Do you suspect some of your student teams are not performing at their best? Are your students reporting that they cannot find a time to meet with their group members? Are some complaining that not everyone on their team is doing their fair share of the work? Perhaps CATME software can help you address these issues.
CITL purchased a license to CATME that allows all IUB faculty to use the tool for free through Summer 2018. Here are some of the CATME tools that can help you take care of some of the administrative headaches of group work.
CATME Team-Maker
This tool allows you decide what student information to collect so that CATME can help you create teams. You choose the criteria to be used and how these are weighted when the system creates teams. You can decide to create heterogeneous or homogeneous groups based on demographics, overall GPA, majors, ability to use a particular software, tool, or language. You can also create teams based on compatible schedules or preferred leadership roles and styles. Other criteria include anticipated grade for your class, earned grade from a previous course and time commitment to the class. You can even create your own questions or select questions from a long list of community-generated questions.
CATME Rater Practice & CATME Peer Evaluation
CATME allows students to provide structured peer evaluations of their teammates. But students need practice if they are to accurately and consistently rate their peers based on teamwork-related behaviors. CATME Rater Practice gives students practice using descriptions of fictitious team member behaviors and contributions.
Once your students have had this practice, they can provide one another feedback on their teamwork. You can choose questions related to team member contributions to work, interactions between team members, whether a member is keeping the team on track, whether members have the knowledge and skills to help the team, and many other questions about behaviors that helped or hindered team work, as well as overall team functioning. Student also have the opportunity to leave confidential comments for the instructors. Once students submit feedback about their teammates, instructors can release the results to students, and CATME will provide the student with research-based suggestions for improving their team effectiveness.
CATME Meeting Support
Many students may not have experience being in structured meetings and/or know how to run these. Using CATME Meeting Support can help team meetings be effective by providing templates for team contracts, meeting agendas, and for taking meeting minutes. By helping students learn how to run effective meetings you might eliminate problematic team behaviors that are limiting team effectiveness.
If you are interested in hearing more strategies to create and support your students teams, consider attending out upcoming workshop, Fixing Group Work: Tools and Practices for Student Collaboration, on Thursday, December 14, 1:00- 2:15pm. We will discuss these CATME tools as well as ways to use Canvas and other tools to support and simplify group work. Please register at https://citl.indiana.edu/events.
I am very curious what the students who have actually used catme have to say about the software.
From my experience using Catme for three years, and after speaking to many students, there is a widely and commonly accepted opinion that Catme is one of the least effective and least intuitive programs we are forced to use. I could give you a very long list of the reasons why Catme is ineffective and unintuitive, but instead, I would encourage you to seek the opinions of the students who were forced to use the software in order to see if this is a truly effective product. There are much better options out there for you to use. It seems like this program is used by instructors because it is the least labor intensive way they can try to solve an issue of a team dynamic. I fear that this program is used in place of an instructor actually putting in effort to sit down with a team and figure out what the issue is. There is no substitute for a meeting and a conversation.
Thanks for the perspectives on CATME. Just a few quick replies. First, you mentioned it as a program “we are forced to use,” and I want to clarify that no instructor is being forced to use this tool, unless that happens at a course level within a department. So, I am not sure if you are writing from an instructor or student perspective when you mention being forced to use it. From our perspective, CATME is a tool that many instructors find useful for managing group work, particularly in courses that are too large for the hands-on approaches you so rightly advocate. You won’t get any arguments from me about the program being pretty clunky, but I do think the approaches have very sound basis in research about effective group behaviors, and I think that is what draws many people to the tool, despite its rough interface. On a broader note, may favorite thing about CATME is that is tries to be educational about group dynamics, since we collectively advocate group work while rarely teaching how to do it well.