Technology-Enhanced Assessment Systems: Opportunities and Challenges

Advances in educational assessment, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and educational technology have made it possible to create technology-enhanced learning and assessment environments that provide teachers with relevant information to support instruction and students with opportunities to learn and develop skills in a variety of areas including science inquiry, critical thinking, argumentation, and collaborative problem solving.

It is expected that future learning and assessment systems will pay more attention to the context in which learning takes place taking into account tradeoffs to balance local usefulness and broader comparability, include a variety of performance-based and unintrusive activities that can be used to create experiences that are perceived as positive ones while gathering evidence from multiple sources to measure various constructs at once, and provide actionable assessment information that supports the needs of educational stakeholders.

In this talk, I will discuss some of the affordances and challenges associated with the adoption of various types of educational innovations. Some of these innovations include personalized learning and assessment systems, conversation-based assessment, caring assessment, game-based assessment, and interactive dashboards. The importance of applying a principled assessment design framework will be highlighted. This framework can help with processes such as evidence identification, evidence aggregation, and interpretability of assessment claims. The implementation of an open evidence layer in modern learning and assessment systems will be suggested as a mechanism for supporting adoption of these systems.