Assessing Student Affect

This article explains how classroom affective assessments enable teachers to arrive at group-focused inferences-- inferences about the affective dispositions of an entire class. These inferences can be useful as teachers plan their instruction, as they enable teachers to understand a class's disposition toward a particular subject or area of study and work to support a positive disposition or improve a negative one. Evidence of students' affect may be supplied in the form of students' responses to self-report affective inventories, which most be administered and completed with anonymity in mind.