Digital forms of assessment

Assessing what counts, the performance

Abstract

Future generations will look back at current assessment practices and wonder why it took so long to replace pen and paper assessment with quality digital forms of assessment.

Digitization of the assessment process, from student work to the recording of marks is occurring now but haphazardly and is often only a replication of the paper assessment. The desired goals and aims of learning have rarely been fully achieved with pen and paper assessment. Could digital forms of assessment finally achieve them?

This paper begins with a background to the failure of traditional forms of assessment based on pen and paper to assess what counts and then argues through research findings that it is time that we in education catch up with the rest of society and move into the digital world especially went considering assessment. While many parts of education have abandoned the analog world for the digital one, assessment has not been one of them. This lack of digitization of assessment is holding back what is learnt and taught in all fields of education, as the form of assessment drives what is learnt and taught.

Our research has shown that high stakes assessment can be successfully digitized from the capturing of authentic student performance, to high stakes comparative pairs marking. Not only have we demonstrated this with current technology but that the reliability, validity, manageability and scalability are as good as or better than current practices.