Affiliated Institution/Organization(s): Murray State University
Session Format: Poster
Session Tracks:
AEA – Accessibility, Equity & Access
OP – Online Pedagogy & Instructional Strategies
SS – Student Success
Session Description
When presented with complex free response assessments, students often provide responses that suggest that their cognitive load has become overwhelmed. This can lead them to stray from their points and to ignore key aspects of the prompt. In addition to being remarkably complicated for instructors to grade, such meandering responses are also unlikely to be truly representative of student learning, as individual variations in responses may reflect executive functioning capabilities more strongly than they reflect knowledge of a subject. However, when students are given scaffolding for their responses in the form of sentence stems (sometimes called sentence starters or sentence frames), these stems can make the assessment more accessible by reducing student cognitive load. This, in turn, allows students to more effectively demonstrate their knowledge which can then help instructors more efficiently grade and provide feedback on their responses. The purpose of this presentation is to examine ways in which instructors can use this sort of scaffolding in their own assessments in order to create more accessible, equitable, and efficient learning conditions.
Learning Objectives
- Explain how sentence starters and structured response scaffolds reduce extraneous cognitive load during free-response assessments.
- Evaluate the relationship between scaffolded response design, accessibility, and equitable assessment practices in higher education.
- Apply scaffolded assessment techniques to improve student response quality and instructor grading efficiency.
Session Facilitator(s)
- Amanda Joyce
Bio(s)
Dr. Amanda Joyce is a Professor of Psychology at Murray State University, with experience teaching in-person and online (synchronous and asynchornous) and at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She teaches courses in Introductory Psychology, Research Methods, Statistics, and the Psychology of Women and Gender, as well as several courses in her specialty area of Developmental Psychology. Her research interests include childhood cognitive development and best practices for teaching and learning in the college classroom.