NUTSHELL NOTES "Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

Copy all your quiz, test, and review questions into one giant file, in about the same order you intend to cover these topics in the coming days ahead. If you have thought of new material you'll add, make up a few new review questions on this material and add them. Delete any duplicates and number each question. You have now constructed a "monster exam" that covers the entire course. Make copies for each student in the class. At the top of the first page of questions, provide the following instructions to the students:

The following is the start of a value-added assessment. Use a soft pencil. Make sure your name and student ID number are coded on the answer sheet. Respond to each question in the following manner. Mark an "A" on the answer sheet if you can answer the question right now with present knowledge for test purposes; mark "B" if you can answer the question partially or would know exactly where to find the information required to answer the question within a short time (say, 30 minutes); mark "C" if you could not answer this question for test purposes, and you are not exactly sure where to find the answer. I reserve the right today to request full answers for a quiz grade to any three of the questions that you mark with an "A," so be certain that you assess your own knowledge accurately. When you are finished, keep the questions. Refer to them throughout the semester to mark your progress through the course. This survey will be given again at the end of the semester.

"General Purpose Data Sheets" are used for scan-processing of the A-B-C responses. NCS form #16504 allows up to 200 questions. If you want more questions, just use more forms. These forms are available for assessments from the Office of Teaching Effectiveness.

This basis for providing response is efficient. Students can cover 100 questions in less than 15 minutes in this format. Completion of the knowledge survey can also be done as a take-home exercise.

For your students, this is the most powerful action you can take in providing disclosure. It removes all need for students to guess the content that lies ahead, the difficulty of questions you will ask, or your emphases of material. Most important, it gives students a clear starting point from which they can begin to chart their own learning progress.

For you, this shows what kinds of preparation students are bringing into your class. If your class has common deficiencies, now is the time to discover them, rather than a month later at the first exam.

Finally, do assessment by repeating this exercise exactly at the end of the course. Thereby you will be able to validate the actual knowledge changes produced by every topic covered on every individual student. The Office of Teaching Effectiveness can save files and provide graphs of before-after results, or the results can be provided to you as ASCII files for your own graphing and reporting.

Despite its simple nature, this is a direct and powerful assessment that produces hard data about actual learning. Indirect methods of "evaluation" (colleagues' opinions, surveys of students' satisfaction) are important, but these are not actual measures of value-added knowledge. Your before-and-after sheets should be the basis for settling any dispute about how your students grew in knowledge through your course.