Eileen Lewis
Early in my teaching career, I noticed that students could memorize equations, solve problems, and even use terms fairly correctly. However, further questioning revealed that students' knowledge was pretty shallow. So even though my "lectures" encouraged conceptual understanding, my exams were more traditional. Since students are pretty efficient about learning what they need to be successful in a course, I changed the assessments of students' understanding - emphasizing making sense of phenomena, connecting ideas, and giving explanations about why in everything they observed or did. Writing these questions was much harder, but it changed the type of learning that went on in the class. Students knew they had to understand the concepts, not just be able to parrot them back and solve algorithmic problems. These new assessments also served them in future courses because they really understood and had made connections between concepts.
Elaine Seymour
Elaine Seymour is the Director of Ethnography and Evaluation Research, Bureau of Sociological
Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, a position she has held since 1989. She received a
Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado, a M.A. in Education from the University of
Glasgow, Scotland, and a B.A. with Honors in Economics and Political Science from Keele
University, England. Her academic honors include Doctoral Fellowships from the National
Institute of Mental Health and the University of Colorado, Teaching Excellence Awards, and a
Fulbright Teaching Scholarship. Seymour's recent work in assessment includes the development
of a prototype Field-Tested Learning Assessment Guide (FLAG), and the development of the Student Assessment of their Learning Gains (SALG) classroom evaluation instrument.
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