Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Thava's Reading Notes #3

“Course assignments should be tied to the learning objectives” Lang, p129. This is a powerful statement as objectives should build the knowledge and skills I want to have from students. Therefore, reading assignments will reflect whether students achieved the course objectives.

I have a draft course outline/skeleton and set due dates for exams and assignments. The advise on checking these exams and assignments against the course objective is a valuable one, often I would have overlooked.

The advise on variety of evaluations does help to cover the wide range of student learning and responding to evaluations Lang, 129. I have been teaching and learning all my life, except brief five years work in industry. We need to use variety of teaching methods for diverse learning abilities; we must have variety of evaluations to compensate to respond to evaluations.

I like the way Davis, p. 329 refers to grading writing. That is to keep it simple by grading 0,1,2 for unacceptable, acceptable and excellent. I plan to introduce sample writing for students and will mark accordingly (without affecting their grades) to set my writing expectations. This way I could guide or provide them inputs to address the gaps in their knowledge. I could use my own rubrics or checklist to grade assignments.

I have seen and faced very unreasonable selection of choices and problems by some course instructors. Sometime those questions were tricky for most or all students. I am wondering what type of satisfactions those professors derive by tricking students with choices and problems. In my view these types testing was a waste and might have not achieved any teaching-learning objectives. I like the way Lang, p336 suggest reasonable mix of routine and challenging questions. When professors are not sure about their teaching philosophy, course objectives and evaluations these types of outcomes are inevitable.

Another one I like the most was Davis, p337 about my own problem-solving and techniques. I plan to incorporate practice tests so that students will be able to see how I approach problem solving and underlying principles that students may want to consider.

For Tuesday class, I would like to see a discussion on how evaluation ties fully connected with teaching philosophy, learning objectives. The problems of not following course objectives such as teacher and student confusions, frustrations in teaching-learnings. This topic could be broad enough to all of us specially at this stage of this course to tie all we learnt sofar.

My next topic that I would like to have discussed related to higher level of learning through assignments. Assignments should ideally gear towards to reach higher learning objectives. Would it provide means to achieve this? What type of guidance needs to be given? How could evaluate whether students reached these goals?

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