An independent student newspaper serving Iowa State since 1890
MONDAY
12.10.2018 Vol. 219 No. 076
TIME
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Managing time pg 3 Prepare for your finals in advance to save yourself from the stress of procrastination.
FINALS FUEL
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Food for thought pg 4
The finals creation process Professors discuss what testing styles they prefer BY EMILY.BERCH @iowastatedaily.com Throughout the final two weeks of the semester, students submit projects and take exams to determine their final grades, but professors spend time year-round figuring out which types of assessments will work best for their classes and their students. When planning their final assessments, instructors consider the material they’ll teach, the level of understanding they expect from their students and a variety of other factors all leading to students having different types of assessments at the end of the semester. Lesya Hassall, the learning designer and program coordinator at Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, said there are many variables in determining which type of assessment will be most effective for a particular course. “Assessment is always very much dependent on the pedagogical context and the situation,” Hassall said. “The instructor is always thinking of students becoming something
as a result of that course, and there are certain learning objectives that an instructor has in mind that even five years from now students will still remember this very important stuff about the course.” Hassall said she believes these objectives are critical in guiding the course and students can better understand what their professors want them to learn if they pay attention to their syllabi. “I really believe that every professor is sort of driven by those big learning objectives that they set out at the start of the course,” Hassall said. “Oftentimes if you look at your syllabus, those learning objectives are right there up front, and they use an action verb. They have very specific logic as to why it’s an action verb.” Adriana Gonzalez, assistant director for academic coaching and outreach at the Academic Success Center, said these action verbs may be the key in determining how to study for a class. At the Academic Success Center, Gonzalez helps students identify what level of learning a class is operating on using Bloom’s Taxonomy, which she describes as “a theoretical framework surrounding levels of thinking.” Bloom’s Taxonomy is structured as a pyramid, with remembering and understanding being the basis for learning a concept and evaluating and creating being the top two levels of knowing a subject.
Try these tasty recipes to give your body the fuel it needs to survive finals week.
SURVIVAL
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Pass with ease pg 5 COURTESY OF GETTY IMAGES Professors discuss the process of coming up with their final assesments. There are many factors which go into deciding the best way to test a student’s knowledge.
“The idea is the further you move up the pyramid, the more you understand the material,” Gonzalez said. When students come to the Academic Success Center, Gonzalez gives them a handout with keywords assigned to each level of the taxonomy. Students can then compare it to the wording in their course objectives and old exams to find where their course lies on the taxonomy. Stacy Cordery, a history professor at Iowa State, said she believes the survey courses she teaches necessitate having a cumulative final exam both because of the subject matter and their institutional level. She said she wants her students to be better prepared for their upper-level courses, which means they need to
have a solid foundation. “Survey classes are service courses for upper-level courses,” Cordery said. Cordery also said she believes students learn better when they study the material for a second time. Adam Logsdon, a senior in apparel, merchandising and design, said this concept has applied to him this semester in Introduction to Spreadsheets and Databases, a 100-level computer science course, a subject with which he is unfamiliar. “I feel like going back and filling out the notecards, looking through everything, has been a good
FINALS
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Check out these tips to help you get through finals week with ease and keep a little sanity.
STUDY BREAKS
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What to watch pg 7 Here’s a list of movies that will be released over break. Check these out once you’re done with finals.