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UW–Madison resources
The Office of the Provost offers a guide to assessment resources on campus.
Other resources
Teaching Goals Inventory, offered by the Center for Teaching at The University of Iowa, was developed by Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross in their book, Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (Jossey-Bass, 1993). The Inventory is a self-reflection technique guiding you through evaluating the importance of 53 goals with respect to any particular course you are designing.
“Tools for Teaching” (Jossey Bass 1993), a book partly reproduced online, includes two chapters with long lists of tips and tools for assessment: Fast Feedback and Watching Yourself on Videotape. For a review of the literature on student course evaluations and some tips and resources, see Student Rating Forms.
The University of Washington has developed a Student Learning Objectives System(SLO), a Web-based set of tools by which “all courses (including independent studies) … are encoded by their instructors in terms of the learning objectives that they offer. Every course has a total of 100 learning-objective points. It is entirely up to the faculty member to decide how to divide up those points among the 15 university-wide standard-learning objectives, and any custom-learning objectives.” The tools to do this are at their Web site. This system has been put in place with “three principal purposes: (1) to improve our understanding of the learning experiences offered to students; (2) to advance the assessment of learning; and (3) to prepare for the … decennial accreditation.”
The University of Washington Center for Instructional Development and Research offers a comprehensive collection of resources on assessment and evaluation of teaching. It includes specific sections on instructor self-assessment, student perceptions, teaching and learning research, administrative perspective, peer or colleague review and student learning. One unique section within self-assessment, is a very useful site on Developing a Teaching Portfolio. Faculty and other teaching staff are increasingly facing situations in which they are required to assemble a teaching portfolio, a set of materials that represent their teaching practices. Many experts argue that constructing a teaching portfolio is also a useful technique for self-reflection and self-assessment.
The Carnegie Foundation’s Gallery of Teaching and Learning has an interesting on-line exhibit on creating teaching portfolios entitled “Compressing and Crystallizing Knowledge: Representing the Complexity of Teaching Succinctly.” It has particular focus elements on Refining the Unit of Analysis, Framing the Questions, Balancing Scope and Granularity, and on the use of digital video.
The Peer Observation Guidelines and Recommendations, from the Center for Teaching and Learning Services at the University of Minnesota includes general discussions of the definitions, strengths, and weaknesses of peer observation, as well as tips and guidelines about how to do it well.