success when they present the opportunity to use technology in the classroom. There are various benefits and effects when technology is used for educational instruction and some may argue that not all of the effects are positive. Having an infinite flow of information and entertainment available at any given time could be seen as a distraction, but if technology is integrated into the classroom with routines in place that are monitored or assessed, the pros of using technology in the classroom outweigh the cons.

Keeping students engaged

Active engagement is a key part of any lesson plan. Whether students are working independently or collaboratively, technology engages students because it is interactive.

Helps students with different learning styles

Not all students learn and retain information in the same way or at the same speed. Technology is an opportunity for teachers to differentiate instruction to modify information for the appropriate learning capabilities of their students. The use of technology can also allow students to work at their own paces.

Prepare students with life skills

Technology has become its own form of literacy because of how often it is used in everyday life. Many careers use at least one aspect of Microsoft Office or Google Drive on a daily basis: balancing budgets on spreadsheets, creating decks or slide shows to be presented, or attaching documents to emails to communicate important information. Allowing students to learn and refine these skills prepares them for life beyond the classroom.

For additional information about programs or certifications associated with technology in the classroom, visit Drexel University's School of Education Instructional Technology Specialist Certification program.

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How to Integrate Technology in the Classroom - School of Education

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Check out our list of tips for the best ways on how to use technology in the classroom. Learn the benefits & effects of technology with Drexel University.

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Important to remember how stress (both inside and outside the classroom environment) impacts student ability to learn

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Learning and memory under stress: implications for the classroom - npj Science of Learning

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npj Science of Learning - Learning and memory under stress: implications for the classroom

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Really like this idea of checking in with students to get both qualitative and quantitative feedback about the impact of changes implemented in the course

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This confidential program assists faculty members in obtaining student feedback about the course at a point in the semester where there is still time to adapt and improve.

For College of Engineering and CIS faculty: The College of Engineering offers its own Mid-Semester Feedback Survey program to faculty in the College of Engineering and Computing and Information Science. Faculty from those schools should use the College of Engineering program. Find program information and the registration form here.

For CALS faculty: CALS supports its own voluntary mid-semester feedback evaluation; CALS faculty can participate in CTI's program, or use the CALS evaluation. CALS faculty are required to administer CALS-specific end-of-semester evaluations. To learn more, visit CALS' Course Evaluation page.

Registration

Registration (via this brief survey) for Spring 2023 will be open through February 3, 2023.

Why participate in the Mid-Semester Feedback Program?

Show your students you are interested in what and how they are learning.

Adjust your course to address student learning while the course is in progress.

Getting started with the Mid-Semester Feedback Program

This semester, CTI staff will use the Individual student teaching & learning questionnaire to gather feedback for all participating faculty.

CTI offers consultations on any topic related to teaching and learning. Visit our Consultations page to learn more, or contact us to set up a consultation.

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Mid-Semester Feedback Program | Center for Teaching Innovation

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This confidential program assists faculty members in obtaining student feedback about the course at a point in the semester where there is still time to adapt and improve.

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Important to engage students in a variety of ways to cater to their needs, increase overall content engagement, and provide equitable learning opportunities

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

Reenvisioning the UDL Guidelines

Because the UDL Guidelines are meant to be informed by feedback from the field as well as new research, they have been updated several times in the past. We are in the process of updating the Guidelines once again in our UDL Rising to Equity initiative.

This update will focus specifically on addressing systemic barriers that result in inequitable learning opportunities and outcomes. CAST aims to develop a transparent, inclusive, and community-driven process. If you are interested in collaborating and staying updated on our progress, we invite you to complete a brief survey.

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

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Wanting to focus on providing just the right amount of content interaction for
- Learner-Content
- Learner-Instructor
- Learner - Learner

Strategies to increase overall content engagement will lead to increases in neuroplasticity, which benefits overall student learning