The Power of Personalized Interventions

by Audrey Haynes, Integrative Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2019 “It’s nice to know someone actually cares.” A student in Biology 1B said that to me at the end of a meeting. She had not passed the first exam and we were brainstorming about how to improve. For a variety Continue Reading >>

Collaborative Grading Rubrics for Assessing Student Writing

by Rosalind Diaz, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 Grading rubrics are an invaluable teaching tool. Ideally, they promote fairness and transparency in assessment, and help students set reasonable goals, develop metacognition, and practice self-assessment. But a rubric can also act as a gatekeeper of knowledge. Vague, abstruse, or circularly Continue Reading >>

Why Am I Doing What I Am Doing?

by Varsha Desai, Chemistry Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 Experiments in chemistry laboratories often have complex protocols where students perform several steps sequentially to obtain a “correct” product. Seemingly small mistakes can result in a domino effect that leads to inconclusive end results. For example, students forget to “mix” a Continue Reading >>

Deploying General Rubrics to Preclude the Pitfalls of Grading

by Christian Lambert, Goldman School of Public Policy Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Assessing student work is the household chore of any given course: important and useful, but often begrudged and disparaged, too. As an instructor in an introductory course that many students pursue in order to fulfill pre-requisites for Continue Reading >>

Introducing Students to Scientific Writing in E45 Lab Sections

by Rajan Kumar, Materials Science and Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 In Spring 2015, I served as the GSI for Properties of Materials (E45), an introductory materials science and engineering course usually taken by freshmen and sophomore students. My primary responsibility for the course was to lead the lab Continue Reading >>

Grading Rubrics

What are rubrics? Rubrics are scales in which the criteria used for grading or assessment are clearly spelled out along a continuum. Rubrics can be used to assess a wide range of assignments and activities in the classroom, from oral presentations to term papers to class participation. There are two Continue Reading >>