Eileen Lewis
Early in my teaching career, I noticed that students could memorize equations, solve problems, and even use terms fairly correctly. However, further questioning revealed that students' knowledge was pretty shallow. So even though my "lectures" encouraged conceptual understanding, my exams were more traditional. Since students are pretty efficient about learning what they need to be successful in a course, I changed the assessments of students' understanding - emphasizing making sense of phenomena, connecting ideas, and giving explanations about why in everything they observed or did. Writing these questions was much harder, but it changed the type of learning that went on in the class. Students knew they had to understand the concepts, not just be able to parrot them back and solve algorithmic problems. These new assessments also served them in future courses because they really understood and had made connections between concepts.
Elaine Seymour
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Eileen Lewis and Elaine Seymour
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