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Category: Assessment

Promoting academic integrity; or cheating and plagiarizing and bears, oh my!

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/granada_turnier/7330551406/ It seems that cheating and plagiarism is still on the minds of many educators. I have rarely had this issue with students (at least to my knowledge). There was the time when I assigned a book review, and received one that had been “lifted” from Amazon.com. That experience taught me a lot about how some students understand academic integrity particularly with regards to the use of digital content resources. Here are a few ideas for managing academic integrity concerns, sorted into three categories: general class management, refocusing student work, and using quizzes and exams. General class management…

Voting a question off the island; or, different ways to think about quizzes and exams

Given the nature of the courses I teach, I tend to use authentic projects for assessment purposes. However, because of recent conversations with students, I’ve been reconsidering my avoidance of quizzes and exams. What I have heard from students is that quizzes and exams help them gauge their acquisition and comprehension of content, which can be very helpful for formative reasons in advance of project work. These conversations spurred me to reexamine my past uses of quizzes and exams, and explore different ways of structuring quizzes and exams for formative and summative assessment needs. Philosophically, I am more interested in…