Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are ungraded activities conducted in class to provide instructors feedback on student understanding before exams. CATs include techniques like minute papers, one-sentence summaries, and application cards that assess comprehension without grades. The feedback informs instructors to adjust pacing or address confusion to improve learning outcomes.

1. Classroom
Assessment
Techniques
Jammu University
2 Year B.Ed.
Paper 202
Sem: II
Dr. Atul Thakur
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
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2. Classroom Assessment Techniques
 Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are
ungraded activities conducted in the classroom setting.
 Their purpose is to provide the instructor feedback on
whether or not students understand course material so
that adjustments can be made before the end of the
term.
 Frequent use of CATs also can assure students that the
instructor takes a genuine, active interest in their
learning process throughout the course, before the
summative assessment (e.g., final exam) is given at
the end of the term.
 Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are a set of
specific activities that instructors can use to quickly
gauge students’ comprehension.

3. CATs are meant to provide immediate
feedback about the entire class’s level of
understanding, not individual students’.
The instructor can use this feedback to inform
instruction, such as speeding up or slowing
the pace of a lecture or explicitly addressing
areas of confusion.

4. What can be asked in the CAT:
familiarity of students with important names,
events, and places in history
Application of knowledge and skills learned in
this class to their own lives
Extent to which students aware of the steps they
go through in solving problems and how well
can they explain their problem-solving steps
Use of various learning approach by students to
understand what is new to them (e.g.,
cooperative groups) for mastering the concepts
and principles in the course

5. Using Specific Types of CATs
Background knowledge probe:
Minute Paper:
One-Sentence Summary:
What's The Principle?
Directed paraphrasing:
Application Cards:
Problem Recognition Tasks:
Documented Problem Solutions:

6. Background knowledge probe:
 In the first class teachers ask students for general
information on their level of knowledge
 This technique is designed to collect much more
specific, and more useful, feedback on students' prior
learning
 Background Knowledge Probes are short, simple
questionnaires prepared by instructors for use at the
beginning of a course, at the start of a new unit or
lesson, or prior to introducing an important new topic
 A given Background Knowledge Probe may require
students to write short answers, to circle the correct
response to multiple-choice questions, or both.

7. Minute Paper:
 No other technique has been used more often by teachers
that the Minute Paper
 This technique - also known as the One-Minute Paper and
the Half-Sheet Response - provides a quick and extremely
simple way to collect written feedback on student learning
 To use the Minute Paper, an instructor stops class two or
three minutes early and asks students to respond briefly to
some variation on the following two questions: "What was
the most important thing you learned during this class?"
and "What important question remains unanswered?"
Students they write their responses on index cards or half-
sheets of scrap paper and hand them in
 Collect their responses and look them over quickly. Their
answers can help you to determine if they are successfully
identifying what you view as most important.

8. One-Sentence Summary:
This simple technique challenges students to
answer the questions "Who does what to
whom, when, where, how, and why?"
(represented by the letters WDWWWWHW)
about a given topic, and then to synthesize
those answers into a simple informative,
grammatical, and long summary sentence.

9. What's The Principle?
After students figure out what type of
problem they are dealing with, they often
must then decide what principle or principles
to apply in order to solve the problem
This technique focuses on this step in
problem solving
It provides students with a few problems and
asks them to state the principle that best
applies to each problem.

10. Directed paraphrasing:
The instructor asks students to paraphrase part of
a lesson for a specific audience and purpose,
using their own words
This is especially useful for pre-professional
students who will be asked in their careers to
translate specialized information into language
that clients or customers can understand.
This technique allows faculty to examine
students' understanding of information and their
ability to transform it into a form that can be
meaningful to specific audiences other than the
student and instructor.

11. Application Cards:
After students have been introduced to some
principle, generalization, theory, or procedure,
the instructor passes out index cards and asks
students to write down at least one possible,
real-world application for what they have just
learned.

12. Problem Recognition Tasks:
Identify a set of problems that can be solved
most effectively by only one of a few
methods that you are teaching in the class.
Ask students to identify by name which
methods best fit which problems without
actually solving the problems.
This task works best when only one method
can be used for each problem.

13. Choose one to three problems and ask
students to write down all of the steps they
would take in solving them with an
explanation of each step. Consider using this
method as an assessment of problem-solving
skills at the beginning of the course or as a
regular part of the assigned homework.

14. 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 to be sure that it is
doable in the time alloted for it.
 Plan how you will analyze students’ responses, such as
grouping them into the categories “good
understanding,” “some misunderstanding,” or
“significant misunderstanding.”
 After using a CAT, communicate the results to the
students so that they know you learned from the
assessment and so that they can identify specific
difficulties of their own.

15. Benefits of CATs
Provides regular feedback about student
progress and can preempt misconceptions and
poor performance on more heavily-weighted
tests, quizzes, projects, etc.
Gives insight into day-to-day teaching
methods and student learning processes. It
also can model to students the fact that
learning is an ongoing and evolving process
that can be modified as needed.

16. Provides students with a means of gauging
their own learning styles and then modify
study strategies as appropriate.
Helps students feel less anonymous in large
class settings, since it is concrete evidence
that the instructor cares about student
learning.
Provides "food for thought" for instructors as
they reflect on their teaching and on a
particular course at the end of term.