I was invited to give a talk for Dan Wolczuk's seminar for UW instructors, and chose to talk about Assessment Design for Learning. You can view the presentation here and access the slides below. In it, I touch on several of the ways I design assessments in my courses to encourage student learning, including:
Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning
Incorporating high level questions into assessments
Back in early 2015, the SAS (Stats and Act Sci) department was having a discussion about CS students in the two required STAT courses (230: Probability and 231: Statistics). While CS students are as strong as other Math students in most courses, they were systematically underperforming in STATs.
The idea that got the most traction was to pilot a special section of STAT 230, which would focus on the CS applications of probability. The hope was that by including more relevant examples, and pointing out the many important tie-ins to later CS courses, the students would be more...
This post is based on a presentation I made at the 52nd Actuarial Research Conference in Atlanta, Georgia in July 2017. The slides for the presentation are attached.
I was inspired to give this talk by a few conversations I had with other actuarial educators at last year's conference. I mentioned my usual approach to testing both basic and high level thinking skills, along with communication, in the same question on my exams. More than one person was extremely surprised by my approach and exclaimed "I wish I could write...
As part of my LITE grant (see posts below) I presented the outcomes of my work with STAT 334 at UW's Opportunities and New Directions conference in April 2016. I also gave a similar (and a bit more detailed) presentation to my own department of Statistics and Actuarial Science in June 2016. Finally, I talked about how to extend these ideas to Actuarial Science courses at the ...
I have used Oral Exams in several courses in the past (STAT 430/830: Experimental Design, ACTSC 455/855: Advanced Life Insurance Practice, and ACTSC 613: Probability and Statistics for Actuaries) based on research I had done while completing my Certificate in University Teaching. So I was eager to use them in STAT 334 as well. I always use them in addition to, rather than instead of, a traditional written final exam.