What  makes a good question? How do you write effective answer distractors? Is feedback really used on exams? What tools can be used  to engage students with questions and answers? These questions and more were addressed in this week's Teach Talk Webinar, presented by Katrina Fogelson and Sarah Prosory .  What Makes a Good Question? We need better questions to go beyond simply assessing a student's understanding. As instructors, we should be checking a student's ability to apply the material in a meaningful way.  Starting with Bloom's Hopefully you’ve learned about objectives by now, but in brief: learning objectives help answer the question, "what do I want students to be able to do upon completion of this lesson/topic/module?" Learning objectives are one of the foundational pieces to designing and developing a learning experience. Everything in the course should tie back to them, especially assessments. So, why do we need to think about objectives when we a...

As instructors, we’re all looking to help our students deepen their learning in ways that make the content “stick,” or in other words, make it memorable and meaningful. Cognitive and educational scientists have discovered that strategies such as reflection, retrieval practice (opportunities to recall content), making predictions/hypotheses, and other active learning strategies can have a significant impact on the depth and durability of student learning (Lang, 2016 and Brown, Roediger III, & McDaniel, 2014) but there are practical barriers to implementing these strategies. For instance, how can you confirm which students completed the activities? How can you find time in-class or out-of-class to collect and grade these activities? How can you get students to do these activities ? Fortunately, ASU faculty already have a free and easy-to-use tool to promote these types of non-punitive learning activities that requires no grading time or class time by instructors, and as an added...

Exploring how the decisions instructors make when crafting exams impact students Last week, our Evidence-Based Teaching Seminar series welcomed Christian Wright, PhD. Christian shared his research on assessments, and how instructors should be making careful decisions when writing exams. Faculty must consider a wide variety of areas when creating exams. Depending on their choices, they may be unknowingly causing students to drop out of biology programs. There were a number of questions faculty consider when building exams: The breadth and depth of the content- Do you cover less in order to deepen student learning in a specific area? Certain collaborative activities help students learn better, but the cost is that faculty may not be able to cover as much content The level of the content- Bloom's Taxonomy is often thought to move students from lower to higher cognitive levels. However, if a professor is asking a multiple choice question that requires students to memorize s...

In Tuesday's TeachT@lk Webinar, we talked about creating questions that challenged and engaged students in discussions .We talked about starting with knowing your objectives, and then using Bloom levels to scaffold questions from "Remembering" to "Creating". We evaluated some questions, and wrote our own after learning about the Rise Model and 4 Stages of a Discussion, and how to pose questions that drove students further into content for deeper learning. To support this type of learning, we watched a video on three technologies for the ASU Community, including BlackBoard, Turning Point and Piazza (links are below). Finally, we talked about why having Student-Generated Questions was a great way to involve them in the learning, and we highlighted some activities like: Student FAQ wikis Student Generated Test Questions Using the K-W-L exercise to help students focus on questions before class Be sure to join us for the next webinar on February 21....

By Yawar Baig A key skill for any instructor in student-centered learning, is the ability to ask good questions that lead a student to critical thinking, discovering their own answers, and exploring new ideas. In Friday's workshop we shared some techniques to make this easier, whether using questions for clickers, or having a class discussion. We defined 4 different types of questions, and practiced writing Factual, Convergent, Divergent and Evaluative questions. We talked about the types of questions to use during the four different stages of a classroom discussion. We discussed how to use Bloom's Taxonomy for developing questions, and how important student generated questions were by using the K-W-L activity to get students thinking about their questions before class. (or using it for a "ticket out" at the end of class) Links and resources are listed below: PowerPoint file Handout Additional Resources: The Second Principle: http://thesecondprincip...