Researchers Seek Civically-Engaged Millennial Faculty

The American Democracy Project (ADP) is currently searching for Millennial Generation (anyone born after 1981) faculty members from across the nation who utilize service-learning techniques regularly in teaching their courses.

Those who meet that description are eligible to participate in a research study conducted by Texas A&M University- Central Texas researchers that will explore how millennials, who tend to be highly civically-engaged. are teaching courses that promote civic engagement, community service, and social justice at the university level. The researchers will also be exploring how the civic engagement of millennial faculty has been influenced by their own undergraduate experiences. This research is important to continue to grow the benefits of service-learning techniques that improve learning outcomes for students and create practical benefits for their communities.

If you are interested, please see the full announcement on the ADP blogsite for contact information!

Student Evaluations of Teaching Useful - in Context

Students' evaluations of professors have great value for administrators who seek an accurate
assessment of the quality of teaching at their universities. This is in turn drives their decisions regarding faculty promotion, pay rates, and termination.

One of the problems with placing such heavy weight on student evaluations in making decisions about faculty employment is that students don't always give valid feedback. Students, like most people, don't always play fair. Students will sometimes give poor scores (not to mention rude comments) in evaluations, not because the scores are warranted, but because they felt the class was too challenging or made them work too hard. When these ratings are included in aggregate, they punish professors who simply teach difficult courses or demand high standards from their students.

How can student evaluations be more useful? A recent article outlines some suggestions on using student evaluations of teaching more effectively. The best ideas seem to revolve around cross-checking teaching quality using measurements other than student evaluations alone. For instance, finding innovative ways to assess how much students are learning by the end of their courses, rather than asking them to solely self-report how much they liked the experience of the course, is one way to supplement assessment. Other ideas that have been successfully implemented include classroom observations (both scheduled and surprise) by administrators or senior faculty, spot-checking faculty practices feedback on assignments, and including multiple iterations of student evaluations throughout the semester to give professors a chance to adjust their strategies. The Office of Faculty Enhancement at UNF provides a number of alternatives to end-of-semester student evaluations.

Context is very important in using results from student evaluations, especially because research has shown positive correlations between students' expected grades and their evaluation scores. Essentially, student evaluations are important because they provide direct feedback on how students feel about their professors' ability to educate them. However, they do not tell the whole story, must be taken in their rightful context, and need accompaniment to be used as a key metric in faculty assessment.

Testing Critical Thinking using Multiple Choice Questions - Part 2

The General Education Program and the Office of Faculty Enhancement invites faculty to a continuing discussion and workshop on using multiple-choice questions to assess critical thinking. 

Teaching and assessing critical thinking in student work is a priority for many faculty. Faculty typically assess critical thinking through essay test questions and lengthy assignments, both of which are time consuming to grade. Multiple choice questions are quick to grade but typically are constructed to test recall and comprehension. 

In the first workshop of this series, participants evaluated multiple-choice questions on whether they assessed two important skills associated with critical thinking, analysis and evaluation. 

In this workshop, participants will work collaboratively in crafting multiple-choice test items that assess analysis and evaluation. This event will be especially helpful to those teaching General Education courses that satisfy the Critical Thinking requirement. Participants are encouraged to bring with them 3-5 multiple choice questions that they would like to convert to critical thinking questions or that they would like to modify and enhance to assess critical thinking. 
RSVP is required, email ofe@unf.edu 

Testing Critical Thinking using Multiple Choice Questions
Friday, December 4th, 2015, 11:30-1:00 p.m.
COAS Dean's Conference Room, Bld 51, Room 3201
RSVP required, email ofe@unf.edu

Noodles and Networking Event: Being an Effective Teacher

Being an Effective Teacher: Tips on Class Preps, Course Design and Classroom Management
Presenter: JeffriAnne Wilder, Associate Professor, Sociology
Tuesday, December 1st, 3:00-4:15 p.m.
President's Conference Room, Building 1, Room 2800
RSVP to codi@unf.edu 

Noodles and Networking: A Minority Faculty Learning Community is a pilot faculty community building initiative for tenure-earning underrepresented and ethnic minority faculty led by tenured minority faculty. The goal of this initiative is to create a network that supports the smooth transition of minority faculty at UNF and serve as an outlet for social, professional and community interactions. The President’s Office and Academic Affairs’ Office of Faculty Enhancement are sponsoring this initiative.

At this Noodles and Networking event, JeffriAnne Wilder, Associate Professor of Sociology will address tips for being an effective teacher. She will address the benefits of intentional course design, time management, and dealing with difficult issues in the classroom.
Come and join the conversation.
RSVP to codi@unf.edu 

Being an Effective Teacher: Tips on Class Preps, Course Design and Classroom Management
Presenter: JeffriAnne Wilder, Associate Professor, Sociology
Tuesday, December 1st, 3:00-4:15 p.m.
President's Conference Room, Building 1, Room 2800

Should Students Write Their Own Exams? The Benefits of Innovation

Two marketing professors are espousing the view that traditional college exams, in which a professor writes an exam to assess students' knowledge of course learning objectives, may not be the most effective way to motivate students to learn. Their proposed alternative? Students write their own exams. While it is well-known that humans learn more effectively when they must manipulate materials and ideas to create a new product, rather than simply regurgitate information, many professors would undoubtedly be uneasy with the idea of students writing and taking their own exams.

In their study, the researchers asked students to create exam questions based on a range of recently covered course materials (like most exams) and then answer the questions they had written for themselves. Students were given specific guidelines in terms of what content they needed to cover in their questions, what practical learning objectives the exam should address, and the rubric that would be used to grade the exam. The questions were meant to be predominantly multiple choice, with one short essay question. Students wrote and answered their questions and brought them to class, where the normal time used to take the exam was used instead to discuss questions and answers, during which time students could alter answers, but not questions, if they wished. Then, students turned in their exams to be graded by the professors, who graded them based on the extent to which questions covered relevant course content and learning objectives, how challenging the questions were, and the accuracy of the answers.

The results may be surprising to those outside academia, but really shouldn't surprise any professional educators. Follow-up assessment showed that this method improved student learning outcomes. Because students had been forced to utilize the material at a higher level of processing, by analyzing, evaluating, and creating course information instead of memorizing and occasionally applying it, students learned more deeply. Students were thinking critically about material in the same way their professors had to in order to create an exam that would test student knowledge fairly and comprehensively. When they were required to think like those who have mastery in the subject, they were able to better approach mastery themselves. Although students reported that this method is more challenging than traditional exams, they also reported that they were more motivated to learn as a result and that their exam experience was less stressful. Although this alternative to traditional testing in higher learning is not perfect, it is an important reminder that when faculty stop thinking about education as a static system and start incorporating viable fresh perspectives, students are able to make breakthroughs in the quality of their learning.

Is Your Grading Biased? Beware the Halo Effect

Humans are prone to taking mental short cuts, it's part of the physiology of our brains. We are exposed to so much information throughout our lives and from day-to-day that it is necessary for our brain to utilize mental short-cuts (i.e., heuristics) to help sort information and to determine what should grab one's attention. Heuristics are mental guidelines you create from your experience to help you reach an answer more quickly than by algorithm searching through every possible answer. The only problem is that this quick thinking can also bias cognition and decision-making, and grading is no exception.

The Halo effect is one form of heuristic bias that impacts everyone's decision making. It happens when we find good qualities in an individual and, through experience, incorporate those good qualities as part of our perception of the person. This biases the way we perceive their actions, whether good or bad. For instance, attractive individuals are often perceived to be more intelligent, talented, and generally good more often than individuals of average attractiveness.

The Halo effect can produce biases in grading just like any other area of judgment. In a previous post we discussed briefly how faculty will frequently grade students based on their personal characteristics and past performance rather than solely on their performance on the work in question. Faculty may begin reading an assignment, stop and think, 'so-and-so usually does great work' and allow that judgment to alter the way they grade the assignment.

This bias in judgment and decision-making process is exactly what researchers found at work in a study examining the Halo effect in subjective student assessments. The researchers randomly assigned faculty to observe a student perform either very poorly or very well on an oral presentation, and then graded the student on a written assignment. When grading the exact same student on the exact same writing assignment, faculty members gave substantially higher grades when the students had done well in a presentation before being graded and lower grades when the students had done poorly before being graded. Other than giving either a poor or good oral performance, the student was the same and the quality of the written assignment was the same. And yet the grades were different. Prior experience with students will bias the way faculty members grade students on future assessments, but by being aware of this "Halo effect", faculty can more effectively protect against bias. Making student assessments anonymous is another effective was to reduce biased grading.

Making Office Hours Required for Students: The Best Bad Idea You've Ever Heard

It is well known that students who build working relationships with their professors are
more successful both in college and after graduation. One of the best ways to cultivate that relationship is the simple step of coming to a professor's office hours.

Despite the fact that office hours are theoretically beneficial for students, very few students seem to take advantage of this valuable opportunity. Office hours should be the time students are receiving much-needed mentoring that can lead to increased student engagement, leading to better performance in the course and ultimately to higher graduation rates.

Should faculty then make office hours mandatory for students? The logic behind this move is simple. Much is lost in the translation of course material and knowledge from the professor to the student during the lecture because it lacks personal and motivational factors that are typical in more personal conversations. This effect is compounded when grades and feedback are given only through writing, whether digital or analog. Making a personal connection has always been, and is still, extremely helpful to the learning process. Although practical ways to implement required office hours depend tremendously on course size, the idea that students benefit from engaging with their professors on an individual level about course topics is wholly unsurprising and is worth pursuing.

Let us know your feedback. Do you require office visits for your students? What would be some advantages or disadvantages?