Educational Technology Assessment

There are two main types of assessment, Formative assessment and Summative assessment. Teachers use both types of assessment to understand student progress and learning in the classroom. Technology has helped teachers create better assessments to help understand where students who are having trouble with the material are having issues.

Formative assessment is more difficult for teachers to do well, since the perfect form of it is ongoing and allows the students to show their learning in different ways depending on their Learning styles. Technology has helped some teachers make their formative assessments better, particularly through the use of Classroom Response Systems.[1] A Classroom Response System (CRS) is a tool used where the students each have a handheld device that partners up with the teacher's computer. The instructor then asks multiple choice or true/false questions and the students answer on their device.[1] Depending on the software used, the answers may then be shown on a graph so students and teacher can see the percentage of students who gave each answer and the teacher can focus on what went wrong.[2] Some examples of CRSs are Quizzler, Turning Systems, and the quiz aspect of the Mastering Programs (Mastering Physics, Mastering Chemistry, etc).

Summative assessments are more common in classrooms and are usually set up to be more easily graded, as they take the form of tests or projects with specific grading schemes.  One huge benefit to tech-based testing is the option to give students immediate feedback on their answers. When students get these responses, they are able to know how they are doing and this can help push them to improve or give them confidence that they are doing well.[3] Technology also allows for different kinds of summative assessment, such as digital presentations, videos, or anything else the teacher/students may come up with, which allows different learners to show what they learned more effectively.[3] Teachers can also use technology to post graded assessments online for students to have a better idea of what a good project looks like.

  1. ^ a b Beatty, Ian D.; Gerace, William J. (Jan 2009). "Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology". Journal of Science and Technology.
  2. ^ Fies, Carmen; Marshall, Jill (March 2006). "Classroom Response Systems: A Review of the Literature". Journal of Science Education and Technology.
  3. ^ a b Marriott, Pru; Lau, Alice (2008). "The use of on-line summative assessment in an undergraduate financial accounting course". Journal of Accounting Education.