Classroom Assessment

Classroom assessment facilitates the transformation of a more student-centered environment with an emphasis on the students' perspectives, their diversity of learning styles, and intellectual development. The distinctive characteristic of this transformative philosophy within higher education is the analysis and improvement of the constantly evolving triad between student, pedagogy, and discipline. Higher education typically relies on summative evaluations of student learning such as exams and quizzes to determine whether teaching was effective. However, since these evaluations tend to come late in the semester it is very seldom that the teaching pedagogy is altered until the following year. Classroom assessment quickly evaluates the whole class's learning in order to adjust instruction prior to graded evaluation. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the use of classroom assessment to assist educators in improving learning within the classroom.