Penn State University

Tools and Resources

Alphabetical List

Browse through the tools by the title of the resource.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

This IDEA paper from the Kansas State IDEA Center Resources provides many strategies for improving essay tests.

This IDEA paper from the Kansas State IDEA Center Resources provides guidelines for creating effective multiple choice tests.

This PowerPoint about reading compliance was presented by Amit Sharma. It describes his research into factors that prevent students from doing course readings and strategies that instructors could use to improve reading compliance.

Professor Christine Hockings (UK), April 2010
Inclusive learning and teaching in higher education refers to the ways in which pedagogy, curricula and assessment are designed and delivered to engage students in learning that is meaningful, relevant and accessible to all. It embraces a view of the individual and individual difference as the source of diversity that can enrich the lives and learning of others.
This publication includes summaries of key research on how inclusion practices impact students' learning, identities, and belonging.

Creating a sense of belonging is critical for student learning and setting the tone for an inclusive classroom begins on, or even before, the first day of class. This handout provides sample questions for a questionnaire you can use to get to know students, a few considerations for your own introduction as an instructor, and suggestions for introducing your course.

This asynchronous course aims to deepen educators’ knowledge of inclusive teaching practices. The course was designed with undergraduate introductory life science educators in mind, but components of the course will resonate with educators in other contexts. Developed by Bryan Dewsbury and Kayon Murray-Johnson with support from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and available on Biointeractive.

Larger courses can present challenges for instructors aiming to provide personalized and inclusive learning experiences for students. Inclusive teaching refers to an intentional practice of recognizing and mitigating biases that may lead to the marginalization of some students (Dewsbury & Brame, 2019) and supporting all students to reach their full potential (Addy et al., 2021). This resource provides suggestions for inclusive teaching practices for larger courses.

List of references and citations for creating inclusive courses and classrooms; and in support of teaching diverse students.

Links to websites about microagressions, stereotype threat, implicit attitudes (hidden biases), teaching for diversity, teaching in multicultural classrooms, diversity resources. URLs for videos about how microaggresions feel to recipients, reverse-microaggressions on white people (helps some white people understand microaggressions better)

This list of inclusive teaching strategies was created as part of the Schreyer Institute's Creating Inclusive Courses workshop. The workshop activity is also available in this repository. The list was compiled over many years and is intended to help instructors recognize what they might already be doing to demonstrate that all students are welcome contributors to the course learning community. This is not a "checklist." Creating inclusive course environments requires sincerity, intentionality, and reflection, not simply enacting a list of strategies. These strategies are most effective when combined with other efforts such as critical self-reflection reflection, learning about antiracist pedagogies, and taking steps to decolonize our classrooms.

This is a workshop activity used in our Inclusive Courses workshop. It is intended to help instructors to recognize the wide range of things that they currently do, or can do, to demonstrate to students that each has unique contributions to make in the course learning community.

This is a ready-to-use template for collecting mid-semester or end-of-course open-ended feedback from students.

This survey is used by the Penn State Berks teacher education program to assess student teachers for learning outcomes assessment (program assessment) purposes.

Provides access to information technology services at Penn State.

This book is a collection of 14 articles from the Journal of College Science Teaching that describe techniques that promote higher-order thinking and inquiry skills. The techniques are alternatives to lecturing, and range from small tweaks to large-scale changes for courses.

This document offers a nice overview of Inquiry Based Learning.

This document contains the guidelines for the Instructional Foundations Series short course to be offered in Spring 2017.

Instructional Foundations is a series of workshops for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and instructors
from all disciplines who have never taught at the university level (grading experience OK) prior to Fall 2016. The
series is designed to provide people new to college teaching with knowledge, skills and confidence they can use in
their first teaching experience.

This guide is intended to be helpful for faculty, instructional designers, and multimedia specialists that are in the early stages of creating a video for teaching purposes. The guide breaks down the many types of pedagogically-useful videos into several types and sub-types in order to help you think about the best approaches for discussing your content (each has an example of a low-cost and a higher-cost video).

The guide was designed to take you through each step of discovering what kind of video best suits your purposes. It is recommended you select a video category, read about what attributes define that category, and then explore the sub-categories that further explores organizing content in this medium. The guide can be used as often as you like and will email you the results of your exploration as well as provide links and information on pursuing the creation of your video and next steps.

Instructors have key impacts on course climate, and these impacts affect classroom management and students' sense of belonging. This handout discusses ways in which instructors' behaviors might shift a course climate in marginalizing or centralizing directions.

The Role of Interactive Digital Simulations in Student Conversations About Visualizing Molecules
Yuen-ying Carpenter, Erin Rae Sullivan
Proceedings of the University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching, Vol. 2, 2017

Abstract
The visualization of chemical compounds in three-dimensions is a foundational skill in the study and practice of chemistry and related fields, and one which has the potential to be supported by interaction with virtual models. Here, we present a collaborative learning activity piloted in first-year chemistry which investigates if inquiry-driven interactive technology can contribute meaningfully to student conversations around this topic, and how students’ conversations and practices may shift when driven by feedback from an interactive simulation. Our initial observations from this pilot project suggest that students engaged in collaborative sense-making and discussion around key ideas throughout this activity. Students’ post-activity reflections also highlighted their positive experiences and increased confidence with the topic afterwards. The unique dynamics of these interactions lead us to propose a novel framing of interactive visualizations as participants rather than merely as resources in student learning conversations.

Short descriptions of 22 activities to engage students in both large and small classes.

Posted on Friday, September 26, 2014
by Julie Thompson Klein, Ph.D.
Many consider interdisciplinarity to be synonymous with teamwork. It is not. Individuals engage successfully in a variety of solo interdisciplinary activities, ranging from borrowing tools, methods, and concepts from another discipline to teaching courses that migrate to a new hybrid interdiscipline. Moreover, a team may not necessarily be interdisciplinary.

This two-page guide offers a wide range of teaching tips specifically intended for international TAs.

Common questions that applicants for faculty positions can expect to encounter.

This brief document addresses academic integrity by outlining which students cheat, why they cheat, how they cheat and how instructors can reduce cheating and plagiarism.

This one-page handout describes the advantages of using a rubric for grading certain assignments and provides additional resources to help instructors develop good rubrics.

This document is the master Learning Outcomes Assessment plan for the College of Information Science and Technology.

The iStudy tutorials are designed to advance students' knowledge and skills in areas that can promote overall academic achievement, such as studying, communicating, and career planning. Faculty can use the tutorials to help students adjust to college curricula and expectations or add career planning tools to syllabi.

An introduction to college-level learning, focusing on areas in which first-year students often need to build skills.

This is a 2-page document describing the main statistical indices provided as part of an item analysis. It offers information about how to interpret each index.

This PowerPoint presentation describes how to us item analysis to determine the efficacy of multiple choice questions.

Information Technology Services site for students.

Penn State University