(Demonstrate broad knowledge of strategies that can be used to evaluate teaching programs to improve student learning)
Strategies for Designing Evaluation for Improving Teaching and Student Learning
1. Embed evaluation in the learning processes for the student and the teacher.
When you are designing curricula and learning tasks to engage students, think about ways to make students’
progress in learning explicitly visible to both the student and yourself. For example, include a reflective loop where students complete an activity, stop to review it and then redo it to improve their first attempt. This serves as a learning experience and, with appropriate documentation, can be a valuable source of evaluative information for both you and your students.
2. Plan evaluation with deliberate intent.
The following set of prompts and questions will help you in deciding about appropriate evaluation strategies that align with your aims or purposes for evaluating, in your particular context and within your resource support environment.
What is the purpose of this evaluation?
• Can you succinctly articulate the aims in one sentence or formulate a single question? Is there more than one aim? If yes, how do they relate to each other?
What kinds of evidence would help you understand more about these issues or aims?
What sources of information will you use?
• Where will you get this information? Who would have information about or a perspective on these
concerns? Who are the audiences and stakeholders?
• What ethical issues and responsibilities need to be considered? Who owns and has access to data and reports?
What methods or approach will you take in collecting information?
• What kind of data or information do you want to collect? Why? Given the types of audiences and sources -
what kind of strategies or methods will help to get appropriate and valuable information?
What timeline would be best for undertaking each element of this evaluation plan?
• When is best? Why? Does timing matter for each of the different methods, tools, data and audiences or sources?
What resources and support do you have?
• What is needed? What is the most effective and efficient approach? Are the required resources available? If not, how does this impact on your plans and data collection?
Good Practice Guide
Evaluation: Designing Evaluation for Improving Teaching and Student Learning
Context and Key Issues
Whilst there are many different models of good teaching and many different environments within which students learn, there is one unifying goal – that of enabling students to learn. Your evaluation program should help you to research and document how well, your teaching enables your particular students to learn, in your particular context. Biggs and Tang (2007) present a model of curriculum design, Constructive Alignment, based on ‘constructivism in learning’ and ‘alignment in teaching’ where aims and objectives, assessment, and teaching and learning activities ‘align constructively’.
When you are designing curricula for your course or teaching sessions, think about evaluation also. The best evaluation programs are embedded in the learning processes for the student and the teacher.
At Griffith, evaluation of teaching and student learning mirrors the University’s quality assurance cycle - Plan,
Implement, Review and Improve (PIRI). This continuous cyclic process can be applied to evaluate a specific aspect of teaching or curriculum, or more broadly to review a whole course or program. There are many dimensions to evaluation and many different ways by which data can be collected. This guide offers a set of prompts to consider when designing evaluation for improving teaching and student learning.
The following questions can be used in your evaluation report or summary and can help in documenting your teaching and learning practice.
Evaluation Purpose and Questions Who will ‘know’ about this?
(Stakeholders)
Types of evidence, tool most appropriate, mode of collection
Comment on timing and resources.
Evaluation Questions
Did concept mapping help the students to learn?
To learn what we intended?
Did they enjoy it?
What was their experience of the process and the tool?
