Classroom Assessment and Social Welfare Policy: Addressing Challenges to Teaching and Learning

Drawing on multidisciplinary research that focuses on the different ways novices and experts learn, this article shows how Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) can minimize some of the major barriers to student learning in the curricular area of social welfare policy. The author describes three major challenges to the teaching of social welfare policy, relevance, content—and prior knowledge and misconceptions—and suggests how the judicious use of specific CATs can mitigate them.