27
The fact is that institutional norms and expectations regarding teaching vs research for faculty vary widely. At my current institution, teaching is very important. At my previous institution, no one really cared. Basically, I would not voice this opinion in any strong way unless you want to make your life difficult. It would only work if the faculty member ...
25
In the absence of other factors, in my opinion, at least in mathematics, a free response is always the more valuable type of question. The educational value of getting shown, where precisely your argument went wrong is much higher than just being told if the final result was right or not. It also allows for a much finer grading, as I can both give partial ...
18
There are lots of good teaching-focused jobs in academia, for example faculty positions at small liberal-arts colleges, and lecturer-type positions in larger departments. It sounds like this kind of job would appeal to you more than a job whose primary focus was research. That’s great! Go and learn about those jobs, find people who have taken that career ...
15
There is a problem with multiple choice questions in general: They are very hard to design well. The time you "save" in grading isn't free. You need to spend a lot of time and thought on question design and you really need to find a way to verify the questions so that you don't get negative correlations between the answers and the knowledge of ...
12
Keep in mind that as a grad student you are not part of the permanent faculty. You are supposed to be there for a few years, get your degree, and leave. It is the responsibility of people like the Chair or Director of Graduate Studies to decide on these bigger issues. If it really bothers you, you could discuss with them, if you trust him/her. But if they ...
10
This might depend somewhat on the field and certainly on what you intend to do as a career. It is field dependent since different fields place a somewhat different balance on teaching v research.
But if you seek a career in an R1 or R2 then you want to focus primarily on showing good research "chops". For those seeking to (mostly) teach at a ...
7
Agreed on all the answers above about the incentive for not making waves, and that any effective approach will create more work for you. It's probably in your best interest professionally to ignore these problems, do what you can to help the students you have access to, and spread information invisibly about highly dysfunctional people/classes to avoid, ...
6
I think this would depend on the location of your institution and how traditionally/modern inclined its culture is, as well as the person itself who reviews your application, but it certainly wouldnt hurt your application in any way. It is certainly a good way to stand out from the rest of the field, since I highly doubt any other applicant to your same ...
5
While I sympathize with your concerns, let me give some background, and possibly a solution.
First, a good student exercise that leads to insight is an extremely valuable thing. Text book authors often will vet their exercises with real students to assure that they lead the faithful student to the right conclusions, and preferably to insight. In some of my ...
5
I think that these concepts don't really overlap that much:
Simplification is about how you explain something. When you explain a concept, you might leave out some details which make the concept more complicated to grasp. By focusing on the most essential parts (and possibly adding the details later), you don't overwhelm the students with information and ...
3
A great use of multiple choice questions is in formative assessment: you can test and quickly see which of your students have common misunderstandings. These questions dont work so well to assign grades, as then the student isnt interested in what they misunderstood, but are great for use in quizzes during teaching or between session to allow explanation of ...
2
There are important differences between simplifying and spoon feeding:
simplifying: leaving details out that are not important for the moment. For example: not mentioning exceptions to certain rules.
spoon feeding: sharing knowledge slowly, small bits at a time, and not teaching students to think for themselves or understand the underlying concepts. A ...
2
Agreeing with people before me, I would say that you cannot change a lot. You have to understand that what you are observing, with number of students you are referring to, is not secret. People whose job is to change that (if they feel to) probably know about it and decided to keep it that way. So you have to assume that the institution is fine with that ...
2
As everyone else says, certainly do not use any personally identifying data. I am not clear as to whether using student ID numbers is legal, but it is a bad idea; these are effectively not private. If you really want each student to have a secret PIN, assign them one specifically for the class. That said, I think giving a list of scores with any sort of ...
2
Have you considered using a Swivl, we have used them on our ITE programme to support teacher observations. The camera follows your movement around the classroom while you wear a mic on a lanyard which is connected via Bluetooth. This would support the online learners you have in feeling more engaged? You could also prepare some flipped resources on a pallet ...
2
You seem to have three options, but I think only one will lead to success if you want to continue in Philosophy.
The first is to complain to the administration about your issues. This might work, but I don't think it is very likely. The administration may have limited options in the time frame available. Of course it might make a change long term (not ...
2
True or False?
Since there's a lot of intersubjectivity here, and I agree that multiple choice is not optimal for assessment, I notice that one aspect of multiple choice has been left out, so I'll play Devil's advocate: true/false questions.
While it does depend on your content area, adding a few well-written T/F questions to make up a part of an evaluation ...
1
There's nothing wrong with a healthy mix!
Though your question is very broad and the answer changes depending on the age group of students and their abilities, there is nothing wrong with a good mix (suited specifically to both of the possibilities above,) though in my answer I've included some facts and provided the most conclusive answer that I could.
...
1
I like multiple choice for Q's where you'd otherwise have to explain the sort of answer you want too much or you think they might misunderstand:
"What operation has the highest precedence? +, ^, *, /". I'm looking for a binary operator, not () or unary minus. Limiting the answers is the easiest way to specify that. "What is the formal name for ...
1
Actually, reputation matters. If a college were to give out uniformly high grades then they would pretty soon not be trusted. And organizations that do "ranking" would be pretty savvy about such things.
It would also be pretty hard for a university to manage such a thing, since grades are given by individual professors with individual preferences ...
1
Don't do it (unless it is a pure lecture already)
This is not to say that it is impossible, but still...
If you simply giving a lecture, or other unidirectional teaching, there is probably a better experience for the physical attendees, so you should offer it. Have some way of preferably real-time communication with the distant people. Even better, have ...
1
This doesn't sound particularly subtle to me. If your teacher is specifically rude to you in this way, I doubt it is going to be fruitful to raise the issue with her. Feel free to do so if you like; it might or might not work. In any case, this is what student reviews of teaching are for. At the end of the session you can give honest feedback and ratings ...
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