I know many of you are planning to increase the amount of active learning in your courses. That's great -- it's one of the fundamental ways to improve student engagement and learning. Many of you are also planning to incorporate some elements of teaching metacognition into your courses this fall -- another great way to improve student learning. This post is about a strategy that you can use to support both of those goals, and also to assess student learning: multiple choice Concept Tests.

Eric Mazur pioneered this strategy in undergraduate physics classes at Harvard, but it can be used in almost any educational setting. The idea is very simple: after a short lecture segment on a single concept, you ask students a multiple choice question that assesses their understanding of that concept. If the majority of the class gets the right answer, you move on to the next topic. But if there is dissension about what the right answer is, you have students discuss their answers with each other in small groups, and then ask the question again. Only if the students don't converge on the correct answer after discussion do you explain the concept again, perhaps using a different approach. This method is described in detail on the SERC website, which includes a library of more than 300 example questions on geoscience topics:

• SERC site on Concept Tests: http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/conceptests/index.html
• Library of >300 Concept Test questions for geoscience: http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/conceptests/examples.html

For more information, I also recommend Eric Mazur's book, Peer Instruction: https://www.amazon.com/Peer-Instruction-Manual-Eric-Mazur/dp/0135654416.

What's great about this method is that it encourages students to listen carefully while you lecture, knowing that they'll have to answer a conceptual question on the material in just a few minutes; it provides both you and them with information about how well they understood the lecture, immediately; and it promotes peer to peer instruction, in a carefully controlled situation - one where you can correct any misinformation immediately. Students are actively engaged, and there's a built-in mechanism for them to check their understanding of the course material - a key component of metacognition, called self-monitoring.

I'm curious how many of you use multiple choice questions like this, already, to assess student understanding on the fly. If you do, what tips do you have for your colleagues about doing this? Or do you have other ways of assessing student understanding in class (i.e., long before you give a quiz or exam)?