This week I am attending the National Academies Summer Institute(s) on Undergraduate Education.  It is a series of all day workshops with people attending from colleges and universities from all over the West Coast, Alaska and Hawai'i.  The focus is on improving undergraduate biology education through active learning, assessment, using methods that improve learning, ... and the motivation is both that many people, including future policy makers, community leaders, voters, etc. have a very poor understanding of biology (especially genetics and evolution) and that we are not attracting and retaining enough students into STEM fields like modern biology to supply the future workforce needs of the US, so we need to use every opportunity in undergraduate education as effectively as possible.

In the first day we brought an example of one of our class exams and assessed questions as a group in terms of cognitive level in Bloom's taxonomy.  Most student assessment in most classes are at lower cognitive levels like recalling information (memorization) and explaining concepts (comprehension).  Very little moves to the middle ground of applying knowledge in new ways or inference at higher levels of using your knowledge to synthesize new hypotheses, experimental designs or evaluate/appraise/critique concepts based on new and prior knowledge.  There were also presentations on methods of testing/question writing that are more effective in assessing student knowledge, ways to get feedback during lecture (like iclickers), and backward design of classes from learning goals to assessment to activities, how to get students to monitor their own knowledge level, etc.  Then we met as smaller groups  to start on a group project to design a teachable unit that will be presented to the entire workshop with a smaller activity for the workshop to participate in.

To be honest, I am not sure how much I will really get out of this workshop (much of what we are doing so far seems like, at least on the surface, pointless semantics and I am naturally suspicious of anything that appears to contain a lot of buzzwords even if I am not familiar with them, but I am trying to keep an open mind).  I already use iclickers for class feedback during lecture, some active learning techniques and inverted classroom techniques, aspects of backward design and assess some higher level cognition with my exam questions (where students are expected to synthesize prior knowledge/experience to answer new questions in new situations they have not seen before and/or evaluate competing hypotheses)--not that there isn't room for a lot of improvement.  There is also the practical issue of time and effort that goes into some of these approaches--we have a lot of ground to cover in my undergraduate class and at some points we have to move through topics quickly and frankly do not have time for many detailed activities in lecture.  ...  At the very least however I am already getting some good examples that I can use in my class this fall.