Purpose: to give you and your students feedback on the teaching/learning process in “real-time”
       
Advantages:  

You get “just-in-time” info about student understanding of concepts, where they need more help or practice, so you can address it during the lesson. They are quick and easy.

Allows the teacher to then switch gears and try a different approach if necessary with one or more students. 

Students begin to learn how to monitor their own learning and evaluate their own understanding. Hopefully it gives them the confidence to speak up when they do not understand or need another example, more time to review, or more practice.

CATs can foster good rapport between teachers and students.

The hope is that students will not go on to independent practice without fully understanding the concept and end up practicing things “wrong,” only to find out the next day they just completed 15 problems and they are all wrong.

The hope is that instructors do not just move along to the next topic not knowing whether all students “get it.”

Different CAT activities are designed to assess knowledge and skills at different stages of the learning process and at different DOK levels:

Assessing Prior Knowledge, Recall and Understanding

Assessing Skills in Application and Performance

Assessing Skill in Problem Solving

Assessing Skill in Analysis and Critical Thinking

Assessing Skill in Synthesis and Creative Thinking

 There are CAT activities designed to assess student attitudes, values and self-awareness.

There are CAT activities designed to assess the learners’ thoughts about the effectiveness of instruction, the usefulness of information and resources, whether the way something was taught was useful, if they liked the textbook or the video, etc. 

CATs are techniques teachers use to answer the question: “What are students thinking?”

CATs should be quick to use, easy to interpret, and provide information about students’ thinking.

CATs can answer questions like:

   What do students come to my course 
   knowing (or thinking they know)?

   What are they thinking at any moment in 
   class?

   What did they get out of today’s class 
   compared to what I wanted them to get?

   What are they thinking when they study (or 
how did they go about answering a problem)?