| Date | Speaker | Talk |
| Nov 6, 2007 | Anne Fay, Director of Assessment, Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & The Office of Technology for Education (OTE), Carnegie Mellon University | "Assessment-Centered Instruction: Using Assessment to Support Educational Effectiveness" |
Research in the learning sciences has changed our view of education from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered perspective. Designing our instructional practices with the learner at the center changes significantly how we teach, what we teach, and where and when learning takes place. Fundamental to this learner-centered view is the role of assessment, whereby assessment and instruction are tightly interwoven and interdependent activities, and assessment is no longer an afterthought in the instructional cycle.
In fact, in a learner-centered approach, that is, thinking in terms of how students learn and what we want them to know and be able to do, assessment should guide our instructional practices, and not the other way around.
In this talk I will explore how our new understanding of learning can be used to change and expand our instructional practices and change how we think about and engage in assessment activities. I will present examples of instructional innovations and assessment practices to illustrate how integrating assessment of student learning into our instructional practices can make teaching and learning more effective and efficient.
Dr. Anne Fay received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1990) and was awarded a post doctoral research fellowhsip from the James A. McDonnell Foundation in Cognitive Studies in Educational Practice. From 1993 - 1997 she was a research associate at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh where she served as a principle investigator on assessment projects for the Society of Automotive Engineers and the Children's Television Workshop, and as a co-investigator on a grant from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. From 1996 - 2001 she served as a Visiting Professor in the pyschology department at CMU where she taught courses in research methods as well as cognitive and developmental psychology, with a particular focus on the development of reasoning and problem solving skills, and the application of cognitive theory to eduational practice.
Her current focus is on developing formative and summative assessments for programs and courses at Carnegie Mellon.