Tools and Resources

This document describes a specific strategy that provides a collaborative learning experience for students.

Brief explanation of several easy-to-use Classroom Assessment Techniques, with examples.

Three-page overview of the steps in documenting one's teaching through a portfolio.

Item Analysis (a.k.a. Test Question Analysis) is an empowering process that enables you to improve mutiple-choice test score validity and reliability by analyzing item performance over time and making necessary adjustments. Knowledge of score reliability, item difficulty, item discrimination, and crafting effective distractors can help you make decisions about whether to retain items for future administrations, revise them, or eliminate them from the test item pool. Item analysis can also help you to determine whether a particular portion of course content should be revised or enhanced.

This resource offers principles of trauma-informed teaching and recommendations instructors
might consider as they are developing trauma-informed practices for their own courses.

Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent describe their approach to Collaborative Learning Strategies.

This list of inclusive teaching strategies was created as part of the Schreyer Institute's Creating Inclusive Courses workshop. The workshop activity is also available in this repository. The list was compiled over many years and is intended to help instructors recognize what they might already be doing to demonstrate that all students are welcome contributors to the course learning community. This is not a "checklist." Creating inclusive course environments requires sincerity, intentionality, and reflection, not simply enacting a list of strategies. These strategies are most effective when combined with other efforts such as critical self-reflection reflection, learning about antiracist pedagogies, and taking steps to decolonize our classrooms.

This is a ready-to-use template for collecting mid-semester or end-of-course open-ended feedback from students.

This file is an example of a rubric that can be used to grade a science experiment. The use of a rubric can help instructors to grade more accurately and more quickly.

This is a peer-reviewed article published in the journal of Studies in Educational Evaluation. Its focus is the accurate interpretation of student ratings data (including Penn State's SRTE) and appropriate use of the data to evaluate faculty. It includes recommendations for use and interpretation based on more than 80 years of student ratings research. Most colleges and universities use student ratings data to guide personnel decisions so it is critical that administrators and faculty evaluators have access to the cumulative knowledge about student ratings based on multiple studies, rather than single studies that have not been replicated, studies based on non-representative populations, or that are from a single discipline.

The article provides an overview of common views and misconceptions about student ratings, followed by clarification of what student ratings are and are not. It also includes two sets of guidelines for administrators and faculty serving on review committees.

This document was created to provide you with a source of options for gathering data on teamwork assignments and projects. You may choose to adopt one of the examples as is, combine elements from several of the examples, or use the examples to identify characteristics that correspond to particular aspects of your assigned work, course content, or student population.

Student ratings are not the only option to provide evidence in the evaluation of teaching. There is a broad range of alternatives to consider beyond student ratings in the delicate decision-making processes to improve teaching and determine the promotion and tenure of faculty. Yet, despite the constant barrage of attacks on the integrity, reliability, and validity of student ratings, their use in higher education is at an all-time high.
So what do student ratings actually contribute to decisions about teaching and faculty? Should they be abandoned? Should you focus on the other options? This article examines student ratings and 14 alternatives to guide your plans to evaluate teaching in your department.

The purpose of this activity is for participants or students to get to know each other as individuals with distinct histories, backgrounds, and traditions. Knowing something personal about others helps learning communities and teams function more effectively.

The Where I'm From icebreaker activity was developed based on a poem by George Ella Lyon (http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html). This teaching activity is described in: Christensen, Linda (1998) Inviting Student Lives into the Classroom: Where I'm From. Rethinking Schools, 12(2): 22-23. Available on-line at: https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/where-i-m-from/

A teaching philosophy is more than an instructor’s beliefs about teaching and learning and paints a picture of what it is like to be a student in the course. It explains why a faculty member does what they do in their courses. It can be a foundational document for course design, narrative statements, and self-reflection.

A teaching philosophy is typically a 1-2-page narrative. It describes how learning happens in a course through examples learning activities, instructor- and student-student interactions, assessments. See Writing a Teaching Philosophy.

Practical suggestions for writing exams and techniques for creating questions from Boston University School of Public Health.

This file contains a list of "item-writing rules," which will help you to write multiple choice questions in a way that will improve the ability of the test to focus on the content and prevent students from guessing the correct answer without knowing the material. The rules were developed by experts in the field of psychometrics, like the people who write questions for SATs or GREs.