Its purpose is to provide faculty and students with information and insights needed to improve teaching effectiveness and learning quality. Faculty also share feedback from CATs with students to help them improve their learning and study strategies. Since 1986, when K. Patricia Cross and I first introduced Classroom Assessment, this practical feedback method has been employed by tens of thousands of college teachers in the United States and abroad. Attributed to Dr. Charles Schwartz, a physics professor at UC Berkeley, the Minute Paper has, been adapted and used since the mid-1980s in virtually every discipline. Letting students in on the process helps promote active engagement, participation, and more reflective learning.
Most teachers ask questions to check understanding.
And most of us have noticed that typically only a small, not very representative percentage of students volunteers to answer. CATs, by contrast, elicit anonymous responses, usually in writing, from all or nearly all of the students. Unlike quizzes and tests, CATs are for quickly assessing the whole group's learning, not for evaluating the work of individual students to assign grades. And while all faculty use teaching techniques, whether they know it or not, some faculty go a step further, using CATs to find out how well those techniques are promoting learning. Since the late 1980s, several researchers have studied the effects and effectiveness of using Classroom Assessment Techniques in college and university classrooms.