IDEA Resources

What is this objective?

• This objective is based on the lower levels of understanding and knowledge in Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy and deals with the acquisition of the elementary understanding of the course/lab upon which more advanced learning relies.
• Traditional teaching practices of lecturing and reading can only ‘deliver’ the information to the learners, but without the actual involvement of the learners there is no guarantee that they learn, understand and retain the information.
• When students understand the relevance and usefulness of the course content, when their curiosity is piqued, when they see the information presented to them as important, they tend to put in more efforts to stay engaged and as a results perform better. From the IDEA surveys point of view, these parameters highly correlate with the student ratings of the course and the teaching.

How can one teach this objective?

• Focus on the learner by involving them in the learning process. Instead of starting the class by simply stating the principle, ask a question. Let their curiosity and interest pique. Let them come up with the relevance of the principle to the real life.
• Allow room for motivational teaching strategies in your teaching. Provide students with opportunities to work on different problems or questions and let them come up with their own interpretations. There is no bigger motivation than when a student can say “I did it myself”.
• Revisit the previously learned topics and tie it to the new material. This reinforces the idea of retaining knowledge and the importance of building upon it.
• Allow opportunities for practice. Incorporating core principles into activities, enhances learning and understanding immensely.
• Provide effective and constructive feedback. As a teacher you have to tell them i) what their current understanding is, ii) how far are they from the course/lab goal and iii) how would they reach the goal.
• Encourage team-based learning. Peer learning can encourage conceptual understanding and can help student learn better.

How can one assess this objective?

• Use knowledge surveys to assess the progress of the students. The responses are to the questions are contrasted with correct responses and students can assess what they know and what they need to work on to perform better.
• Use ‘clickers’. These can be used to immediately asses the student attention and understanding and you can also follow up on the questions. The follow-ups can be opened to the class as discussions about the correct answer or even interpretations of their choice for an answer.

What is this objective?

• This objective addresses the need to develop the ability to include others perspectives and opinions, along with personal thoughts, to better understand and interpret global events and in general perform better cross-culturally.
• Most of the faculty are underprepared when it comes to dealing with topics that are linked to diversity issues or social and cultural issues.

How can one teach this objective?

• Understand and determine your students’ backgrounds and life experiences, and their motivation to take the course. Also consider your social and cultural background, learn about you own biases and stereotypes.
• Allow opportunities to help the students present their perspective and opinions on the topic at hand. They will understand others view and engage in discussions with higher enthusiasm if they get a chance to present and clarify their own thoughts.
• Form caucus groups with students that have a common aspect like “gender”, or a similar social aspect and let them share their opinions and also learn others perspectives. These activities will build self-reflection and teamwork. The initial sharing of ideas and views would also make the students ready to deal with complex and highly emotional global issues.
• Use rubrics to avoid ‘blind grading’ and to make your expectations clear and transparent.
• Identify a teaching partner who would help you with judging the class progress and who can bring different social and cultural perspectives based on his/her experiences and training.
• Give credit for personal growth and transformation.

How can one assess this objective?

• Use formative and summative forms of evaluation to assess the progress of the students.
• Aspects like improvement in self-awareness, development of social insights over time, can be easily judged by the performance of the students in formative assignments.

What is this objective?

• This objective deals with the higher levels of Blooms cognitive taxonomy, specifically analysis, application, evaluation and creation.
• Instruction without proper application creates an artificial learning experience leading to a lack of connection between the learner and the material.

How can one teach this objective?

• Stimulate interest among your students. Set higher goals for your students and encourage them to answer their own questions.
• Improve critical thinking by prompting them to answer the “whys” and “how’s” rather than “what’s”. Structuring a question based on a real world example will push the students to analyze, evaluate and create ideas and new information.
• Teach to transfer. Always make sure the concept is well explained and discussed before you ask your students to come up with some examples where the concept is being/can be applied. Here you are providing opportunities for deeper learning as the students are executing the transfer of knowledge from what they learnt to explain a brand new situation.
• Incorporate more problem-based learning into the curriculum to allow students to apply the course material to solve a real-life, usually ill-defined scenario.
• Service-learning is another efficient strategy to integrate application of the course material in to the curriculum. Involving students in meaningful community service in connection to the learning objectives of the course will allow for the direct application of the knowledge and a good learning environment.

How can one assess this objective?

• Use at-home assignments or individual work, based on case studies or real-life issues, to assess the progress on the problem- based learning.
• Make sure to ask higher cognitive-level questions to assess the progress in the critical thinking aspect.
• Small projects explaining what they encountered in a particular community and how the course concepts/materials were used to solve problems can be used to assess service-based learning.

What is this objective?

• This objective deals with the initiation of the students into the “community of practice” that allows them to become a highly competent and motivated professional.
• Learning of concepts cannot be achieved by just describing and telling. To create professionals in a field, the teachers should work together with the students to create a learner-centered learning environment that would make clear the content, the relevance of the content and the target mastery.

How can one teach and assess this objective?

• Let students set their own goals and work to achieve them. You, along with your students, share the power of learning. By letting students have a say in their learning, you are not only encouraging them to take up more responsibility, but you are also enhancing their motivation to work on a particular task.
• Work with students to develop knowledge from content. In a learner-centered learning environment this practice will push the students to i) properly utilize their prior knowledge, ii) use different forms of knowledge and iii) cultivate a habit of asking right questions and seeking answers on their own.
• Become a facilitator. Help students to use the content in productive ways. Always try and highlight i) the relevance of the content to the real life and ii) the importance of the subject. Use of relevant examples and case studies can help you achieve this objective.
• Work with students on a more personal level. As a teacher you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of the students you work with and then can guide them to utilize their strengths in productive ways and transform their weaknesses into strengths. You should motivate them to become a “self-directed learner”.
• Use multiple and alternative assessment techniques. In a learner-centered environment, the assessments are not only used to generate grades, but also to promote learning. As a teacher, you should use alternative assessment techniques like, short-answers questions, essays, demonstrations, portfolios etc. These assessment strategies can either replace the traditional tests or can work in partnership with them.

What is this objective?

• This objective revolves around the idea that collaboration and team work improves practice and provides for a platform where the participants can exchange ideas and reform information.
• With the increasing prevalence of interdisciplinary work and research, learners need to become more of a team player and collaborate with other professionals (in a real or virtual setting), that come with different sets of expertise.

How can one teach this objective?

• Carefully design the group tasks. The tasks should push the students to think beyond their existing knowledge, should provide scope for the students’ to challenge each other’s thinking and should provide opportunity for creativity.
• Choose an appropriate team size for your course. According to the research, a team of three to five individuals functions the best.
• Prepare the team before they dive into completing the tasks. Start with some team building exercises like stating the goals, developing and signing-off on a set of expectations and guidelines to deal with a non-participant. Assisting the team to choose the roles of each team member (leaders and scribes) can help the team to function as a cohesive entity.
• Educate the team regarding the qualities and characteristics of successful teams. The more the teams know about what goes into making or breaking a team, the better they would be able to work in teams and also resolve any issues that may arise later.
• Provide frequent feedback and assistance on conflict resolution. Facilitate timely feedback and reviews at appropriate intervals so that the teams can identify their weaknesses and can work on them and also review the group members. With members coming from diverse background there would be some conflicts among the members, but if you as a teacher will provide assistance on conflict resolutions, there will be a positive learning environment and the teams would also learn team management strategies.

How can one assess this objective?

• Interact personally with the teams, ask appropriate questions to gauge the understanding and progress of the team.
• Provide clear rubrics prior to the start of the projects.
• As a real-time assessment ask the teams to maintain logs, minutes, reports and tasks lists on hand always.

What is this objective?

• This objective is on the highest level of cognition in Bloom’s revised taxonomy, “creativity”.
• Creativity is not just a product of elusive inspiration, but a cognitive domain that requires reorganization of elements into new and distinct patterns or structures. Even if the creative activity comes from “out of the blue”, it still requires inputs from creator’s idea, concepts and complex interactions of experience, training and intuition.

How can one teach this objective?

• Carefully design activities that require assembly, disassembly and transformation of prior learning and allows students to combine it with new knowledge and skills to form distinct products.
• Encourage collaborative learning as a tool for developing creativity. Collaborative tasks push the students to exchange idea and debate the pros and cons of proposed idea.
• Give projects, tests or assignments that require original or creative thinking.
• Introduce stimulating ideas about the course content and concepts to raise student interest.
• Stimulate students to intellectual efforts beyond that required by the course.

How can one assess this objective?

• Ask students to provide a self-report and their actual achievement of the learning outcomes.
• Ask for student feedback on some of the questions like; i) were you flexible and adaptable? ii) do the students actually perceive what they are taught?

What is this objective?

• This objective aims at broadening student understanding and appreciation of the diverse disciplines through properly designed survey/ non-major/ general education classes. These classes must be designed and taught in a way that the students will appreciate new and unfamiliar ideas and develop curiosity for further study.

How can one teach this objective?

• Include cultivating student motivation as an intentional learning task.
• Clearly communicate how learning in your course is relevant to learning other courses, their understanding of the world and potential careers.
• Provide frequent feedback and opportunities for self-assessment. This would help the students build students’ confidence in their ability to learn in a new discipline.
• Give them opportunities to learn deeply by manipulation, application and analyses of the course material, both in class and in assignments.

How can one assess this objective?

• Classroom Assessment Techniques like “minute-paper” in which you ask the students to write in one minute the most important concept you learned in a class, would give you an idea of their understanding of the subject. Another relevant CAT can be, drawing of “concept maps”.
• Hands-on experiments can also be used to assess their understanding of the concepts.

What is this objective?

• This objective identifies with the courses that emphasize on developing writing and oral skills. Not all courses provide enough opportunities that directly relate to this objective, and hence selecting this objective as ‘essential’ or ‘important’, should be done only if you are actually teaching writing or speaking.
• IDEA research has found that this objective pairs well with other objectives like No. 6, No. 7, No. 9 and No. 10, emphasizing that good learning and development of new ideas could only happen with clear communication.

How can one teach this objective?

• Use student’s own work to make the lesson more real and relevant. Share excellent work of few students with the whole class and provide opportunity for them to learn from each other.
• Since writing and speaking are collaborative processes, form teams or groups, to facilitate practice, revise and peer critique.
• Allow opportunities for a lot of practice. With practice comes skill. Quick one-minute-papers “what did you learn in the class today” or “question you have about the assignment” will let you bring in a lot of writing to the classroom.
• Role playing or even reading sections of books aloud can bring in a lot of active learning chances for students to work on their speaking skills.
• Encourage team-based learning. Peer learning can encourage conceptual understanding and can help student learn better.

How can one assess this objective?

• Provide a clear assignment and grading rubric. If you want the paper or speech to follow a particular theme or process, then say so.
• Incorporate diverse feedback opportunities in your curriculum. Students learn most when they receive timely and diverse feedback from their teachers, peers, friends and last but not the least through self-reflection and revision.
• Use writing portfolio approach to evaluation. This approach would provide you with a holistic view of the writing abilities of each student and then you can concentrate on specific shortcomings and help them out with that. These portfolios can also serve as program assessment tools at the end of the course year.

What is this objective?

• This objective, though is relevant to all the courses that are taught, but is only chosen as ‘essential’ or ‘important’ in 30% of the classes using IDEA.
• This objective preaches information literacy and thus forms the basis of all disciplines, all learning environment and all education levels. It identifies with effective teaching that initiates students to become lifelong learners with deep thinking.

How can one teach this objective?

• Encourage students to use multiple resources like libraries, internet, outside experts, to improve their understanding.
• Find ways to help the students answer their own questions.
• Assign work that requires high efforts and creative thinking.
• Design projects and research work that would push the students to explore new resources and solve challenging problems.
• Encourage team-based learning. Peer learning can encourage conceptual understanding and can help student learn better.

How can one assess this objective?

• Provide a clear assignment and grading rubric.
• Have clear deadlines for each of the research project/paper/thesis. You can have additional sequence of intermittent deadlines for parts of thesis.
• Ask the students to provide authentication of the websites they referred to while conducting their research. This would infuse a habit of critically weighing the available resources.
• Use peer reviewing as an additional source of feedback. This will not only encourage active learning and student engagement but also enhance deep learning. This process will also encourage students to fully understand the expectation resulting in a better final product.

What is this objective?

• This learning objective deals with the inclusion of training on ethical thinking and decision making along with learning about the ethical principles.

How can one teach this objective?

• Use case studies to introduce ethical reasoning in a classroom. Involve the students by asking them to come up with case studies from their own experience.

How can one assess this objective?

• Essays or oral examinations in response to specific ethical problems can be used to assess ethical reasoning.
• Remember to score for the quality of reasoning and not for the agreement with the conclusions in an ethical problem.

What is this objective?

• This learning objective addresses the activities at the upper levels of cognitive taxonomies. This objective is focused on the development of critical evaluation skills and autonomous thinking among students in their respective disciplines.

How can one teach this objective?

• Organize the course around questions and problems that a professional in your field would be interested in exploring.
• Engage students in activities that require complex and critical thinking, rather than just presenting them with information.
• Encourage study groups not only to solve a particular problem but also to share the reasoning behind the approach. Ask students to use their critical thinking skills outside the classroom.
• Help students cultivate methods to efficiently gather data and assess the quality and relevance of the data.
• Help students develop sound and well-informed arguments.

How can one assess this objective?

• Assessment of problem solving, critical evaluations and related skills is defined by the discipline being thought. Angelo and Cross have listed many techniques that can used for assessments.
• Design writing assignments that put the students in a debater’s shoes or writing assignments that require the student to critique others’ ideas or opinions.
• Ask the student to read a scientific paper and assess the conclusions the authors made based on the results.
• Construct a rubric to lay down the guidelines for critical analysis and evaluation so the students know what to expect when they are assessed.

What is this objective?

• This learning objective aims at building competent leaders with extensive understanding of public life, excellent critical thinking skills and the ability to cooperate and collaborate with diverse groups to create change.

How can one teach this objective?

• Incorporate a service learning project as a part of the course curriculum.
• If you want to involve the students extensively with the community consider several important principles derived from the scholarship on service learning, for instance
  • Carefully design the project goals so as to thoroughly integrate them with the course goals.
  • Organization is the key to the success of community projects, so plan accordingly.
  • Ensure that the students and partners understand and are committed to the ethical practices, mutual empowerment and open communication.
  • Provide opportunities for the students to critically reflect on the relationship between course content and their projects.
  • Encourage students and community partners to regularly evaluate and assess their progress through giving one another formative feedbacks, in addition to the summative feedback at the end of the semester.
• Use the institutional resources like Centers for Teaching and Learning and Public Service Centers wisely. These centers and the people involved can help you with overcoming challenges you would likely face while setting up a project.

How can one assess this objective?

• Community based projects should be graded and assessed based on the same discipline-specific grounds as any other assignments or projects.
• It is good to assess students’ social, emotional and ethical development. Though these cannot be used as the basis for grades, mid-semester/ course or end-of semester/course reflection papers or other assignments like blogs or journals can provide the students with a platform to discuss their growth by using skills of collaboration, ethical reasoning as measuring tools. Other tools like Civic Attitudes and Skills Questionnaire can also be used for assessment.

What is this objective?

• The current age is becoming increasingly data-rich and people need to critically read and understand the numerical information.
• This objective deals with creating opportunities for the college students where they can develop the ability to i) work with, ii) understand and iii) make arguments based on numbers (“quantitative literacy”).

How can one teach this objective?

• Appreciate the students’ need to understand the value of this objective.
• Don’t leave the introduction to “quantitative literacy” to be addressed at the end of the unit or “if time permits”. Use numerical questions as motivation to use the quantitative skills to answer specific questions, throughout the semester.
• Be sensitive towards students’ mathematics phobia. Use exercises that can help students overcome their anxiety.
• Use appropriate examples to introduce numerical literacy to the students.
• Quantitative situations often require assumptions to be made prior to computing/solving. Clearly explain the assumptions and discuss the pros and cons of the assumptions made.
• Encourage the students to think about the audience when sharing their work and conclusions. Representation of the data and the conclusions is a very important part of interpretation.

How can one assess this objective?

• Use Quantitative Literacy and Reasoning Assessment instrument that is specifically designed to assess students “quantitative literacy” habits.
• Grounding assessments that are evaluated based on the VALUS rubric can also be used to assess students progress.