For anyone interested who is attending the AECT conference this year in Louisville, I will be hosting a round table discussion on the use of card sorts for educational assessment. Come on by and join the conversation!

Donna Spencer, one of the most recognized authorities on card sorting, has a new book just released – Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories. Although she and most others in the card sort field apply this for user design (websites, marketing, etc), much of the information is readily applicable to education.

I presented the idea of applying card sorts for assessing students’ mental models at The Teaching Professor conference in Orlando, May 2008. The concept is that card sorts can be used for a quick check of how well students are packaging the course material, and it can also be used for more in-depth analysis for serious assessment purposes. The beauty of using card sorts is that you find out where students are coming from – you really need to get their picture and slant on things rather than seeing how much they’ve memorized for an exam. It’s a powerful complement to traditional assessment techniques.

XSort, an excellent card sort software application that is described on the Resources page, is now available as a free download. It was already fabulous…now it’s even more so. Check it out at www.enoughpepper.com.