Popular K-12 Classroom Assessment Techniques Teachers Need to Know

Chain Notes – Students write immediate, spontaneous reactions to questions given by the teacher while the class is in progress. This feedback gives the teacher a “sounding” of the students’ level of engagement and involvement during lecture.

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Productive Study-Time Logs – Students keep a record of how much time they spend studying for a particular class, when they study, and how productively they study at various times of the day or night. This allows faculty to assess the amount and quality of out-of-class time all their students are spending preparing for class, and to share that information with students.

Punctuated Lectures – Students and teachers go through five steps: listen, stop, reflect, write, and give feedback. Students listen to lecture. The teacher stops the action and students reflect on what they were doing during the presentation and how their behavior while listening may have helped or hindered their understanding of that information. They then write down any insights they have gained and they give feedback to the teacher in the form of short, anonymous notes. This technique provides immediate, on-the-spot feedback on how students are learning from a lecture or demonstration and lets teachers and students know what may be distracting. And students are encouraged to become self-monitoring listeners, and in the process, more aware and more effective learners.

Interest/Knowledge/Skills Checklist – Students rate their interest in various topics, and assess their levels of skill or knowledge in those topics, by indicating the appropriate responses on a checklist which has been created by the teacher. These checklists inform teachers of their students’ level of interest in course topics and their assessment of the skills and knowledge needed for and/or developed through the course.

Goal Ranking and Matching – Students list a few learning goals they hope to achieve through the course and rank the relative importance of those goals.. This assesses the “degree of fit” between the students’ personal learning goals and teachers’ course-specific instructional goals, and between the teachers’ and students’ ranking of the relative importance and difficulty of the goals.

Self-Assessment of Ways of Learning – Students describe their general approaches to learning, or their learning styles, by comparing themselves with several different profiles and choosing those that, in their opinion, most closely resemble them. This provides teachers with a simple way to assess students’ learning styles or preferences for ways of learning.

Problem Recognition Tasks – Students are provided with a few examples of common problem types and are asked to recognize and identify the particular type of problem each example represents. Faculty are able to assess how well students can recognize various problem types, the first step in matching problem type to solution method.

It is important for educators to use some assessment techniques whatever suits them the best as the complete course of actions helps students in many ways, like mentioned below:

For students, CATs can:

– Help develop self-assessment and learning management skills.

– Reduce feelings of isolation, especially in large classes.

– Increase understanding and ability to think critically about the course content.

– Foster an attitude that values understanding and long-term retention.

– Show your interest and support of their success in the classroom.