Clickers and CATs: Using Learner Response Systems for Formative Assessments in the Classroom

Formative assessment can play a critical role in fostering student success by engaging students in their own learning process, focusing their attention on what really matters, and helping instructors adjust to student learning needs in real time. Classroom assessment techniques (CATs) are a powerful...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inThe EDUCAUSE quarterly Vol. 33; no. 4
Main Authors Briggs, Charlotte L, Keyek-Franssen, Deborah
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published EDUCAUSE 2010
Subjects
Classroom Techniques
Educational Practices
Educational Strategies
Educational Technology
Evaluation Methods
Faculty Development
Feedback (Response)
Formative Evaluation
Student Evaluation
Teaching Methods
Technology Uses in Education
Use Studies
Online AccessGet more information

Cover

More Information
Summary:Formative assessment can play a critical role in fostering student success by engaging students in their own learning process, focusing their attention on what really matters, and helping instructors adjust to student learning needs in real time. Classroom assessment techniques (CATs) are a powerful formative assessment tool, and many CATs can be conducted quickly and easily in the classroom with clickers or other types of learner response systems. CATs are a well-developed set of formative assessment processes for collecting classroom data to support continuous course improvement. CATs are highly regarded by teaching and learning specialists, but might be less familiar to those who have come into a faculty development role through involvement with instructional technology. In this article, the authors showcase CATs as a use for clickers to make instructional technology staff more aware of the potential value of clickers for formative assessment and also to encourage a more systematic and rigorous approach to using clickers for this purpose. Additionally, they offer suggestions and resources to instructional technology staff for conducting faculty development workshops about using clickers to conduct formative classroom assessments. (Contains 3 figures and 16 endnotes.)
ISSN:1528-5324