Teaching Tools
Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices | Teaching with Technology | Resources for Funding
1. Evaluation and Assessment
1.2. Assesment
Helping Students Manage and Monitor Their Learning
Among the noticeable differences between high school and college is that students need to take much more responsibility for managing their time and monitoring their own learning. With a challenging workload and numerous diversions in their new environment, first-year undergraduates often need a lot of structure and ongoing feedback to help them stay focused, practice new skills appropriately, and assess their progress continually.
Since frequent assignments can be time-consuming for faculty to prepare, for students to complete, and for TAs to grade, experienced faculty offer strategies which can be both efficient and effective for all members of our community.
- Establish a routine for due dates, distribution of solution sets, and reminders to help students plan their time better. A weekly or bi-weekly routine makes it easier for inexperienced students to set aside regular blocks of time for completing homework, papers or projects. When such a routine isn't practical for a course, in-class reminders help students handle their workloads while they begin to develop better planning and time management skills.
- Make assignments which require students to identify patterns or strategies within or across problems, papers, or projects and discuss these common patterns in class. All too often students are so concerned with just getting assignments completed that they don't look back on their work to consolidate what they learned from it.
- Allow students to "redo" problems with documentation that indicates "what I did wrong last time" and "what I learned from reworking the problem," or encourage students to visit the TA to have these types of conversations.
- Advise students to rework problems in preparation for exams because many think that simply re-reading their solutions is sufficient. If you or your TAs conduct review sessions, incorporating practice on sample problems during the session can alert students who have overestimated what they know.
- Meet individually with any student who is performing poorly in the course, along with his/her TA, and give the student an exam from a previous semester to complete as homework and discuss with the TA. Remind both the student and TA that the process will alert them to where the student is weak and that they should schedule extra sessions to work on those areas. This strategy can help the student follow through on a recommendation to seek help and also help the TA become more proactive in assisting students who are having trouble.
- When you review and grade students' work, analyze error patterns and discuss common errors and their possible origins. Discussion of common misconceptions and errors can help students to detect them on their own more quickly and avoid similar problems in future work.
- Help students develop a greater awareness of their thinking strategies and ways to enhance them. These strategies are rarely explicitly taught and are an important step toward developing more complex learning skills. For example, faculty and TAs can model how to verbalize steps in thinking through a problem or issue and then ask students to do the same in small groups or by writing explanations of their solutions. You can also encourage reflection about readings via short writing assignments or teach diagramming and clustering to help students organize their thinking visually.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
