Welcome to the CET website!

On these pages you'll find a variety of teaching resources that we hope will be useful.  Over the next few months, we'll be adding to the information and redesigning the cite. Please e-mail the CET with any suggestions for website content, workshop topics or any other ideas you may have to make the CET more helpful to you as a teacher.

Janelle Heineke, CET Director

2/13/2008

*** Announcing BU Faculty Subscription to online teaching newsletter, The Teaching Professor ***

The Center for Excellence in Teaching has negotiated a group online subscription to The Teaching Professor, a lively, informative newsletter that offers ideas and insights to educators about teaching.    

If you are logging in from a campus computer, you can access The Teaching Professor without a password by going to http://www.magnapubs.com/issues/magnapubs_tp/

You will be able to access the current issue as well as past issues (to 1999).

If you prefer to view The Teaching Professor from a non-campus computer, e-mail CET at cet@bu.edu for a log-in name and password.

Assessing Class Participation

Class participation is a component of the grade for many classes and students often like to get some feedback on their participation before the semester is over. One effective way of providing midsemester feedback is to ask students to assess their own participation, both in terms of frequency of participation and quality of the contribution to class learning. Ask students to grade themselves on each of these dimensions along with a short explanation of each and an overall grade. You can then respond back to them, indicating whether you agree or not and why. 

If you did not have students do a self-assessment at mid-semester, you may still want to have them do a self-assessment as an input to their final grades.

Most students are thoughtful about their self-assessments. A few may use the exercise as a marketing one, giving themselves a much higher grade than their participation warrants, but about as many will undervalue their participation.

April 25, 2008