Spring 1994

Whole-Class Processing

Do you believe that students share with you the responsibility for how well a class--or an entire course--goes? If so, you may want to consider trying some whole-class processing this semester. This type of classroom assessment gives students much of the responsibility for checking on how effectively students are learning in the class; it gives you and them information about what is working well and how improvements can be made.

Instead of the teacher asking for and analyzing students' one-minute papers about what they learned from a lecture or discussion, create a student assessment team to poll their peers and summarize and analyze the anonymous responses. Such teams can also create or distribute your mid-semester request for comments. Why not ask students how they can make the course work better, and have them collate and present the majority opinion? Students like being asked their ideas about the course and feel challenged to help make the course better.

For more ways to find out how well your students are learning or what (very often useful) suggestions they would make to improve the course, see Angelo, T.A. and K.P. Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993 (in the TRC library). [Yet another idea brought to us by Karl Smith, University of Minnesota.]