The document discusses the concept of "big ideas" in introductory courses and disciplinary contexts. It argues that introductory courses should focus on ensuring students understand core disciplinary concepts and ways of thinking, rather than just isolated facts. Assessing students' ability to apply these big ideas outside of class and reflect on their own thinking can help ensure deep learning. The document provides questions to help faculty design assignments and discussions that allow students to demonstrate their understanding and use of important disciplinary ideas.

1. The Rules of ‘Travel’: Disciplinary ‘Big Ideas’ in Interdisciplinary Contexts William S. Moore, Ph.D. Coordinator, Assessment, Teaching & Learning WA St. Bd. For Comm. & Tech. Colleges 360-704-4346 bmoore@sbctc.ctc.edu Learning Community Coordinators’ Meeting October 2004

3. Central Question Assume for the moment that the introductory course in your discipline or program is the LAST course that the students will ever take in the area. What core discipline-specific ideas/concepts do you want ALL students taking the course to understand deeply, i.e., be apply to apply and even transfer to other settings five years later?

4. Deep Learning Meta-cognition about thinking & learning Understandings of core concepts Ways of reasoning

6. All students come to us with prior ideas, and our first challenge is to bring what is inside, out: to make the internal external, to make the private public, to make the implicit explicit…That is the essence of pedagogy: putting the inside out, working on it together while it is out, then putting the outside back in… Lee Shulman, “Teacher Development: Roles of Domain Expertise and Pedagogical Knowledge,” 2000 Making Thinking Visible

8. CONTENT (knowledge) PROCESS (ways of reasoning) Meta-cognition about thinking & learning BIG IDEAS (core concepts)

9. Providing Feedback (and Judgments) about Progress What opportunities could you provide for students to demonstrate their understanding of, and capacity to reason with, the Big Ideas you think matter the most?

10. If you want your students to think the ways historians, biologists, or attorneys do, create assignments or classroom discussions that make it possible for them to make those moves, to understand them, and to reflect on their effects. Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, University of Pittsburgh, from Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning , Pat Hutchings (ed.), 2001

11. Good assessment tasks are interchangeable with good instructional tasks. Lorrie Shepard “ The role of assessment in a learning culture,” 2000

12. Designing Course-Embedded Assessment Tasks Karen Sheingold, Joan Heller, & Susan Paulukonis, “ Actively Seeking Evidence…,” ETS, 1994 What understandings & abilities do I want to assess? What performances or work will allow students to demonstrate these understandings & abilities? What evidence in the performance or work tells me to what extent the students have these understandings & abilities? What activities do students have to do to learn how to generate these performances?