Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty

Gotta buy it for class. As good of a book as expected

Don’t need to say much besides get this book! It breaks assessments and implementation down in an expert fashion. Wish I had this book months ago!

This is a very useful resource book! I look forward to utilizing this in designing next semester's course!

This book is a treasure trove of assessment methods for faculty of all ilks, so easy to learn and teach, too!

Great reference for teaching!

Research on effective teaching at the college and university level emphasizes the following components says this book:"1. Identify and communicating clear learning goals and outcomes2. Helping students achieve these goals through activities that promote active, engaged learning3. Analyzing, reporting, and reflecting upon results in ways that lead to continued improvement"This book outlines 50 Learning Assessment Techniques which allows faculty to assess the effectiveness of their teaching. These techniques are identified for traditional, online, collaborative, and flipped classes and classroom. A professor can get ideas on assessment techniques which may work best for the kind of classroom he or she teaches.For example, one technique I liked for an economics classroom - which my son teaches at a liberal arts college - was a creative Nomination assignment. Students research the Nobel Economics prize criteria, do research on outstanding Economists, and write a profile on the Economist describing why that Economist would qualify for the prize. Could work for other disciplines, too, such as medicine. This assignment was under the "human dimension" category.This book describes 50 techniques such as this.Chapter 4 explains how to implement Learning Assessment Techniques, creating assessment rubrics, student and peer evaluation forms and introducing the activity, facilitating, concluding it and other helpful processes. This is really a how-to manual guiding faculty step-by-step in a very organized fashion on how to use these techniques successfully.Chapter 5 covers analyzing and reporting on what students have learned.Part Two of this book highlights teaching and assessing for different domains. These domains include: foundational knowledge, application learning, integration, human dimension, caring and learning how to learn domains. Each domain gets its own chapter and covers clarifying learning goals, identifying learning outcomes, aligning learning outcomes and assessing achievement. Then about seven learning assessment techniques are provided for each domain.For the learning how to learn domain, some sample LAT's include: study outlines, student generated rubrics, invent the quiz, learning goal listing,What? So what? Now What? Journal, Multiple Task Mastery Checklist and Personal Learning Environment. Each chapter is about 40 pages long so is packed with information in this section.This is an invaluable resource for professors who want to improve engagement, assessment, learning outcomes and reporting for evaluations and even tenure. Assessments are one of the primary ways students learn, so having quality and accurate assessments is imperative. This book has abundant ideas on how to create these for all kinds of teaching styles, objectives and classrooms.Any professor would find the information useful. It is clearly organized and comprehensive in its explanations in how to implement these LearningAssessment Techniques. I am going to give this to my son for his college teaching. Reading this book is like taking a class on assessment techniques at the college and university level. Although these assessments could work at the high school level, too.

I have a mixed relationship with this book. Initially, and still at moments, I get lost with it. If you're a college professor, you've no doubt been flooded with administrative mandates that make you design, redesign, add to, subtract from your syllabus on a yearly basis as new patterns gain sway. It feels like it is part of the ongoing attempt to overthrow faculty altogether, exhausting us with mandates and educational mantras.The text is, admittedly, written in a way that gives me the shakes, causing me to tense up as I see dense text filled with educational acronyms and complicated prose. Now I am an academic, so I don't mind dense or complicated prose, but as a reader and as someone who is too busy, I want something that is as clear as possible and as easily adapted to my usage.This book is written that way which led me to put it aside for a while after receiving it in the mail. One probably should not start this when near the end of a quarter, a pile of research papers to grade, and next quarter's syllabi requiring finalization. Now, a few weeks later, I return to it with maybe not fresh eyes, but certainly more patience. I'm glad I waited to look at it and to give a review.It really is a worthwhile text, both for application, as it does give a wide selection of patterns for different purposes, and maybe even better it gives substantive justification for adaptive techniques. I get strong student reviews, but a lot of my style comes from instinct and my own creative insights, rather than grounded justification. Which is okay, but when I want to deepen both my own teaching and explain my pedagogical approaches, I'm on less secure ground. I don't have a degree in educational theory or suchlikes. Barkley and Major provide a resource rich text that is very dense in both guidance and support, making this a very valuable text for both exploring new models of learning as well as providing a great reference when you are proposing different patterns to your department head or administration. A lot of the ground work is done, and so this is a great springboard for exploring new approaches and deepening those that work for you.