“I think self-assessment is both a challenge and an opportunity when it comes to teaching today’s students. It can be a challenge because many traditional-aged college students have been conditioned by society to believe that high self-esteem is more important than anything else. One of the unfortunate side effects of this is people can come to view anything other than lavish praise as a personal attack, or a sign that they don’t know anything at all. As a result faculty sometimes have a challenge to create a shared understanding of how self-assessment can assist in a student’s development as a learner. I think the opportunity for us at Alverno is that our criteria-based system and our extensive feedback allow us to create a context for self-assessment that isn’t about a judgment of the worth of the student, but about a very specific aspect of a performance.

More and more I’m trying to give my students a chance to learn outside the boundaries of the traditional classroom. A colleague at Marquette University, Dr. Stephen Franzoi, and I have an ongoing collaboration that’s a joint research project between students in Alverno’s Behavioral Sciences Research Center and students at Marquette. The class is much less structured than anything I’ve ever taught because we have to deal with questions, ideas and problems as they arise, and because we’re dealing with groups of people at remote locations. Students are asked to adapt to flexible schedules and to meet deadlines imposed by real outside agencies (Institutional Review Boards, conference submission deadlines). They also have to deal with projects that don’t start and end with the semester. For example, over winter break, senior Jenna Schwalbach entered data to see how her hypotheses were shaping up, even though she had finished the class in early December. We do a lot over the Web that would normally happen in a classroom, from collaborating on design to collecting data, and we visit Marquette periodically to meet with the team over there.”