{"id":4636,"date":"2026-08-31T13:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T13:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/faculty-development-center\/?post_type=furman-update&p=4636"},"modified":"2026-08-31T13:16:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T13:16:34","slug":"teaching-tips-with-raiana-de-carvalho-september-2026","status":"publish","type":"furman-update","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/faculty-development-center\/updates\/teaching-tips-with-raiana-de-carvalho-september-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Tips with Raiana de Carvalho – September 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Teaching Tips aims to share creative pedagogical practices that Furman instructors are implementing in and out of the classroom. In this month\u2019s story, Raiana de Carvalho shares her unique approach to emphasizing process <\/em>over product<\/em>: an oral exam based on concept-maps<\/a>! Check out Kent State University for a brief review of concept maps<\/a> and consider what ways you might further communicate and evaluate the learning process <\/a>in your course.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve been reflecting on my tendency to treat traditional exam formats as an almost indispensable way to assess students’ knowledge of course material. While I still see students treat exams as a chance to learn, I also notice many losing their initial excitement about a course once they have to start studying for one. The stress of preparing for unknown questions can be overwhelming, shifting the focus from learning to memorizing. I wanted to try a method that would still pushstudents to engage rigorously with course content, but in a way that could hopefully also bring them joy and spark their creativity.<\/p>\n

That’s why I transformed the final exam in my Media and Society course into a concept-map project that anchored an oral exam at the end of the semester. (I call them concept maps, following a final assignment I completed myself as a master’s student once.) Instead of a multiple-choice questions type of exam, students hand-drew a concept map visually representing how the theories, ideas, and cases from the semester connected. I set a few structural and content requirements (e.g., a minimum number of nodes and arrows, a comprehensive overview of the whole semester), but students decided what to emphasize in their maps and how to elaborate on their thinking during the oral exam.<\/p>\n

My hope was that an activity like this could shift the emphasis from product to process. To reinforce that, I had students first submit a mini concept map\u2014a kind of prototype\u2014before building their larger one. These hand-drawn mini-maps included a central concept and a few connected nodes, giving me a sense of their initial thinking. I used them to anchor informal conversations with students about how they were understanding and integrating course material. These conversations doubled as low-stakes opportunities for students to test out how to make their maps more complex and comprehensive, and to identify gaps or concepts that still confused them before their final map and oral exam.<\/p>\n

I conducted the oral exams in groups of four to five students so they could lean on each other and learn together. Within their groups, students had to: 1) present their maps, 2) answer questions from me about specific nodes\/concepts, and 3) engage with each other’s maps by offering suggestions and comparisons. These steps were designed to encourage collaborative learning while still giving each student room to draw on what they knew best or found most interesting, intriguing, or relevant.<\/p>\n

While I kept the traditional exam format for the midterm, I witnessed a more dynamic form of engagement with course content when students were preparing for their final concept-map\/oral exam. My hope was that crafting and studying their own maps helped students rediscover their own learning trajectories\u2014while also picking up a new tool for studying!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teaching Tips aims to share creative pedagogical practices that Furman instructors are implementing in and out of the classroom. In this month\u2019s story, Raiana de Carvalho shares her unique approach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","update-categories":[],"class_list":["post-4636","furman-update","type-furman-update","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/faculty-development-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/updates\/4636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/faculty-development-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/updates"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/faculty-development-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/furman-update"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/faculty-development-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/updates\/4636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4639,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/faculty-development-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/updates\/4636\/revisions\/4639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/faculty-development-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"furman-update-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/faculty-development-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/update-categories?post=4636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}