The Comprehensive Assessment for Team-Member Effectiveness (CATME) tool is a free, online peer evaluation tool developed by Purdue University. The tool is maintained through a National Science Foundation grant and all data is maintained on a secure server at Purdue. Faculty across Penn State that have tried this tool report positive experiences, allowing instructors to create a customized, research-based peer evaluation survey and quickly administer it in a course.
You can learn more about the tool, and create an account, by visiting the CATME website. Below is a short list of key features that make this tool very popular among instructors.
- Importing teams – If you use ANGEL in your course, you can export an excel spreadsheet of student teams that can be easily imported into the CATME tool. No manual entry and assigning of teams is required.
- Evaluation Categories – When creating a peer-evaluation, the tool contains several different categories of questions that come from past teaming research. Categories include:
- Contributing to work
- Interacting with Teammates
- Keeping team on track
- Expecting quality
- Having knowledge/skills
- Follow-up questions
- Team conflict
- Team satisfaction
- Team interdependence
- Team cohesiveness
- Peer influences
- Team transition processes
- Team action processes
- Peer Evaluation Results – Once students complete the evaluation, you have several options. You can download the raw data in Excel and manipulate the data locally, if you have a certain method for assigning grades based on the data. You can also use a ‘release data’ feature in the tool, that will send each student anonymous feedback from his or her teammates. When viewing the results, the CATME tool does some analysis for you and attempts to indicate, based on the data, certain characteristics of a team or individuals within a team.
An image from the CATME peer evaluation tool
In the example above, “Conf” refers to a team member that might have a personality conflict with another team member, “Under” refers to an underconfident team member, “Over” implies an overconfident team member, and “High” indicates a high performer. These are just some of the codes the system uses, you can see a full list of codes, and how the system calculates these codes, on the CATME help page. In addition to using the CATME tool to assess teams at the end of the project, some instructors also use the CATME tool as a diagnostic instrument, using it in the middle of a team project to better understand how each team is performing.
The CATME tool is just one of many different tools designed to help instructors evaluate teams. If you have a tool that you like to use, please feel free to share it below and include a link.