“Think small.” This simple reminder was the key takeaway from Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie’s recent assessment workshop with the Incubator’s instructional design team. The advice was borne from Goldie’s own track record as an award-winning educator, teaching core decision science, health policy, and global health courses at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard College.
Marker in hand, Dr. Goldie sketched out the informal framework she uses to structure her thinking around student assessment in a global health classroom. Goldie underscored the value of ensuring that students have a strong foundation of the “bare basics” of topic before moving to more creative assessment tools.
“Have I managed to get people of different levels to the same background? Do students have the core knowledge they need, so they have the ‘ingredients’ for subsequent levels of assessment?” said Goldie.
Dr. Goldie explained that new teaching fellows, for example, are often overly ambitious in the assessment questions they pose to their sections. Scaling down the question so that it can be realistically answered can more effectively check students’ factual understanding before wading deeper into the knowledge territory. With the basics in hand, the educator can then assess whether students are able to situate a global health problem in a context or demonstrate higher orders of thinking.
Based on these principles, the Incubator’s instructional design team is hard at work at developing teaching tools that include opportunities to assess foundational understanding of the global health landscape. Learn more about the Incubator.