Time Well Spent: Designing for Balance in Instruction, Activities, and Assessment

I teach art history within a studio art department at a comprehensive regional university. While I am pleased that my courses are popular among studio art majors as well as general education students, it requires me to manage a 4/4 load without any grading or instructional assistants; additionally, my position requires contributions in the areas of both scholarship and service. This situation has required me to think carefully about how I spend my time teaching as well as evaluating and, I believe, made me a much more efficient and effective instructor. For example, although multiple-choice questions are often dismissed as assessing only lower-level thinking – and the test banks provided by many textbook publishers certainly reinforce such impressions – carefully tailored multiple-choice questions can be effectively employed in a variety of ways and used to test much more than the simple recall of information. Furthermore, these questions can easily be made to correspond with course discussion and activities, reinforcing the importance of the classroom and helping to motivate student attendance and course involvement. Finally, the activities used to educate students in how to effectively prepare for challenging multiple-choice questions assists them in developing study techniques; in this way, they not only learn to think critically within the discipline of art history, but they also are exposed to preparatory methods that can be transferred to almost any college course. This presentation will discuss some of the strategies I use when creating, elucidating, and managing multiple-choice questions in my courses.