Linda B. Nilson

Improving Student Peer Feedback

Abstract Instructors use peer feedback to afford students multiple assessments of their work and to help them acquire important lifelong skills. However, research finds that this type of feedback has questionable validity, reliability, and accuracy, and instructors consider much of it too uncritical, superficial, vague, and content-focused, among other things. This article posits that the typical judgment-based feedback questions give students emotionally charged tasks that they are cognitively ill equipped to perform well and that permit laxness. It then introduces an alternative that encourages neutral, informative, and thorough responses that add genuine value to the peer feedback process.

Mapping Your Course: Designing a Graphic Syllabus for Introductory Finance

Abstract In this article, the authors offer a powerful teaching tool, the graphic syllabus, to help instructors meet the unique challenges of teaching introductory finance. This tool, a visual representation of the topical organization of the course, supplements and clarifies the text syllabus. The authors explain the instructional advantages of graphics, describe how to design a graphic syllabus, and provide an example of one for the introductory finance course. In the Appendix, they enumerate the available graphics software for composing a graphic syllabus.

Revisioning Graduate Professional-Development Programs.

Revisioning graduate professional-development programs is critical to enhancing graduate education. Both graduate students and employers have expressed a desire for an educational experience that better prepares students for their professional roles. This article describes the revisioning of a graduate professional-development program using a systems-developmental framework. The authors hope their process and model will generate further dialogue about this increasingly important topic.