The importance of using systematic formative assessment to guide students toward meaningful learning has gained more recognition in the education community in recent years. This form of assessment is characterized by task-oriented feedback in a low-risk environment, which is believed to promote mastery goal orientation and self-regulated learning.…

Two separate writing-to-learn activities in which students wrote to authentic audiences outside of the instructor were used in a college integrated science course, Science of Water. For the first task, students were asked to write to fourth-grade students, and for the second, students were asked to write to their academic advisor. An overview of…

Creative exercises (CEs) are a form of assessment in which students are given a prompt and asked to write down as many distinct, correct, and relevant facts about the prompt as they can. Students receive credit for each fact that they include that is related to the prompt and distinct from the other facts they list. With CEs, students have an…

Testing strategies centered around open-ended assessments are generally thought to result in deeper learning compared with close-ended questioning. However, the time requirements involved in grading open-ended assessments on exams often limit the feasibility of using such assessments. This article presents an index card questioning strategy…

The use of a photocopier to archive exams consumes photocopier resources and generates a large amount of waste. As an alternative, I have been using a consumer-grade digital camera to document exams in an upper-division biology course. The approach is inexpensive and offers a number of advantages over photocopies. (Contains 2 figures.)

We describe a team-taught course entitled Chaos in Science and Literature. Our course goals were to place science in a nontechnological context, emphasizing its intellectual and cultural aspects, and to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas between "scientists" and "humanists," with the authors serving as role models. (Contains 4 figures.)