Evaluation (Individuals); Two Year Colleges

Investigates the use of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) by adjunct faculty at three Florida community colleges. A qualitative methodology, with a phenomenological approach, helped to describe the meaning that the experience of using CATs had for adjunct professors. Interviews with eighteen participants were the primary means of data collection, supplemented by researcher field notes, demographic profile sheets and analysis of actual CATs. The data synthesized three levels of meaningful encounters, revealing the barriers that inhibited adjunct faculty use of CATs and how those obstacles were overcome, as well as facilitators that promoted use of CATs. A critical finding was that the CATs did not motivate adjunct faculty to move from "private " investigation of student learning to "public dialogue. " The following conclusions were reached: (a) community college adjunct faculty use CATs to expand their own learning, often by designing probing questions in response to immediate classroom concerns; (b) deprivatizing adjunct faculty teaching is met with resistance; (c) CATs strengthen learning colleges as communication tools between instructors and individual students, but are not used to their fullest advantage to generate public dialogue on student learning. Institutional research forms, consent forms, and the interview instruments are appended. (Contains 127 references.) (RC) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document