OPID's Faculty College 2003

Designing Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes
Tim Riordan

In these seminars participants will have the opportunity to discuss examples of assessments of student learning outcomes in different disciplines, and to design their own assessments in the context of their respective disciplines. The sessions will include assistance with the articulation of learning outcomes at different developmental levels, with the creation and use of criteria to assess student performance, and with ways of using assessment to provide feedback to students and to improve the design of learning. Other topics to be considered in the seminars include: student self assessment, the distinctions and relationships between student assessment and program assessment, and use of assessment in grading.

Tim Riordan is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Philosophy at Alverno College. He has been at Alverno since 1976 and in addition to his teaching has been heavily involved in developing programs and processes for teaching improvement and curriculum development. He coordinated the Faculty Development Committee for the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, and he has participated in national initiatives on the scholarship of teaching, including the American Association for Higher Education Forum on Exemplary Teaching and the Association of American Colleges and University’s Preparing Future Faculty Project. He has regularly presented at national and international conferences on teaching and learning. He has consulted with more than a hundred institutions on the same issues and received the 2001 Virginia B. Smith Leadership Award sponsored by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Teaching & Learning 101: What Every College Teacher Should Know
Greg Valde

What should every college teacher know about how students learn?
And what should we all know about how to teach?
Are there basic concepts and findings in educational theory and research
that might inform our work?

Do you want to know how your students think?
Have you always wondered about developmental epistemology?
Or the 3 basic principles of human memory?
Or maybe Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive objectives?
Or a taxonomy of affective objectives?
Certainly you’ve been searching for the seven steps in effective traditional instruction? Or yearned for research-based alternatives to traditional instruction?
Or maybe you would you just like to be able to use the word constructivism in a coherent sentence?

These topics and questions will be explored in this interactive and entertaining workshop.
A variety of basic concepts and research findings about teaching and learning will be presented and discussed. There will be plenty of opportunity for questions and dialogue – as well as the opportunity to begin to apply some of these ideas to your teaching.

Greg Valde is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and director of the Teaching Scholars Program at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. At UW-W he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the psychological foundations of education. The UW-W Teaching Scholars Program identifies a small group of faculty each year for participation in an intensive teaching and learning experience. The program involves a seminar, attendance at workshops and conferences, peer partnerships and the completion of a scholarship of teaching project. Greg is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the College of Education Teaching Award and the university W.P. Roseman Excellence in Teaching Award. His most recently published works focus on the development of excellence in college teaching.

Improving Teaching Through Scholarly Inquiry into Student Learning
William. Cerbin

This seminar is for faculty who want to design a scholarly project that focuses on teaching and learning in their own classrooms. The goals of the seminar are to help you:
• identify a research focus related to student learning in your classes
• develop classroom inquiry strategies and tools for investigating student learning
• develop a plan to implement the investigation in your class
• design a project intended to improve teaching and learning and that will result in a scholarly product in the form of more effective teaching practices and course materials
This is not a general seminar on research methods in higher education. Instead it addresses how to do systematic, disciplined classroom inquiry to investigate questions about student learning that matter to you. The project you design will focus on how to improve student learning as it relates to very specific contexts and learning problems. For example, projects might investigate how to improve student learning with respect to a significant course assignment you use, or focus on a common learning problem in your class (e.g., why students have trouble understanding an important concept in your field). The aim is to design a project you can implement in your classes or one that could be the basis for a grant proposal on teaching and learning.
The seminar is intended for instructors who have little formal training in classroom inquiry, but experienced classroom researchers are welcome to participate.

William Cerbin is Professor of Psychology and Assistant to the Provost at UW-La Crosse. In 1998 as a Scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, he studied the development of student understanding in a problem-based learning course he teaches. Since then he has given numerous workshops and presentations on teaching and learning for understanding. Recently, he was selected to be a Carnegie Scholar again to work on a project to help faculty learn to improve teaching through scholarly inquiry into student learning.

The Role of Digital Learning Materials in the Practice and Scholarship of Teaching
Scott Cooper, Alan Wolf, and Glenda Morgan

In this session faculty will use several digital libraries and referatories containing online learning materials and learning objects to use in courses. We will focus in particular on the MERLOT project, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. This NSF-funded referatory contains access to thousands of peer-reviewed digital learning materials. We will demonstrate and discuss innovative ways that digital learning materials can be used to enhance student participation and learning. Digital libraries also are a powerful tool in promoting the Scholarship of Teaching, by providing a peer-reviewed forum for the dissemination of quality educational materials. Faculty will participate in the peer-review of MERLOT materials, and use this experience to explore what makes a quality digital learning material. By the end of the session, participants will leave with a specific lesson plan for the incorporation of a digital learning material into one of their courses and a plan of how to assess the effectiveness of this learning material on improving student understanding.

Scott Cooper is Co-Editor of the Biology section of MERLOT and Associate Professor in the Biology Department at UW-La Crosse. He has extensive experience incorporating technology into teaching, and is exploring the impact of technology on the scholarship of teaching.

Alan Wolf is Biology Learning Technology Consultant in the Division of Information Technology and the Center for Biology Education at UW- Madison. He is a staff consultant in the Biology New Media Center where he monitors emerging technologies and assists faculty in implementing both instructional and research technologies into the classroom. He serves as a member of editorial board of the biology discipline community of MERLOT. Alan received his doctorate in biology from the University of Michigan.

Glenda Morgan is Learning Technology Analyst in the Office of Learning and Information Technology at UW System Administration. She is the Wisconsin Project Director for the Merlot Project and a member of the Learning Objects Working Group of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. She holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota.