ETIPS - Make Thinking Visible
ETIPS cases offer an embedded suite of assessment tools for immediate feedback on students' critical thinking strategies. Visual displays of learners' decision-making sequence and other tools provide formative information that can inform teaching and deepen students' reflection. These innovative tools help instructors create and model assessment-centered learning environments by making students' thinking visible and providing them with formative assessment of their work.
Unique to ETIPS are PlanMaps, visual displays of the learners' step-by-step decision making. Automated PlanMaps of students' planned strategies and their actual step-by-step search illustrate how individual learners framed a key question and what information they thought was necessary to answer it. These maps visually compare their search process to their planned exploration of the case and to the strategies suggested by experts.
ETIPS also offers tools for quickly assessing the short-answer essays students compose in response to the key questions posed in the case introduction after they have gathered sufficient information from their exploration of the case's context. Students' essays are archived and can be scored online, and scores are electronically available upon demand by instructor or student. Instructors can easily and quickly give detailed feedback to students about their decision-making process through the rubrics provided in the online essay-scoring tool as well as through optional narrative comments.