Skip to content Where Legends Are Made

Category: Assessment

Teaching how to do college: do grades help students learn? Part 2 of 2.

A masculine-presenting person of color showing a big smile while sitting on a green lawn holding papers in both hands and a laptop on their lap.The person’s expression of glee is what I hope students in my courses feel about learning!

by Lisa Beck, Psychology Another option, especially after having the above “let’s get curious” conversation with students part 1 of my post, may be to creatively remove the grading fixation altogether. This leads us to the spectrum of possibilities commonly referred to as “ungrading,” which has become quite the buzz word and hot topic in higher education over the past few years. According to Amy Kenyon, the Assistant Director for Teaching Innovation at Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology: Ungrading […]

Read More from Teaching how to do college: do grades help students learn? Part 2 of 2.

Teaching how to do college: do grades help students learn? Part 1 of 2.

sculpture of a hand holding up a massive tree branch.

by Lisa Beck, Psychology. Do grades help students learn? As a professor, I find myself frequently asking my students some variation of “what is your intention with their work… … this sentence, your research methodology, this intervention, fill-in-the-blank with other activities of the academy?” In mentoring conversations, this may be “what is your goal, and how is what you are doing now helping you to get there?” I also find myself asking similar questions of my own pedagogy: “why am […]

Read More from Teaching how to do college: do grades help students learn? Part 1 of 2.

Teach Your Students Active Reading: Assign Texts in Blackboard with Hypothesis

bookshelves that spell the word "read"

by Lauren Horn Griffin, Department of Religious Studies Your Blackboard course menu includes Hypothesis on your “build content” menu. Hypothesis works with files you add to your course. It also works with any website. Hypothesis is a teaching tool that allows you to have your students “show” how they are reading your course content. With the Hypothesis tool, anyone in the course may add annotations with text, images, websites, and LaTeX equations. Anyone in the course can reply to those […]

Read More from Teach Your Students Active Reading: Assign Texts in Blackboard with Hypothesis

Remote Teaching, Difficult Topics, and the Cultivation of Political Judgment: Lessons From the Israel/Palestine Conflict

a red and a blue zipper running across each other

by Daniel J. Levine, Political Science and Religious Studies This post outlines a set of group assignments developed while teaching The Israel/Palestine Conflict (PSC 344) remotely in Fall 2020. I start by outlining the challenges that typically attend teaching on this topic. I then take up the circumstances faced when planning for it late last summer: the transition to remote teaching and an increasingly partisan political climate. Finally, I describe a set of assignments intended to address those challenges, assessing […]

Read More from Remote Teaching, Difficult Topics, and the Cultivation of Political Judgment: Lessons From the Israel/Palestine Conflict

Using Gradescope to Give Detailed Feedback on Assignments

construction site with grader at work

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies/eTech Did you notice the “Gradescope” option under the “Build Content” option in your Blackboard courses in Fall 2020? Perhaps you also noticed the Gradescope resources posted by the Center for Instructional Technology? Thanks to the support of the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, and the Office of Information Technology, UA provided Gradescope for everyone using Blackboard on campus. And, thanks to the positive feedback of instructors, it is renewed […]

Read More from Using Gradescope to Give Detailed Feedback on Assignments

What to Do When Your Test Answers are Available Online: Create 1200-Question Test Banks!

stack of books

by Deborah Keene, Associate Director, Blount Scholars Program How often do you check to see whether answers to your tests are available somewhere online? In the Department of Geological Sciences, several GEO 101 instructors decided that we needed to create our own test bank after we found several of our exams, with answers, online (e.g., Quizlet, StudyBlue, Koofers, CourseHero, StudySoup, etc.). Our goal was to be able to create tests that asked for the same core information in different ways each semester, thereby ensuring that one would need to […]

Read More from What to Do When Your Test Answers are Available Online: Create 1200-Question Test Banks!

Piloting ePortfolios in the First-Year Writing Program

Students working on ePortfolios in Dr. Kidd's classroom.

by Jessica Fordham Kidd, Department of English On February 22, 2019, Natalie Loper, Brooke Champagne, and I participated in the Faculty Technology Showcase with a presentation on the First-Year Writing Program’s (FWP) ePortfolio Pilot program, which is in its second semester. This ePortfolio initiative was inspired by Dr. Kathleen Blake Yancey’s visit to UA in February 2018 when she presented “EPortfolios for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.” Her faculty website lists her recent scholarship, much of it related to ePortfolios. The […]

Read More from Piloting ePortfolios in the First-Year Writing Program

Reflecting on Repetition for Student Success in Teaching and Learning

various nearly identical plant leaves

by Deborah Keene, Blount Scholars Program Thanks to Dean Olin, and the College of Arts and Sciences, I was able to attend the Teaching Professor Conference for the first time. There were a wide variety of sessions, but I found myself drawn to the sessions about metacognition: How to Develop Self-Directed Learners, Maria Flores-Harris Classroom Cognition: Using Educational Neuroscience to Enhance College-Level Learning, Angela Zanardelli Sickler Reaching the Struggling Writer: Effective Feedback Strategies, Cristie McClendon, PhD; Jodee Jacobs, EdD; Hazel […]

Read More from Reflecting on Repetition for Student Success in Teaching and Learning

Reflections on Inclusion and Equity in Digitally Mediated Learning Spaces

by Heather Pleasants, Office of Institutional Effectiveness After returning from the Digital Pedagogy Lab Summer Institute (DPL)*, writing a post about “Assessing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Digital Classrooms” seemed to make sense. However, I encountered a few challenges right away: Challenge #1: Who wants to read a blog post that starts with “assessing?”  (…crickets) Challenge #2: How exactly does one “assess diversity?” (Crap. That doesn’t really make sense, does it? …Don’t answer that). Challenge #3: Given our current social and […]

Read More from Reflections on Inclusion and Equity in Digitally Mediated Learning Spaces

Critical Digital Pedagogy in the Modern Classroom: Expectations Vs. Reality

people holding large puzzle pieces on a table

by Cherelle Young, Tuscaloosa City Schools What is Critical Digital Pedagogy? Kate Molloy, a learning technologist with the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at NUI Galway and a peer from the Digital Pedagogy Lab, gave a good, easy-to-understand definition of Critical Digital Pedagogy: “CDP is the practice of reflective, critical teaching in a digital space. We must remain conscious of the agency connected with the digital tools we use. If learning occurs in a online spaces, it must be humanized to be inclusive to […]

Read More from Critical Digital Pedagogy in the Modern Classroom: Expectations Vs. Reality