Evaluation+and+assessment

Evaluations and assessments are essential to know the progress of your students. Usual true/false, multiple choice and fill in the blank tests are ok but .....

=Use Classroom Assessment Techniques= Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are a set of specific activities that instructors can use to quickly gauge students’ comprehension. They are generally used to assess students’ understanding of material in the current course, but with minor modifications they can also be used to gauge students’ knowledge coming into a course or program. 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.

Minute Paper
Pose one to two questions in which students identify the most significant things they have learned from a given lecture, discussion, or assignment. Give students one to two minutes to write a response on an index card or paper. 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.

Muddiest Point
This is similar to the Minute Paper but focuses on areas of confusion. Ask your students, “What was the muddiest point in… (today’s lecture, the reading, the homework)?” Give them one to two minutes to write and collect their responses.

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.

Documented Problem Solutions
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.

Directed Paraphrasing
Select an important theory, concept, or argument that students have studied in some depth and identify a real audience to whom your students should be able to explain this material in their own words (e.g., a grants review board, a city council member, a vice president making a related decision). Provide guidelines about the length and purpose of the paraphrased explanation.

Applications Cards
Identify a concept or principle your students are studying and ask students to come up with one to three applications of the principle from everyday experience, current news events, or their knowledge of particular organizations or systems discussed in the course.

Student-Generated Test Questions
A week or two prior to an exam, begin to write general guidelines about the kinds of questions you plan to ask on the exam. Share those guidelines with your students and ask them to write and answer one to two questions like those they expect to see on the exam.

Classroom Opinion Polls
When you believe that your students may have pre-existing opinions about course-related issues, construct a very short two- to four-item questionnaire to help uncover students’ opinions.

Creating and Implementing CATs
You can create your own CATs to meet the specific needs of your course and students. Below are some strategies that you can use to do this.
 * Identify a specific “assessable” question where the students’ responses will influence your teaching and provide feedback to aid their learning.
 * Complete the assessment task yourself (or ask a colleague to do it) to be sure that it is doable in the time you will allot 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.

Using Rubrics (my favorite) great website []

Benefits of Rubrics
A carefully designed rubric can offer a number of benefits to instructors. Rubrics help instructors to: An effective rubric can also offer several important benefits to students. Rubrics help students to:
 * reduce the time spent grading by allowing instructors to refer to a substantive description without writing long comments
 * help instructors more clearly identify strengths and weaknesses across an entire class and adjust their instruction appropriately
 * help to ensure consistency across time and across graders
 * reduce the uncertainty which can accompany grading
 * discourage complaints about grades
 * understand instructors’ expectations and standards
 * use instructor feedback to improve their performance
 * monitor and assess their progress as they work towards clearly indicated goals
 * recognize their strengths and weaknesses and direct their efforts accordingly

some of max Teaching strategies []

think -pair-share focus free write

This can help students remember concepts, terms, etc. triangle has 3 points on each point are clues to the answer that goes in the middle-such as big ears, Disney, animation answer is mickey mouse.

this is a concept check that can be used to access various content that that has been delivered or could be used as a pre assessment and then give it again at the end as a post

another method of understanding the whole concept this method can be done with anything.this example just shows a job search. with this form you give students a specific amount of time to come up with words that start with the specific letter such as on job search A might be for application I like this quick evaluation because it is not long and students give good feedback.

great way to access field trips and guest speakers