Events

March 22, 2023

• TALK EVENTS

3.22-23 Crafting Assessments for Critical Thinking 2-day workshop

Abstract   

Several international calls have been made to increase the levels of critical thinking in college classrooms. Students need repetition and practice to master critical thinking skills. However, instructors don’t have a ready source of assessment items or the resources to craft high-quality items. Peggy Brickman has written an Integrating Testing and Learning workbook that reviews common mistakes that faculty make when writing items and reviews psychometric guidelines for writing effective multiple-choice questions.
In this 2-day workshop series, Dr. Brickman will provide three opportunities to learn more about best practices in constructing and peer-reviewing items that test critical thinking. Participants can use a pre-workshop survey to determine which areas they may have already mastered so that they can attend sessions that are ideally suited to their needs. They can also complete the workbook readings before sessions if they wish. 

Schedule

Proposed time	Wednesday March 22	Thursday March 23
10:00-10:30	Opening and introductions
10:30-12:00	Session 1 Learning Objectives & Assessment Best Practices	Session 3Crafting Selected Response Items
12:00-14:00	Lunch	Lunch
14:00 -15:30	Session 2 Evaluating Teaching	Session 4Rubric Design
15:30-16:30	Coffee Break	Coffee Break  Closing

*Lunch and coffee breaks will be provided for all the in-person participants.

Session 1: Learning Objectives & Assessment Best Practices
This session includes an introduction to writing learning objectives and best practices in crafting selected-response items. At the end of this session, workshop participants will spend time working in small groups and will share and receive critical feedback on their own selected-response questions. Finally, this session will wrap up with a discussion and small group activity to prepare attendees to convert open-response items into selected-response items before the next session.

Session 2: Evaluating Teaching
Dr. Brickman will present a special 90-minute session describing her institutional work reforming teaching evaluation methods at the University of Georgia. Participants will engage with a rubric designed to assess the state of readiness of their unit to evaluate teaching on several dimensions and review available materials for conducting a peer review of teaching.

Session 3: Crafting Selected Response Items
In this session, faculty will generate aligned sets of items for formative and summative assessment. Participants will walk away with several peer-reviewed, selected-response items that may be ready for use in their classrooms. 

Session 4: Rubric Design
This session will focus on designing rubrics to provide expectations and requirements to students as well as help assess open-response items and ensure fairness in grading.　

Speaker Bio
Peggy Brickman is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor in Plant Biology in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Georgia. Dr. Brickman has taught over 30,000 introductory biology students over the past 25 years, usually in large sections with over 300 students each. The sheer madness of this setting inspired her to develop and assess multiple types of active learning strategies designed to improve large-group instruction. She recently published her curriculum on Codon Learning, a science courseware delivery system that supports the practice of evidence-based teaching. A prolific education researcher as well, Brickman is often called to share her expertise on active learning and assessment at workshops and seminars for both the HHMI-sponsored National Academies’ Summer Institutes on Undergraduate Education and BioInteractive. Here at UGA, she has mentored dozens of undergraduates, graduate students, and STEM faculty with the ultimate goal of embracing inclusive and active learning strategies to support retention and performance for all students.

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