Seven classic classroom assessment techniques — Minute Paper, Muddiest Point and friends — each with its canonical prompt, when to run it, and how to deliver it digitally.
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| Digital classroom assessment techniques (CATs) | ||||
| Low-stakes, ungraded checks that tell you what students actually learned — run each as a short anonymous survey or open question. Close the loop: always report back what you saw and what you'll change. | ||||
| Source: Angelo & Cross 1993, Classroom Assessment Techniques — 50-CAT digest (Penn State) | ||||
| Source: Cornell CTI, Measuring student learning — classroom assessment techniques | ||||
| Technique | Prompt to give students | When to run it | What it tells you | Digital delivery (our tip) |
| Minute Paper | What was the most important thing you learned today? What question remains uppermost in your mind? | Last 3 minutes of a session | Whether the session's core point landed, and the top open question. | Two short open-response questions, anonymous, auto-closing 5 minutes after class. |
| Muddiest Point | What was the muddiest (least clear) point in today's session? | End of a session or reading | The single topic to reopen next time, ranked by how often it's named. | One open-response question; skim answers and tally the top 2–3 topics before the next session. |
| Background Knowledge Probe | Before we start this unit: answer these short questions on what you already know about the topic. | Before a new unit | Where to start teaching and which misconceptions to plan around. | Ungraded short quiz (5–10 items) released a day before the unit; review the item stats, not individual names. |
| One-Sentence Summary | Summarise the topic in one sentence answering: who does what to whom, when, where, how, and why? | After a process or relationship has been taught | Whether students can compress the content into its essential structure. | Single open-response question with a strict character limit. |
| Application Cards | Write one real-world application of the principle we just covered. | After a principle, theory or procedure | Whether students can transfer the idea beyond the taught example. | Open-response question; share the best 3 answers (anonymised) at the next session's start. |
| Directed Paraphrasing | Explain this concept in 2–3 sentences to a specific audience (e.g. a patient, a client, a new student). | After complex or jargon-heavy content | Whether understanding survives translation out of the textbook's wording. | Open-response question naming the audience in the stem. |
| Exam Evaluation | How well did the exam let you show what you learned? Which question was most/least fair, and why? | After returning a graded exam | Face-validity problems and candidate flagged items to review alongside the item statistics. | Anonymous 3-question survey attached to the results release. |
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Every CAT here runs natively in StudyDrome as a survey or open-response question — anonymous, auto-closing, with the responses already tallied.
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