Dr. Bob Noyd has been generous enough to provide the material used in his workshops held March 23. The session on critical thinking emphasized that your plan of action should always begin with your learning goals. The session on effective instructional strategies focused on critical analysis by the instructor on determining the best teaching methods especially as it relates to active learning. Reviewing the comments from the eighty participants, it is obvious that the day was very useful and had an impact. We will be sharing some of the individual comments in the coming days. As mentioned previously, Dr. Rebecca Cox will be visiting LU on April 15. Her faculty session "Understanding The New Student Learning Paradigm: How to Help your Students Succeed" is set for 9:05 a.m. in the John Gray Center Seminar Rooms A and B. You are encouraged to register now. Dr. Cox will also be making a presentation to our students and we are encouraging the faculty to incentivize attendance. More on this later. Formative assessment occurs when teachers feed information back to students in ways that enable the student to learn better, or when students can engage in a similar, self-reflective process. Evidence shows that high quality formative assessment does have a powerful impact on student learning. Formative assessment is particularly effective for students who have not done well in school, thus narrowing the gap between low and high achievers while raising overall achievement. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam's article "Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment" is a good start if you are interested in exploring ways you can implement this useful assessment tool into your kit.