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The Academic Ear

An occasional newsletter from the Office of the Provost
“If you read it here, take it with a grain of salt”

Did you know that...

76 persons participated in the Teaching Excellence Workshops? Several people attended more than one session bringing the total to about 353 people at all of the sessions. The biggest session was with David Concepcion- more than 65 attended.

In the Assessment workshop the group came up with the following set of general principles for providing students with assessment (4 groups reported their principles so there are some repeats.)

Our principles for how we will do assessment- what we think is important

• Feedback will be prompt
• We will strive to give clear comments (no phrases like “awk” used)
  
• We will provide clarity of criteria for success; we will strive for clarity in our expectations
• We will try to grade consistently
• We will assess with compassion
• We will assess with transparency
• We will assess with objectivity; we will strive to be fair, suspending personal judgment, using blind evaluation
• We will strive to be positive in our comments
• We will adhere to our standards but provide students with explanations for why they did not meet the standards and offer suggestions for improvement
• We will give even drafts a concrete grade “estimate”- “if I were grading this today I would give this paper a …”
• We will relate our assessments to our outcomes
• We will be available to our students to discuss their assessments and offer help when needed
• We will evaluate and assess in a variety of ways so that students will have multiple ways of achieving success/ diversity in assessment strategies
• We will provide models of the criteria or outcomes we want to achieve
• We will strive to be encouraging
• We will assess with frequency
• We will strive to make questions/assessments appropriate to the class and the students’ level
• We will give quick and useful feedback
• We will strive for completeness
• We will assess at multiple levels of difficulty or depth
• We will strive to be concise in our assessments
• We will do assessment commensurate with the student’s experience- easier perhaps at the start of the semester, increasingly more difficult as they gain knowledge and skill
• We will do assessment that matches our goals
• We will give early feedback, everyone getting some feedback by the third week of the semester and substantial feedback before the mid-term deficiencies are due.
• We will give ample feedback
• We will strive for a balance between positive and negative

EAR TO THE GROUND: News, Information and other cool stuff

Libby Williams’ article 'A psychotherapy process study of therapist in session self-awareness', which appeared in Volume 15 issue 4 of Psychotherapy Research was one of the top 10 most downloaded articles of the journal in 2006 according to the editor of the journal, Samantha Cragg. I’ll bet Libby is “psyched!”

Some of the feedback from new faculty regarding orientation and Teaching Excellence Workshops which were combined this year.

What do you think we should do differently next year?
“Do more of what you are already doing, but try getting even more returning faculty to participate.”

Was the orientation what you expected?
“I was very impressed by how thoughtful and reflective everyone was, and how willing to process and to learn. I was expecting more information and less discussion, but the way it was gave me a great deal of information about the culture of the college. It showed me the interest in innovation here, the willingness to try creative approaches, the tendency towards collaborative learning.“

My ear to the ground analysis is that new faculty enjoyed the sessions with returning faculty the most. They particularly liked seeing returning faculty so engaged in learning and they soaked up the St. Mary’s culture at the same time. An important message is sent when a 20 year veteran is clearly excited about the ideas he/she is learning.

If we could have rented a BIG, BIG bus to hold them all we could have taken the new faculty on a tour of the county. The record number of you on sabbatical this year swelled the new faculty ranks to a larger than normal number. Take some time to talk to new faculty about the county, the history of the college, your syllabus, their syllabus, anything really.

New faculty- we’re glad you’re here and so eager to join our ranks. Thanks for your enthusiasm and engagement. Thanks for a great week of orientation and teaching excellence. Thanks for the suggestion to wear togas to opening convocation!

Lois says: we have welcomed 18 new international students to campus, plus three teaching assistants and the Fudan Scholar, in our efforts to bring the world to SMCM. And 89 students are studying abroad this fall!

Music to our ear

From Randy Larsen- I'm writing this morning to pass on some good information. Yesterday, I was a moderator at the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) summer undergraduate research conference. NIST had 137 undergraduate student scientists from over 73 colleges participate in their summer research internship this year. SMCM had four students there, Julia Burton (math, econ), Travis Horrom (physics), Fred Nawabi (biology), and Anna Vaudin (biochem, music). I had several NIST research scientists come up to me during the breaks to discuss their new-found appreciation for SMCM. Most of the conversations went something like this.

“I can't really say that I knew much about SMCM before this summer, but the fact that you got 4 students through the competitive application process, while much bigger and well known schools like MIT, Berkeley, etc. only got one or two slots is a testament to the quality of your students. This was further confirmed by the outstanding work they did this summer. We look forward to SMCM sending more students here next year.”

So kudos to our students for making us all look good. And this fall when students are (should be) thinking about next summer, tell them to look up the NIST SURF program. They are doing research in almost every area of science that I can think of, biomedical, biodefense, chemistry, mathematical modeling, statistics, nanotechnology, atomic physics, etc. They provide both a stipend as well as room and transportation. The director of the program indicated that they budget $30,000 per student per summer and that's without overhead....wow.

And Thanks to Randy who blazed a trail to NIST for our students.