“The A-Word” Made Easy

In 1988, before assessment became the “A-word,” Cross and Angelo produced a short volume containing 30 simple classroom assessment techniques. These were arranged in a practical how-to format that made it easy for college faculty with no background or training in science education to apply assessment in the classroom. It was my introduction to using Minute Papers and Concept Maps to understand what my students were, or were not, learning. By 1993 when the current edition was first published, “assessment” was becoming the buzz word for teacher evaluations and course and curriculum checklists to satisfy accreditation and administration requirements. It has become what most faculty think of when the term “assessment” is used. This is NOT what Classroom Assessment Techniques is about, and a significant improvement in this edition, filling the first quarter of the book, is a section entitled “Getting Started in Classroom Assessment.” The first chapter is essential reading for anyone not familiar with formative assessment. It makes clear that the tools provided in later chapters are to be used by individual instructors to improve their students’ learning by fine-tuning their own teaching. The results are not meant to be “turned in” to someone else (although you may want to include some in a teaching portfolio). The critical first step in classroom assessment is elaborated in Chapter 2. It seems obvious that the first thing we must do in preparing to teach a course is to decide what to teach. For most of us this means deciding what content to cover and in what order. The content is discipline-specific, and the authors acknowledge that this must be considered. However, what they have in mind is to force a much broader and basic understanding of your teaching goals, The Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI). This instrument is presented and discussed in the chapter and provided as a self-scorable worksheet form in Appendix B. The individual teaching goals are grouped into six clusters: Higher Order Thinking