Connecting Classroom Teaching and Assessment

K. Patricia Cross, Pat, was early to recognize the mounting pressures on institutions of higher education to provide evidence of student learning. In 1986, nearly 30 years ago now, she said:

Student learning is a mission of every institution that teaches undergraduates. And it is quite fair to ask how well we do that job. For better or for worse—and much of it is “for the worse”—assessment is here, and everyone wants to know what students are learning in college. (p. 3)

While the assessment movement was largely being driven as a response to external demands (assessment as accountability), Pat saw its greater purpose as fostering an internal feedback loop to advance the quality of instruction and curriculum (assessment as improvement). As she put it:

A concerted attack on the measurement of student learning will enable us to provide more adequate feedback to teachers, departments, and institutions (p. 3). Ultimately, the most sophisticated forms of assessment will be built into instruction and curriculum, providing continuous feedback on the processes of teaching and learning. (1986, p. 3)

Pat clearly thought that assessment should be built into the teaching and learning process, and that it should be teacher designed and teacher driven. She also knew, however, that most teachers weren't prepared for such work, in large part because graduate programs focused on helping students develop disciplinary content knowledge rather than pedagogical knowledge and educational research skills. Yet she urged teachers to ask questions about teaching and learning and to seek to answer them. These beliefs planted the seeds for her work in classroom assessment and research, and she argued that:

If college teachers were to practice their profession at a more sophisticated level, they would discover that the classroom is, or should be, a challenging research laboratory, with questions to be pursued, data to be collected, analyses to be made, and improvement to be tried and evaluated. (1986, p. 6)

As Pat expanded on her ideas, she shared her vision for the role college teachers could play in improving student learning across the country:

I believe that research on teaching and learning should be done in thousands of classrooms across this nation by classroom teachers themselves. What is needed if higher education is to move toward our goal of maximizing student learning is a new breed of college teacher that we shall call a Classroom Researcher. (1986, p. 13)

Thus Pat was in the vanguard of visionaries to see teaching as a valuable and scholarly activity that demanded inquiry and investigation.

Pat was able to put her ideas into action with support from three organizations that provided resources and staff time: The National Center for Research to Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning (NCRIPTAL) at the University of Michigan, the Harvard Seminar on Assessment, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ultimately she established the Classroom Research Project at Harvard in 1988, which was funded by the Ford Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. She also developed and refined her concept of a “Classroom Assessment Technique,” an organized structure that guided teachers through the process and procedures to conduct formative assessment in their classrooms.

She and the project moved to the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1988, when the first edition of Classroom Assessment Techniques was published by NCRIPTAL. This edition was the product of Pat Cross's work with her then graduate research assistant, Tom Angelo. The text introduced college faculty to the idea of classroom assessment, and it provided 30 Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) that instructors could use as the basis for collecting and analyzing information from their own courses. In 1993, the team of Cross and Angelo became Angelo and Cross with the publication by Jossey-Bass of the second edition of Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. The new book contained 50 CATs, with expanded advice and additional examples from practice.

Pat and Tom wanted to encourage college teachers to become more systematic and sensitive observers of learning as it takes place every day in their classrooms. If college teachers would use their classrooms as laboratories for the study of learning and make the results of their research public, they could advance the practice of teaching. Through Pat's writing and speeches, and Tom's conference and college workshops, CATs became known throughout higher education. Classroom Assessment Techniques became a best seller and remains a classic that provides college faculty with practical advice on how to assess the quality of teaching and learning in their own classrooms.

Classroom Assessment Reconsidered

It is now almost three decades since the publication of the first edition of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) and over two since the edition published by Jossey-Bass. The higher education landscape has changed dramatically in the intervening years. When the book was written, instruction in higher education was typically taking place during a meeting between an instructor and a group of students at a shared location. This exchange occurred in a college classroom that was still relatively sequestered and private. Notions of higher education as an “ivory tower” reinforced the image that the academy operated in an elevated, rarified atmosphere that was above the practical concerns and probing eyes of everyday people. College courses today are no longer confined to a traditional classroom. Online learning, for example, is now mainstream. A survey of 2,800 institutions of higher education in 2011 indicated that as of Fall Semester, 6.7 million students, representing 32% of total enrollment, were taking courses online (Allen & Seaman, 2013). The growth in online education with the corollary development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as well as flipped and blended classes challenge the basic concept of what a “classroom” is.

While there have been momentous changes in the instructional landscape, concern regarding the quality of undergraduate education and pressure on institutions to provide proof that they are worth the investment persists. The provocatively titled Chucking College: Achieving Success without Corruption (Ellison, 2012) advises young people “to design their own 21st-century higher education” because a college degree is no longer worth the cost. Ikenberry and Kuh (2015) observe that there is a “palpable sense of urgency to the need to document how college affects students” and advise “a clearer focus on the use of evidence of student learning in more productive and targeted ways” (p. ix, and pp. 1–2). Ensuring and demonstrating that a student's college experience is worthwhile seems to be the academy's best strategy for confronting these criticisms and changes.

As institutions attempt to meet multiple, competing demands for evidence of student learning, many prominent educational leaders propose that the most important and promising next step in assessment is to embed it in the classroom through the regular tasks and processes of teaching and learning. The 2014 survey conducted by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), for example, found that provosts believe that one of the most useful sources of evidence for improvement is the classroom (Jankowski, 2014). The Degree Qualifications Profile—a learner-centered framework for what college graduates should know and be able to do to earn a college degree—holds out a vision of powerful assessment as embedded in high-quality classroom assignments (Ewell, 2013). Richman and Ariovich (2013) describe the efforts of Prince George's Community College to develop a “revolutionary approach to assessing student learning” that they call the all-in-one assessment system in which grading, course, and general education outcomes assessment are combined through assignments designed by faculty and implemented in the classroom. It is against this backdrop that the idea for Learning Assessment Techniques was born, when our editor David Brightman asked us to write a new book on assessment for Jossey-Bass.

Learning Assessment Techniques

Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty reflects a new vision of course-based, teacher-driven, integrated learning assessment. It marks a fourth in the techniques series, which includes not only Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (Cross & Angelo, 1988; Angelo & Cross, 1993) but also Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (CoLTs; Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2005; Barkley, Major, & Cross, 2014) and Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (SETs; Barkley, 2010). Thus far, the books have focused on either teaching or assessment. In this book we have sought to erase this distinction and instead draw teaching and assessment together to create a seamless and unified process. To accomplish this, we selected what we feel are particularly effective ways for teaching and assessing students, regardless of the origins of the techniques. We have thus drawn upon techniques from the CATs book that are active learning techniques and techniques from the CoLTs and SETs books that produce assessable Learning Artifacts. We have also found new techniques by culling through countless books, websites, and blogs. Our goal was to present the techniques we felt accomplished both purposes the best.

Our LATs have two key characteristics. First, they are defined by their seamless integration of three components: (1) identification of a meaningful set of learning goals/outcomes, (2) an active learning instructional activity that requires students to create an assessable product providing direct evidence of their learning, and (3) guidance on how to analyze the artifact and report data to multiple stakeholders. LATs are not simply teaching or learning or assessment, but rather all three. Furthermore, they are designed to assess learning regardless of how the teacher will use the information. LATs guide teachers in the gathering of data that teachers can use for diagnostic, formative, or summative purposes (and often for all three), for grading or reporting to department chairs, or for quite different purposes such as classroom research and SoTL.

Since Learning Assessment Techniques builds upon the work of the three preceding techniques books (Classroom Assessment Techniques, Collaborative Learning Techniques, and Student Engagement Techniques), there is naturally some overlap. For example Background Knowledge Probe is included in CATs, SETs, and LATs. Its distinction as a LAT is that we cast it as an integrated teaching-learning-assessment technique that gathers direct evidence of student learning and may be used for multiple assessment purposes. Finally, after careful consideration and in order to avoid confusion, we determined the following method for dealing with technique names: if we believed that our recasting of the technique resulted in an activity that was different in purpose or use from the original, we used a new name and then explained the difference in the technique and referenced the original. For example, our LAT 5 Quick Write is a broader, more flexible tool for which the popular CAT 6 Minute Paper and CAT 7 Muddiest Point are specific types. We have noted the origins of all techniques in the Key References and Resource section.

Overview of the Book

Through the guidance provided in this book, we hope to make it easier for faculty to carry out assessment as part and parcel of the teaching and learning process. We present this book in three parts. In Part 1, we provide an introduction that lays out the conceptual framework for LATs, describing why and how they support teaching to promote improved learning. In Part 2, we use the six steps of the LAT Cycle as an organizational framework to provide six chapters, one on each of the six steps of the assessment process. These chapters provide detailed guidance organized as a reference rather than in expository style. In Part 3, we provide six chapters correlated to the learning domains of the Significant Learning Taxonomy. We introduce each chapter with guidance on identifying relevant learning goals and outcomes, suggest ways in which outcomes can align with institutional learning goals and course competencies, and provide concrete, practical suggestions on how to assess achievement of learning goals related to that domain. We then follow this introduction with a collection of LATs carefully crafted to address teaching, learning, and assessment in that learning dimension.

Conclusion

This book was written to help college teachers efficiently and effectively identify what they believe is important for students to learn, implement appropriate activities to ensure that students learn it, and then document, interpret, and report student learning to a variety of stakeholders, including students themselves. We present these techniques to our fellow college teachers, therefore, as a collection of 50 carefully designed frameworks for accomplishing a conception of teaching, learning, and assessment as seamless and interrelated. Done well, our LATs involve both students and teachers in the continuous monitoring and improvement of students' learning. To conclude, we offer this book, with its guidance and its techniques, in the hopes of meeting the need for a new and different assessment text to meet the requirements of a changed world, a changed faculty, and a changed student body.