THE INFORMER PAGE 5 NOVEMBER 8, 1989 FACULTY DEVELOPMENT B y REID Deadline for Conference and Research Grant applications is Oct. 31. People interested in exchange —faculty, staff and administration—should speak to me about the exchange possibilities of our new affiliation with CCEP. Deadlines for applications for September 1990 are approaching. Also, it is time now to show interest for future exchanges. All areas are now discussing the committee’ s draft Definition of Professional Development. Please participate in these discussions and send your opinions to me. As a general rule, this column provides factual information about activities of professional development interest within the college and, to a lesser extent, within our disciplines but outside our campus. This time, I thought I’d devote the space to reproducing an article from The Teaching Professor, a monthly publication to which the Faculty Development Committee subscribes. Somewhat similar to the bulletins from NISOD, The Teaching Professor presents discussions of interest to us as teachers, as experts who see our primary role as encouraging learning. Previous issues of this journal can, by the way, be borrowed from me if you are interested. The current issue contains such as articles as “Exams: Alternative Ideas and Approaches,” “The Trouble with Adult Studies,” and “The Group Exam,” as well as the lead article I reproduce below. I think this paper raises some interesting points and I recommend it to you. I would also be interested to hear if the Committee should circulate articles like this one and whether you read and use the NISOD bulletins when they arrive. Is there value to you in these articles on teaching issues? Do you have time to read them? “Taken to the Task on Testing (Again)” Material in The Teaching Professor frequently generates reader response, which delights us. The instructional issues we address in this publication are complicated, without “easy” or “right” answers. They merit further exploration, reflection, discussion and sometimes debate. No issue seems to illustrate that better than matters of evaluating students. In our March 1989 issue we printed an excerpt from an article by John Wergin of Virginia Commonwealth U. which made two points: - Students learn according to how they are tested. - Faculty sometimes give “inappropriate, even grotesque” exams. GILBERT He cited as an example a final exam consisting of the statement, “Discuss the history of social psychology in the twentieth century, including all relevant names and dates.” These two points prompted William Larsen of Iowa State University to object. We shared his objections with Professor Wergin, who responded. We hope you find their exchange provocative and stimulating. Professor Larsen: Mr. Wergin’s first thesis is that learning patterns reflect testing patterns. This is only partly true. Students will seek to respond to testing patterns because, in my experience, the vast majority of students seek not to learn, but to achieve a good grade. However, asking a student to reason, synthesize or evaluate on an examination is too much of a shock for most students, who have largely found by experience that factual recall is all that is required. This is so because tests requiring only factual recall, or at best the mental combination of only a few facts, are far the easiest to write and to grade, especially when there are many students in the class. In short, “the system” breeds intellectual mediocrity , and the students respond to the environment resulting from the teachers’ capitulation to the task of preparing and grading really challenging exams. As a result of this pre-conditioning, getting students to rise to a higher level of thinking about their subject, e.g. synthesis, is a near-impossible chore. “Why did you ask that?” We never covered that in class.” Read outside the text? Go to the library and check the professional journals? Ask, while studying, how the author’s words relate to the other courses? Consider how the vocabulary of the discipline relates to its history or reflects broad or basic ideas? Of course not. The second bone I would pick with Mr. Wergin regards his “horror story.” As a graduate student, I was elected to go to my major professor. As it turned out, he had also forgotten to prepare an exam. As he strode with me back to the waiting class he “prepared” the exam. It consisted of one sentence: “Write all you know about metallurgy.” He left, and we wrote. I was forced to show I understood the whole scope of the course: its limits, its thrust, its content, its meaning. I derived equations to show that I understood the details. I showed their application to show I understood their purpose. I set the course in the context of the rest of my graduate study. It was the best exam I ever wrote - because I was given no constraints in showing what I had learned - and because it was the best exam question ever asked me.