Classroom Assessment Techniques. Lee Haugen Center for Teaching Excellence, Iowa State University February, 1999 What are CATs? Classroom Assessment Techniques are formative evaluation methods that serve two purposes. They can help you to assess the degree to which your students understand the course content and they can provide you with information about the effectiveness of your teaching methods.
Most are designed to be quick and easy to use and each CAT provides different kinds of information. Formative Evaluations Formative evaluations provide information that can be used to improve course content, methods of teaching, and, ultimately, student learning. How do CATs improve teaching and learning? When CATS are used frequently, they can have the following impacts: For faculty, CATs can: For students, CATs can: What kinds of evaluations are CATs designed to perform?
CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES. Formative and Summative Assessment in the Classroom. Testing 65. Constructing Balanced Classroom Tests This file should be read in conjunction with the discussion of alternative assessment. Pencil-and-paper classroom tests should be only one component of assessment strategies. The principle of balance Any classroom test is effectively a random sample of what students know and don't know, can and cannot do.
It is limited in its reliability and validity by the fact that it only gives information about what students did under the test conditions at the time the test was taken, and may not generalize to tell us what the student might do under other conditions or at another time. It also tells us only about a very small subset of all the things students are expected to learn from the curriculum. We need to try to make sure that that subset is properly representative of the goals of the curriculum and is not a biased sample. Many classroom tests are biased, or unbalanced, in one or more of the following ways: Some general guidelines: Classroom Assessment Techniques.