Three teaching things: week of June 6
This week: what does collaborative testing mean for learning? A video to guide you in the development of a meaningful territorial acknowledgement; and some learning-related icons
Issue #50
1. Collaborative Test Taking: Benefits for Learning and Retention
The justification for facilitating collaboration in the classroom is often that, as professionals and community members, our graduates will work with others to solve big problems. That’s not much of a revolutionary statement, and as a result we see instructors work to incorporate a variety of collaborative learning experiences from longer-term group work to quick think-pair-shares.
But what about collaboration and testing? Isn’t that just…cheating?
Crucially, no: following the two-attempt technique, it upholds academic integrity:
Each exam was given twice during a single class period. The first time students took each exam, it was administered in a traditional format, in other words no books or notes and no talking. As soon as all students had turned in their answer sheet from the first attempt, the class started the second attempt. During their second attempt at each exam…students were allowed to consult their text books and class notes. (p. 217)
(This also broadly describes the collaborative test as I’ve learned about it elsewhere).
As this paper suggests, collaborative testing was better for learning: student test scores improved and retention of course content increased (in the relative short-term, measured in weeks, but in a recently-published paper in another domain, lasted as long as eight months).
Bloom, D. (2009). Collaborative Test Taking: Benefits for Learning and Retention. College Teaching, 57(4), 216–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567550903218646
2. Territorial Acknowledgements: Going Beyond the Script
This 13-minute video (embedded below but also accessible in an accompanying website here) , created by staff at the University of Alberta’s (Edmonton, AB, Canada) Centre for Teaching and Learning starts with this provocative question: “have [territorial acknowledgements] become so commonplace that we’ve forgotten what they stand for?”
If you re-committed your efforts towards reconciliation over the past week, watching this video is a way to move towards creating a meaningful territorial acknowledgement. The video has a distinct connection to the lands and original people upon which U of A was established, but the principles and suggestions can be applied elsewhere.
3. Blended, online icons from the Noun Project
As detailed in this blog post, in 2013 the Noun Project collaborated with students from Duke University (Durham, NC, USA) to create a set of public-domain icons for terms like “problem-based learning” and “learning analytics”. Blended learning and MOOC (remember those?) icons are in the set, too.
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
Thanks for reading!