CRLT congratulates Shelly Schreier on winning the 2013 Golden Apple Award! Shreier, of LSA's Department of Psychology, was nominated by students for this annual prize honoring "teachers who consistently teach each lecture as if it were their last." Co-sponsored by over 30 U-M departments and programs, the Golden Apple is the campus's only teaching prize awarded by students. See this University Record story for more information about Shreier, the award, and her upcoming public lecture as the newest Golden Apple recipient.

There's no question that students' writing improves most when they have frequent opportunities for practice and feedback. But instructors sometimes struggle to find ways to provide those opportunities, especially in large courses. One method that many U-M instructors use to good effect is structured peer review. These three faculty members--featured in CRLT's recent Occasional Paper about Online Collaboration Tools (OCTs)--have made creative use of OCTs to facilitate collaborative writing as well as timely, frequent, low-stakes peer feedback: Read more »

At this point in the semester, many courses are building toward major tests.  As a teacher, how can you best design tests to motivate and assess student learning?  How can you be sure that your classroom instruction adequately prepares students for the exam?  How, in short, can you make the most of exam time as a learning opportunity for your students?

The process of designing an exam can offer a great opportunity to ensure that your learning goals, instructional practices, and assessment techniques are all well aligned.  Our website features several resources to help you thoughtfully design exams that reliably measure whether students have learned what you've been trying to teach them--and evaluate those exams fairly.  

For the CRLT Occasional Paper on "Best Practices for Designing and Grading Exams," click here.  For a broader range of resources about testing and grading issues, click here.