Tools and Resources

This document describes a specific strategy that provides a collaborative learning experience for students.

A collection of active learning strategies that can be used in a variety of instructional settings.

Item Analysis (a.k.a. Test Question Analysis) is an empowering process that enables you to improve mutiple-choice test score validity and reliability by analyzing item performance over time and making necessary adjustments. Knowledge of score reliability, item difficulty, item discrimination, and crafting effective distractors can help you make decisions about whether to retain items for future administrations, revise them, or eliminate them from the test item pool. Item analysis can also help you to determine whether a particular portion of course content should be revised or enhanced.

The Syllabus Checklist document provides a syllabus template that includes elements required on all syllabi by Penn State, plus additional recommended best practices in syllabus design.

Penn State’s Faculty Assessment of Teaching Framework assesses teaching using evidence from three sources, peer review, self-assessment, and student feedback. The framework also identifies four Elements of Effective Teaching, which provide a foundation of understanding, advance a shared language for communication, and serve as standards against which the combined sources of evidence are judged. Academic units may also use the elements as an invitation to discuss other important aspects of effective teaching. This document includes teaching examples by element.

This document describes several strategies that can be used to make concepts "concrete" and provide tactile material that can help students learn.

Round Robin is a systematic technique that allows students to brainstorm answers to questions. It allows all students an opportunity to contribute.

A list of active verbs for use in crafting learning objectives based on Bloom's Revised Taxonomy.

Brief explanation of several easy-to-use Classroom Assessment Techniques, with examples.

A rubric for assessing oral communication work.

Student ratings are not the only option to provide evidence in the evaluation of teaching. There is a broad range of alternatives to consider beyond student ratings in the delicate decision-making processes to improve teaching and determine the promotion and tenure of faculty. Yet, despite the constant barrage of attacks on the integrity, reliability, and validity of student ratings, their use in higher education is at an all-time high.
So what do student ratings actually contribute to decisions about teaching and faculty? Should they be abandoned? Should you focus on the other options? This article examines student ratings and 14 alternatives to guide your plans to evaluate teaching in your department.

This faculty resource, What to Do Instead of Using AI Detectors, provides evidence-based strategies for promoting academic integrity through assignment design, trust-building conversations, and transparent AI policy development, offering practical alternatives to unreliable AI detection tools.