Center for Teaching and Learning

There are some common misconceptions about some equally common classroom practices. According to one misconception, to borrow a metaphor from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Oppression (2007), lectures deposit knowledge in students and classroom assessments measure that investment’s rate of growth.

Lectures do provide information for students to apply when solving problems. Often, tests and other assessment methods do measure memory and both critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. The more students retain from and understand a lecture, the greater the yield of that investment in real-life circumstances.

However, in a lecture environment, students rarely get the opportunity to practice critical-thinking or problem-solving skills prior to a graded assessment. In other words, through homework, quizzes, and tests, professors at least initially judge each student’s either innate or nurtured, preexisting abilities. Those types of assessments, or at least in the way that we use them, measure little more than the students as information receptacles.

And perhaps more importantly, many students interpret graded assessments in that way. Yes, homework is practice for quizzes, quizzes are practice for tests, tests for exams, and exams for future courses or even life itself. But at-risk students in particular fear they are both not “good enough” and going to be “found out.” Even when they study effectively, many attribute good grades more to luck than their performance. And as another symptom of their object-status in the classroom, some blame their bad grades on the professor.

This perceptual problem isn’t a one-way street. Unfortunately, as the expressions “sink or swim” and “cream rises to the top” document, the dominant lecture strategy can negatively influence a professor’s perception of students. According to one such perception, whether due to the students’ will or character, upbringing or genetics, some students have the agency to navigate rigorous course material, but others don’t — regardless of the classroom format. Through this lens, the university system acquires the responsibility of not only documenting excellent and satisfactory learners, but also weeding out inadequate ones so businesses know in whom to invest.

Freire criticizes the influence of the investment model on pedagogical practices, because it locates agency in the investor, the lecturer, and reduces each student to a biologically or socially either suitable or damaged receptacle. Freire observes not just a metaphorical problem, not a mere language game devoid of real consequences. The dominant structure of dissemination dampens ingenuity, fosters dependency, and inhibits the very critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that a professor often lists in a course’s learning objectives. By imposing a “sink or swim” structure, many lecture courses do less to promote critical-thinking and problem-solving skills than to document their existence.

However, some of us teach in a lecture hall with over 75 students. Without incapacitating ourselves with endless grading, how can we transform the lecture hall into an active-learning environment?

Perhaps the first step is to revise our understanding of classroom assessments to include what are commonly called Classroom-Assessment Techniques.

Definition of Classroom-Assessment Techniques (CATs)

CATs are routine, often anonymous, and non-graded snapshots of the students’ relationships with the lecture material. They help a lecturer assess and revise his or her lectures. But they also help students both learn and increase their involvement in the learning process. In other words, CATs not only help the lecturer cater the material to the students, but they also promote active learning.

In form, CATs are not unlike quizzes or other in-class assignments. However, the anonymity of a CAT enables at-risk and other students to participate freely without fear of judgment. That is, CATs can promote memory and critical-thinking and problem-solving skills even more than document them.

Also, CATs do not drown professors in superfluous grading. First of all, CATs are not graded. Second of all, if a professor requires each student to confine his or her activity to a single note card, CATs are easy for the professor to review. Third of all, the professor has to examine only a sample of 20 cards to identify both common points of understanding and typical misunderstandings.

By acknowledging and responding to those typical misunderstandings at the start of the next lecture, the professor not only corrects misconceptions early in the learning process. That simple acknowledgment simultaneously sends a message to the at-risk students that their misconceptions are not just theirs, but also “common.” That sense of commonality encourages a sense of community.

We hear a lot about promoting a sense of community in the classroom, but what does a sense of community do for an at-risk student?

At-risk students withdraw easily from a course, but very few people withdraw easily from a strong sense of community. And the longer a learning community maintains contact with a student, the more the community influences that student.

The following research question was merely a starting point for how I chose which CATs to address in this post. Please revise the research question to suit the specific needs of your course or field.

RESEARCH QUESTION

How can we encourage our students to

1) pay more attention both to the lecture material and their interpretation of it,

2) intellectually organize the material, and

3) formulate their own ideas in language

…while at the same time we assess how well our lectures have connected with the students in our collective classroom effort to meet the course objectives?

Below you’ll see a list of only seven from what are ultimately an infinite number of possible CATs. I have appropriated these particular CATs from Diana Kelly’s “Evaluating Teaching and Learning” (2008), but you can find most of these and other CATs on The National Teaching and Learning Forum. Please, don’t confine yourself to the CATs you encounter here or even elsewhere. Once you get a feel for how CATs work in relation to your course’s specific learning objectives, you’ll likely want to create your own.

Background-Knowledge Probe

At the start of a course or new topic, the background-knowledge probe encourages students to recall relevant prior knowledge or experience. A lecturer can use a background-knowledge probe both to organize his or her lectures around a specific audience’s knowledge or experience and to measure overall learning during the progression of the course.

Common prompts for this three-minute writing exercise:

· List relevant educational, personal, or work-related experience in the subject.

· Briefly explain your current beliefs about the subject.

· List your motivations/reasons for studying the subject, as well as your concerns about the subject.

· Briefly explain what you hope to learn and how it will help you succeed.

A background-knowledge probe helps the professor investigate each student’s starting point in the journey to meet course objectives. But it also asks students to situate the upcoming lecture within the context of their own knowledge, experience, and/or situation. By personalizing the lecture in this way, a background probe increases the likelihood that the students will pay attention to both the lecture material and its relationship to what they already know. The latter is the starting point for their organizing that information: what fits and what doesn’t fit with what they already know. The assignment also asks students to formulate their ideas in language.

Focused Listing

Focused listing asks students to recall a set of relevant terms, facts, or concepts that they should know for the subject at hand. A lecturer can assign focused listing at the start of a new lecture or topic, not only to assess what the students remember, but also to encourage that memory. Or the lecturer can assign focused listing at the end of a lecture or topic — again, both to assess student recall and to encourage it.

Directed Paraphrase

By asking students to explain a new concept or set of instructions in their own words, a lecturer can both assess and encourage the students’ understanding beyond rote memorization.

Application Cards

A lecturer asks students to apply a newly discussed theory, principle, or procedure to a relevant, real-world context of either their or the instructor’s choosing. The lecturer uses the cards to determine how well students can apply what they’ve learned and to respond to those applications during the next lecture. But application cards also encourage students to think about a lesson contextually.

Memory Matrix

The lecturer provides a list of items down the left side of the matrix and of characteristics “A” through “C” across the top.

Characteristic A, Characteristic B, Characteristic C
———————————————————————————
Item 1
———————————————————————————
Item 2
———————————————————————————
Item 3

Students fill in the blank boxes with their understanding of how the listed items (names of biological cells, governmental structures, economic theories, literary genres, discursive modes, etc.) are different. The memory matrix facilitates both assessment of the students’ understanding of the material and their retention of that material.

Process Self-Analysis

The lecturer asks his or her students both to organize their fulfillment of an assignment into a series of steps and to calculate how long each step took them to complete. Then the students are to determine which steps caused them the most trouble and how they can improve their approaches to those steps.

The One-Minute Paper

This CAT gives both lecturers the information they need to revise the next lecture and students an opportunity to reflect upon what they’ve learned. The lecturer asks his or her audience thoughtful, reflective questions, not factual ones, questions that the lecturer really wants to know the answer to and plans to respond to at the start of the next lecture. Here are some example questions:

“What did you learn the most today about __________?”
“What did you find the most important about __________?”
“List what you learned today about __________.”
“What did you find the most helpful about today’s lecture?”
“What would you have liked to learn more about?”

All course-assessment techniques require that the lecturer in some way discuss student feedback during the next lecture. In fact, some lecturers dedicate entire class periods to student feedback to ensure a truly student-centered environment. As a lecturer acknowledges their comments, students not only measure their own performance against the backdrop of their classmates’ responses; they also discover that others wrote similar comments. This discovery raises self-confidence for the at-risk students who are experiencing difficulties, but it also promotes a sense of community out of the anonymity of the lecture environment. And both self-confidence and a sense of community increase student retention.

Exercise:

Write down the learning objectives for a particular course you are teaching and then review one of your lectures for that course. Now, devise at least one CAT. Feel free to try one of the seven CATs above, but as you feel more comfortable with how CATs relate to your course’s specific objectives, try to create your own CAT.

REFERENCES

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2007.

Kelly, Diana. “Evaluating Teaching and Learning: Enhancing the Scholarship of Teaching by Asking Students What They Are Learning.” The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Rowena Murray, Ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2008; 80-90.

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