Including an element of collaborative learning is increasingly common as a way to increase student engagement. In situations involving more formal cooperative learning, students work together for one or more class periods to complete a joint task or assignment (Johnson et al., 2014). CATME is an open source application that provides a rich feature set for faculty to use with student teams. CATME stands for Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness and is based on work by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It is designed to help students function effectively in teams and instructors successfully manage team experiences and is hosted by Purdue University.
CATME has several components. The first one, Team-Maker, includes a collection of features that assist instructors in creating teams by surveying students. Team Builder has four phases of use: create the questions students should answer, collect their answers, determine the information that will be the criteria for composing groups and then share the relevant information, including contact information, with team members.
A second component of CATME is Peer Evaluation. This functionality enables students to evaluate their teammates’ performance as well as their own. Students select from a set of behaviors which most closely describes themselves and their peers. Students can also include confidential comments which are only seen by the instructor. Once completed, instructors can decide when to release the evaluation results to students. Peer ratings appear anonymous to students but are identified for instructors.
A final tool included in CATME is the Rater Calibrator tool. The features in this tool provide training and information in the peer evaluation process. Related features ask students to rate a series of fictional team members and then receive feedback about their ratings. This section includes information designed to help students recognize effective team behaviors as well as meeting support information, including templates that students can use to plan and organize meetings.
To view a video demo of CATME and learn more about the product, visit the CATME website.
