Center for Teaching and Learning

The following two videos are of a workshop on classroom-assessment techniques (CATs) from Austin Peay’s 2009 Summer Teaching Academy. CATs are not merely different techniques for assessing students. They are a part of a larger strategy to assess the accessibility of lectures, promote active learning, revise the next day’s lecture to accommodate the students’ needs, and create a truly student-centered environment even in a high-enrollment course.

Classroom Assessment Techniques 1

Classroom Assessment Techniques 2

Jane takes an introductory sociology course. She doesn’t like to “read,” although she reads and writes a lot of text messages. In fact, Jane reads and writes nearly every hour of her waking life. But her sociology professor assigns more sustained reading than she is accustomed to, so Jane almost never finishes (and sometimes never starts) the reading for each class.

But her sociology professor has required that each student post “at least one interesting idea from the reading” into either Facebook or Twitter each night. Meanwhile, students who actively question, develop, or personalize the ideas in other students’ posts are excused from the requirement of posting something new from the reading. Because her text messages are connected to Facebook and Twitter, Jane gleams some of the ideas she never reads from the textbook and still gets credit for responding to them. She gets into her text discussions, but her statements are often distortions of the original material.

Does this posting assignment do a disservice to students like Jane?

On the one hand, Jane’s reading attention span handicaps her. We might argue that the posting assignment enables Jane’s handicap by offering her an alternative to a sustained engagement with the textbook. If Jane is not the only student who opts out of reading the textbook in favor of this shortcut, then we might say that the posting assignment replaces informed engagement with superficial interaction. We can go even further by adding that her handicap likely derives from our technologically supported culture of soundbite learning — and that rather than confronting the problem, this assignment is contributing to it.

On the other hand, whereas the assignment itself promotes superficial interaction, other assignments can inspire informed engagement. In other words, a “dumb assignment” doesn’t have to dumb down the course as a whole. But why would a professor require such a potentially superficial assignment?

Perhaps we should reevaluate the effects of that assignment. Without such an assignment, Jane likely would withdraw early from this reading-and-writing-intensive course. Although some might claim that merely the assignment’s easiness keeps students like Jane in the course, maybe we can offer a different interpretation: It’s not the facility of the assignment, but rather the facility with which the assignment draws her into the learning community.

It’s easy to withdraw from a course. It’s hard to withdraw from a strong sense of community.

The longer students like Jane stay in a course, the longer they have exposure to the course material. If they are more attuned to their classmates than to either the textbook or lecture, then they still acquire some of that course material vicariously, through the advent of their classmates. And eventually, they might “look stuff up” (something else Jane doesn’t always associate with “reading”) in order to improve their engagement with the community.

Jane may not pass the course. But if she enters into the course’s learning community to engage the material vicariously, Jane might improve her relationship with the material enough to engage that material directly — if not this semester, then perhaps the next time around.

Both at Austin Peay and nationwide, course redesign has become a popular means of improving the retention of students. The idea behind course redesign is not to lower our expectations of students so that more students pass, but rather to rethink the ways we teach a course in order to better accommodate our students’ learning processes. So how do we brainstorm a redesign proposal? What should we take into consideration?

A standard way we can increase our students’ access to course material is to offer them many points of entry into that material. We can provide visual, auditory, read/write, and kinesthetic options for our students to satisfy each learning objective. Some students have even undisclosed learning disabilities that impose obstacles to one particular learning style. Other students prefer one learning style over another. Often, students require the use of multiple learning styles before they can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. How can we provide these multiple options for our students to satisfy each learning objective?

It is true that most redesign efforts broach differences in students’ learning styles by hosting the course material in a variety of media online — or through purchased computer programs that purportedly resolve those differences. These technological approaches, however, do not always work.

What if a D2L shell becomes a mere repository for uploaded materials? Only those students who are already motivated to take the learning process into their own hands will bother with the uploaded resources. Moreover, not even those more motivated students are guaranteed to benefit from those resources. Without guidance, even motivated students can experience what we might call a “Baskin-Robins paralysis”: When there are a 101 options, many people don’t know which ones to choose and become paralyzed with indecision and inaction. Uploaded materials do not inherently encourage the students’ engagement, especially when those uploaded materials are not interactive.

Let us not forget the social element. No matter how good they are, neither digital resources nor purchased computer programs can resolve learning differences without a teacher’s drawing those diverse digital examples and exercises into class discussions. Most students learn socially. Until they experience other people’s interest in a topic and associate that topic with their own personal objectives (classroom social status or some higher objective), information remains meaningless to them. It lacks social signification.

The simple solution to all of these problems: departmental workshops.

1.) The more faculty members discuss how to encourage students to access learning resources, the more their students might use those resources.

2.) The more faculty members share with each other strategies for guiding students, for teaching them how to choose appropriate resources for their own specific learning habits, the more their students might discover an intimate relationship with learning.

3.) The more faculty members experiment with creating interactive course materials, the more their students might interact with those materials and retain some of that material under their fingernails — and perhaps more importantly, bring it with them, even beyond the confines of the course.

4.) The more faculty members explore how to take students’ solitary learning activities and transform them into social engagements, the more their students might engage the material while alone, specifically in order to interact better with their peers in the learning community.

Regular departmental conversations are important for a successful course redesign.

What if the departmental culture opposes a technologically enhanced course? Neither targeting different learning styles nor any of the four points outlined above requires technology. Technology is a tool, not an objective.

Student engagement with the material is the objective. An increase of student engagement will improve retention and graduation rates and enhance student learning. Brainstorm how to achieve the objective, not how to use technology in the classroom. Both your peers and students will thank you for it.

In a previous post, I introduced Classroom-Assessment Techniques (CATs) as opportunities to improve both lectures and student engagement:

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.

Of course CATs raise a pedagogical question we should consider before constructing any in-class activity: What is the objective of the activity? Are we assessing the lecture’s effectiveness? Are we also trying to encourage students’ background knowledge, information recall, conceptual understanding, critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, or some other learning skill? Often, teachers rotate different types of assessments throughout a course, and ideally, the activities improve the students’ relationships with the very lectures or learning skills that are being assessed.

But there is one type of assessment that many teachers forget to include: an assessment of students’ motivation. Motivation is essential to learning. If an assessment enhances the students’ relationships with what it measures, then a course should include routine assessments of motivation. So how do we assess motivation?

Obviously, an infinite number of ways to assess motivation lurks in the Platonic ether for you to develop. Yet, before we consider even one possibility, perhaps we should think about what motivates our own recall, conceptual understanding, critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, etc. We should ask ourselves, in other words, What motivates our learning?

I personally don’t remember much from my undergraduate years that isn’t tied to some greater objective which I have elevated in some way onto a pedestal: the improvement of my understanding of the world, communication skills, interpersonal relations, etc. These heightened objectives determine the value or lack-thereof that I attribute to the information I encounter. In other words, if I interpret a connection between information and one of these objectives — the information as means, obstacle, or otherwise related to the objective — then I retain that information, and the inconsistency of that retained information leads me to contemplate it, think critically about it, problem-solve with it….

In short, I learn thanks to a narrative: “X is important to me. Y enables or prohibits me to achieve X. I now think about Y in order to achieve my goal of X.”

In order to assess my own motivation, I would have to ask myself, “What do I value or hope to achieve in my life that has a connection to this information? What would I have to be able to do with this information, specifically in order for it to improve my relationship with what I value or to help me achieve my greater goal?” The more I can explain, the greater my motivation will be to think about that information.

This reflective process then leads me to create a new assessment question for students:

What do you value or hope to achieve in your life that has a connection to this information about________? Explain what you would have to be able to do with this information, specifically so that it improves your relationship with what you value or otherwise helps you achieve your greater goal.

It is possible you won’t see a connection between this information and what you value or hope to achieve in your life. If this is the case, then thoroughly explain what you value or hope to achieve. Next, clarify what you will have to do to improve that relationship with what you value or to achieve your greater goal.

If I were to evaluate at least a sample of the students’ feedback, I could revise my lectures to cater the course material to these specific students’ values and objectives. That is, I can tie information to students’ lives in such a way that likely increases the students’ motivation to think about the course material.

Obviously, we do not experience motivation in the same way. I included my own reflective process not to impose my learning style onto others, but rather to encourage that reflective process in the creation of classroom activities. What do you remember from your undergraduate education? Which course was that in? Who taught it to you? How does it relate to what you’re doing now? Do you value that information? Why or why not? What motivated you to remember that information?

And how can you transform what you just learned about your own motivation into an assessment that might improve your students’ motivation to learn?

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.