Teaching Tools
Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices | Teaching with Technology | Resources for Funding
1. Evaluation and Assessment
1.2. Assesment
Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)
- Provide practice and general feedback that will improve student learning
- Assess questions of particular concern in the instructor's course
- Are intended to assess the whole class' understanding, not to evaluate individual learners
- Are tailored to content-specific objectives
- Allow for ongoing feedback with relatively quick assessment tools
Address with a CAT:
- How familiar are students with the important names, events and places in history that they will need to know as background in order to understand the lectures and readings?
- How are students applying knowledge and skills learned in this class to their own lives?
- To what extent are students aware of the steps they go through in solving problems and how well can they explain their problem-solving steps?
- How and how well are students using a learning approach that is new to them to master the concepts and principles in this course?
When Creating and Implementing CATs:
- Identify a specific "assessable" question where the students' responses will influence your teaching and provide feedback to aid their learning.
- Complete the assessment task yourself (or ask a colleague to do it) to be sure that it is doable in the time you will give the class.
- Plan how you will analyze students' responses, e.g. grouping them into categories such as "good understanding," "some misunderstandings," or "significant difficulties."
- Communicate CAT results to the students so that they know you learned from the assessment and so that they can identify specific difficulties of their own.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
