CATs for Computer Science

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0229908. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

What are CATs

Classroom assessment techniques (CATs) allow instructors to collect information about students. learning processes. They are typically brief, ungraded, and anonymous exercises. In particular, these exercises have many positive qualities:

Low Cost:
Most CATs are pen-and-paper exercises that last less than 5 minutes. Thus, CATs do not significantly cut into overall instruction time.
Tight Focus:
Each CAT probes a small set of teaching goals and class topics, simplifying the analysis of responses.
Timeliness:
A CAT can be implemented at any time during a class or term, allowing instructors to quickly discover and respond to problems.
Honest Perspective:
Because CATs are anonymous and ungraded, students are under less pressure and are more likely respond accurately and honestly than with, e.g., quizzes.

Essentially, CATs provide a lightweight, yet powerful, means of assessment. For more information on CATs in general, we refer the reader to Classroom Assessment Techniques by Thomas Angelo and K. Patricia Cross (published by Jossey-Bass Publishers in 1993).

Goals of this Project

In Classroom Assessment Techniques, Angelo and Cross describe 50 general templates for designing CATs. However, one CAT type is not necessarily appropriate for all courses: designing a CAT requires careful selection of the template and material covered to match the course. Therefore, we have begun creating a public library of sharable and reusable CATs for college-level computer science courses.

Our goal is to promote the use of CATs in CS classrooms by providing a large, diverse collection of ready-to-use in-class activities on a variety of topics. In particular, most of our library will be aimed at introductory computer science courses since these classes often cater to a more diverse set of students than late courses. Several of the CATs were developed and deployed for an introductory computer science course by Tammy VanDeGrift.

Research-wise, we are interested in the effect of CATs on classroms. In the comings months, we will beging providing our CAT library and editor tools to instructors and teaching assistants for use in UW's introductory programming courses. We will evaluate the CATs' impact on the class from both student and instructor perspectives through multiple methods including classroom observations and analysis of student responses. Additionally, we will investigate how the library and editor support and encourage the instructor.s use of active learning in the classroom.

Another ongoing effort for this project is to scale the use of CATs to large classrooms through the use of electronic devices. In particular, we focus on using Steve Wolfman's Structured Interactive Presentation system to integrate CATs into PowerPoint presentations. As part of this process, we have been constructing mock-ups to show how we envision the SIP versions of various CATs will look and operate.

Mock-ups:

Library

The CS CAT Library is an ever-growing collection of CATs for use in computer science courses. Following the link just provided will give a table of contents that includes descriptions of various CATs plus links to html and XML versions of the CATs.

Alternatively, one can download a zipped version of the CAT Library here: CATs.zip.

Editor

To promote the sharing and growth of the CS CAT Library, we have developed a Java Swing application that allows anyone to view, create, and edit CATs. All CATs are stored in an XML format that can be edited indirectly through our editor. The user also has the option to lay out CATs using HTML and then publish both student and instructor versions of the CATs for classroom use.

More information on the CAT Editor can be found here.

Contact Information

If you have questions about the use of Classroom Assessment Techniques in computer science classrooms, or would like to contribute to the CS CAT Library, please contact Katherine Deibel at deibel AT cs.washington.edu or Dr. Richard Anderson at anderson AT cs.washington.edu.

Last Updated: May 17, 2004
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