Asee peer logo

Formative Feedback: Providing Bioengineering Professors With Quantitative Measures Of Their Teaching

Download Paper |

Conference

2003 Annual Conference

Location

Nashville, Tennessee

Publication Date

June 22, 2003

Start Date

June 22, 2003

End Date

June 25, 2003

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Assessment in BME Education

Page Count

4

Page Numbers

8.578.1 - 8.578.4

DOI

10.18260/1-2--11899

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/11899

Download Count

252

Request a correction

Paper Authors

author page

Chad Washington

author page

Alene Harris

Download Paper |

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to determine the effects of formative, quantitative feedback to bioengineering professors on the teaching of their lessons. For the past three years, members of the assessment thrust of the VaNTH Engineering Research Center at Vanderbilt University have worked to develop an observation instrument to capture specific elements in lesson delivery, including (1) various types of teacher-student interactions, student engagement levels related to type of instruction, levels of indicators reflecting HPL learning theory (knowledge-centeredness, student-centeredness, assessment-centeredness, and community-centeredness) (Bransford et al. 1999), and specific indicators of effective teaching. After three years of testing and revision, we have developed valid, quantitative measurements of the teaching of a lesson. We then set about to organize this data into categories that would profile a classroom lesson and allow professors to self-assess their lesson delivery and student engagement. Based on findings in an unpublished dissertation (Harris, 1988), our hypothesis is that providing the professors with quantitative measurements of specific classroom activities would cause them to modify their teaching in ways that would include more HPL elements and indicators of effective teaching. Professors receive both graphical profiles of various aspects of their teaching and the observer’s additional explanation of specific aspects. We predict that formative feedback will have an effect on professors’ structuring and teaching of lessons. This was supported primarily by the Engineering Research Centers Program of the National Science Foundation under Award Number EEC- 9876363.

Washington, C., & Harris, A. (2003, June), Formative Feedback: Providing Bioengineering Professors With Quantitative Measures Of Their Teaching Paper presented at 2003 Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee. 10.18260/1-2--11899

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2003 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015