Penn State University

Tools and Resources

Alphabetical List

Browse through the tools by the title of the resource.

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This FAQ sheet offers many ideas and strategies for engaging students in active learning, given a large class environment.

This FAQ sheet offers many ideas and strategies for designing and administering meaningful assignments in large classes.

This FAQ sheet addresses many issues related to attendance in large classes.

This FAQ sheet provides a number of strategies related to class and course planning and lecturing in large classes.

This FAQ sheet offers many strategies for collecting student feedback in large classes.

This FAQ sheet discusses issues and strategies related to providing notes and supporting students' notetaking in large classes.

This FAQ sheet provides many suggestions for encouraging student participation in large classes.

This FAQ sheet offers many suggestions for making good use of teaching assistants and classroom space.

A presentation that looks at the research findings on large classes and models for course redesign that help to overcome large class issues.

This document outlines the research evidence for the impact of large classes on student learning.

Research indicates that learner-centered syllabi positively impact students’ perception of instructor
effectiveness and rapport with instructors (Harrington & Gaber-Quilen, 2015). Moreover, learnercentered syllabi can lead to higher levels of motivation and engagement, achievement, and rapport
between students (Karanja & Grant, 2020). This resource provides suggestions for constructing a
learner-centered syllabus.

Free templates of engaging learning activities, rubrics for various learning outcomes to save time, and multi-activity course templates to develop skills from the Learning Design Community of FeedbackFruits.com, originally founded in 2012 at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands.

This article from UC Berkeley's' Center for Teaching & Learning, reviews how to create opportunities for your students to build deeper understanding of concepts through articulation and elaboration, as they engage in learning conversations (discourse & sensemaking) in a large lecture hall. These strategies shift some of the intellectual work to the students, as they offer explanations, summaries, elaborations, articulations of the material, and find ways to connect to what they already know with what they are learning in your course (Allen & Tanner, 2005). The title of the article is "Discourse & Sensemaking Strategies in Large Lecture."

Allen, D., & Tanner, K. (2005). Infusing active learning into the large-enrollment biology class: Seven strategies, from the simple to complex. Cell Biology Education (CBE), 4, 262-268. doi:10.1187/cbe.05-08-0113

In this video, you'll learn how to define the terms learning goals and learning objectives, evaluate the clarity of existing learning objectives, and perhaps write your own learning objectives for your courses.

Learning Objectives article, 3 pages, published in the _Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal_ by Patricia B Nemec and Evelyn Bussema. They state." The article differentiates between general goals and instructional objectives. The article is copyrighted by the APA.

This document provides an example of how an accounting program collected, displayed and used evidence of student learning to make decisions that would lead to improved student learning in the program. This exemplifies an important step in learning outcomes assessment process.

An online tutorial designed to help program faculty learn how to assess programs so that student learning can be improved.

The Lecture/Discussion Facilitation Template was distributed at the 2017 Lilly Evidence-based Teaching & Learning Conference held in Bethesda, MD June 1 - 4, 2017. Use it during lectures as a low-stakes, largely anonymous method to gauge students’ understanding, as a pop quiz or survey, or to keep track of in-class group activities. The template can improve student participation and engagement by minimizing their fears of low (or even “too high”) performance before their classmates, and it provides a demonstrable, observable, measurable, and active way to gain a sense of how well students are “getting it,” beyond the glint in their eyes. In that sense, it serves as a quick formative assessment tool that can be customized on demand.

This case study is about how an instructor is presented a unique request from a transgender student. Several discussion questions are included.

This is a full guide for internship supervisors in the College of the Liberal Arts. It would serve as a great model for other programs seeking to develop a similar document.

A Likert scale type tool for evaluating a syllabus.

Refer to this rubric for guidance on completing your Lilly Conference Travel Grant Proposal.

This document offers a wide range of resources for international TAs.

In this article, Meixun Sinky Zheng, PhD, shares some low-risk strategies to help faculty transform lectures into student-centered learning experiences for enhanced learning outcomes. These active learning strategies can be easily implemented without significant redesign of the class and without an investment in technology. The article ends with a few tech-based strategies for engaging your students.

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