We share these best practices to help you use the CAT feature most effectively while maintaining the integrity of your educational assessments.
If you have any questions or want to discuss this further, please feel free to call us or schedule a training session.
Purpose of CAT:
- The CAT is designed as an assessment tool to help track your students' understanding of cognitive knowledge over time.
- It can be an excellent way to gauge whether a student is ready to become a candidate for credentialing exams. Likewise, using the CAT to determine a student's readiness to progress to the next phase of the program is appropriate.
Test Structure:
- Each student gets a unique test, which makes it unsuitable for standardized final or placement exams.
- The CAT aims to adapt to each student's knowledge level, offering a personalized assessment experience.
Question Repetition:
- The CAT uses questions from the same bank as Quizzes and Tests, and group testing.
- This means students might encounter questions they have seen before, which lessens the effectiveness of using CAT as a high-stakes assessment tool.
Best Practices:
- Use CAT for Ongoing Assessment:
- Use the CAT feature regularly to monitor and track students' cognitive knowledge and understanding.
- Analyze the results to identify areas where students may require additional support or instruction.
- Encouraged Uses:
- Use CAT experiences to evaluate a student's readiness for credentialing exams.
- Use CAT to assess whether a student is prepared to move on to the next stage of your program.
- We recommend a progressive approach for using the CAT: teach the content, test it, and then allow students to apply it in their CAT experiences.
- Discouraged Uses:
- Using CAT for grading beyond participation.
- Using CAT as the final comprehensive exam for your program.
- We do not recommend making topics available in the CAT until you have covered the content in class.