Dutton Digest, February 2024

Helping Everyone Feel Better about Everything!

Life Hacks with CAPS

Providing your students with mental health information – and maybe offering some extra credit for participating -- is a great way to signal an appreciation for everyone’s well-being! Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) has excellent programs and Life Hack Kits to improve everyone’s wellness.

Visit the Life Hacks with CAPS page to learn more about kits for anxiety management, imposter syndrome, motivation, and more.

Virtual Workshops are also available each semester to students at all campuses.

Help your students make connections with others, increase their sense of belonging, and gain an understanding of available services.

Formative Assessment

Formative Assessment is generally known as a way to offer low-stakes activities that help students improve their performance. Homework can be formative assessment. So can weekly quizzes, clicker questions, and in-class discussions. This may sound fairly standard, but the practice of formative assessment is packed with hidden value! And with a little creativity, can be fun for everyone.

• Formative assessment, because it is low- or no-stakes by nature, is about more than performance improvement or grades – it’s about learning, and that difference matters to students. Inclusion of these kinds of activities can help motivate students to take ownership of their learning.
• Formative assessment, because it provides valuable feedback to instructors about how students are faring, can help instructors identify gaps in their instruction or in the clarity of their conveyance of information. What might you do differently next time?

For more on this topic, visit the Dutton Teaching & Learning Showcase. We have lots of ideas for how to incorporate formative assessment activities into your practice:

• A simple, no-stakes way to help students evaluate their understanding of material is with Muddiest Point activities.
• The 3-2-1 Method is a formative assessment activity that can be used to determine where students might need additional support. 
• Asking students to close their books, put away their notes, and write down what they've learned about a topic is an effective way to help them remember and learn: Using Broad Recall Prompts to Encourage Durable Learning.
• The One-Minute Paper strategy can be used to evaluate what students have learned and what they are struggling with.