Teaching Tools
Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices | Teaching with Technology | Resources for Funding
1. Evaluation and Assessment
1.2. Assesment
Opportunities for Advancing Educational Assessments
New technologies, such as the Web, digital video, sound, animations, and interactivity, are providing tools that can make assessment design and implementation more efficient, timely, and sophisticated.
Technology can enable us to observe the cognitive activity of students in complex problem solving situations that paper and pencil tasks can't readily support. For example:
programs can track students' multiple attempts at solving problems, allowing us to see how their reasoning and expertise develop over time
interactive animations can allow for a multitude of scenarios, creating unique situations in response to student inputs
computer adaptive tests can focus in on individual students strengths and weaknesses, and adapt the test items accordingly, thus reducing student frustration and providing better diagnostic feedback
Cognitive research has provided models of how people learn, the importance of knowledge representation and tying knowledge to the contexts in which it will be used.
Our assessment practices have to keep in step with our understanding of human cognition, and new technologies are one set of tools that can help us to meet this challenge.
Technologies can strengthen the links among curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
On-line tutorials with built-in assessments or interactive components combine instruction and assessment. Feedback from assessments, such as item analyses, can be used to inform instruction, enabling the instructor to target the specific components of lessons that students find troublesome
Pre-course assessments that identify areas where relevant background knowledge is missing or prone to misconceptions can serve to revise the curriculum, encouraging talk and curriculum development between instructors both within and across departments.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Advanced Technology for Assessment
Advantages
Increased efficiency and flexibility in dissemination - can easily be administered to students, regardless of their location (e.g., distance-learning), and over a longer time period than in-class assessments allow.
Frees up class time usually taken for assessments.
Many formats can be automatically scored, and can automatically provide feedback to students, saving hours of hand-grading, writing individual feedback, etc.
Statistics that can be used for diagnostic purposes can be automatically compiled (e.g., item analysis), facilitating the development or revision of instruction and curriculum materials.
New formats can be used that more closely simulate the targeted skills and processes (e.g., interactive simulations, animations, etc, especially in domains where live labs would be impractical, expensive, or too time-consuming).
Easy to revise, develop and share materials.
Can be administered frequently, thus providing regular information on student progress for the instructor and the students.
Disadvantages
Some skills may not be easily assessed (e.g., fine art performances).
Issues with validity - are you really assessing what you think you are assessing?
May not be able to control who is really doing the assessment.
May not be able to control access to resource materials.
May also be measuring experience or comfort with technology.
Technological problems - crashes, bugs and other types of interference.
Impersonal - lack of contact with instructor to ask questions of clarification, etc.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
