Promoting Integrity at the Classroom Level:
Constantly Evaluate for Understanding
While part of assessment is to test what our students have learned, an important part of assessment is to discover how well we are teaching a subject.
A friend who returned to school after being out of the classroom for 25 years had an appointment with his advisor. After his appointment, we met for lunch and he had all kinds of questions that should have explained by his advisor. It turns out that when she asked if he understood what she had just explained, he was too embarrassed to answer truthfully. He told her that he had understood even though he had not. Students will lie when directly confronted about their understanding of material to avoid embarrassment.
Fortunately, there are a number of relatively quick exercises we can do to get feedback as to whether or not students are learning what we think we are teaching. These three techniques were compiled by Angelo and Cross (1993).
When we ask students to respond, we need to be prepared to modify our assignments and/or teaching techniques based on the feedback we receive.
