I took some of the tips and advice given in the blog, Practise, practise, practise… to share some good practice for teaching CAT:

For learners to be skilled in the content of CAT, they need to practise their skills consistently and revise these skills regularly.

To help to diagnose the gaps in their knowledge and skills, learners need to assess their skills and identify the gaps. This they can do trough self- or peer assessment.

How can this be done?

• Daily assessment activities / excersises from textbooks. These activities should be well scaffolded so that learners can build their skills. It is important that daily assessment (assessment for learning) takes place and that learners (and teachers) immediately act upon the gaps identified. This could be done trough self assessment which will allow learners to take responsibility for their own learning.
• Consolidated assessment activities / excersises from textbooks and/or past examination papers or exemplar papers under controlled conditions. These could also serve as revision of work completed to a point and should also serve as assessment for learning (formative assessment). This could be done trough peer assessment. Provide learners with a detailed assessment sheet that spells out the criteria and let them mark each other’s task.

Benefits:

• Learners work through the activities and identify gaps
• When marking a peer’s task, they work through the activities again, but now looking at the correct answers (memo), identify more gaps and gain knowledge and skills
• When the learners' marked task is returned, they can look at the gaps, compare to the memo and learn.
  This is a very good way to practice daily assessment / assessment for learning and will prepare learners excellently for the formal tasks in the Programme of Assessment (PoA) (assessment of learning / summative assessment) and will ensure that they score good marks for the formal tasks.
  It could be a good idea to arrange an afternoon session for learners to do these consolidated activities, else one can for example “break up” a paper in smaller chunks that can be done during class time.

Self- and peer assessment take the burden from the teacher and ensure that learners take responsibility for their own learning. Teachers could then focus on assessing the formal tasks.

Teachers need to work out their own strategies to manage daily assessment and to cope with formal assessment. Let us use this forum to give advice, share tips and good practice. Tell us about what works for you.