Today I attended the first session of SABER West. The town hall panel discussion was about inclusion and equity and planning conferences. It was really good to hear several considerations for meeting meetings ranging from noise-free areas and speaker training guides to colorblind friendly templates. One thing that really resonated with me and I hope to keep in mind: ask about providing resources AND also plan on providing as many as you can! The feedback from participants will help you prepare and make meetings more accessible. Accessibility has been an area I’m really interested in and have been trying to learn about UDL, web accessibility, and captioning. Also, Claire and I were both nominated for the fall 2020 Accessibility Champions today!
I also attended the first ASK BIO (an NSF RCN) session. This is the first of three sessions. We reviewed learning objectives and discussed whether they included performance and content information that was adequate. We also talked about test blueprints: a table mapping learning objectives and the number of question items for high and lower-order learning objectives. The visual element of the table allows you to see how many questions you have for each learning objective, the breakdown of higher order and lower order, and the percentages for each. I mentioned that it would be useful to share the blueprint with students as a study guide. This first session of three made me realize how I can write learning objectives I think are reasonable, but they may not include enough performance and content information to be measurable — even by my own biology colleagues. I’m excited to learn more about how to write better LOs and questions.
