Scoping a vision for formative e-assessment

Background to the project:

Assessment is integral to teaching and learning. It plays a prominent role in educational policy making, in particular in the context of attempts of successive governments of raising standards. There also exists a substantial amount of significant research into assessment. The main outcomes of this research, conducted inter alia by members of the project team, have included a distinct focus, certainly in maintained settings such as schools, on assessment for learning, i.e. assessment practices and techniques which actively move the learner on to make progress and improve their understanding of how and why they are learning in the way they are. Assessment for learning has evolved from formative assessment and is contrasted with assessment of learning, the broad equivalent of summative assessment. There is increasingly a recognition, articulated also in the invitation to tender for this proposal, that the important work on formative assessment and assessment for learning should find more widespread inclusion in post-16 pedagogy. Despite sustained efforts, for example, of Subject Centres and the Higher Education Academy (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/assessment.html, http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/learning/assessment and http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/assessment/series.html ), summative approaches to assessment still prevail, in particular in the form of end-of module assignments and unseen time-constrained written examinations and tests and where formative assessment often remains conceptualised simply as distributed summative assessment. One challenge, therefore, for post-16 education remains the alignment of assessment practice with the insights and recommendations of research findings which clearly show that assessment for learning is premised on the notion that learners will improve most if they understand the aims and processes of their learning, i.e. posses a certain amount of reflexivity at a meta-level, know where they are positioned in relation to the intended learning outcomes and how they can achieve them or close the gap in their knowledge, skills and/or understanding. It centres on activities by teachers and/or learners that provide information that yield feedback suitable to make necessary modifications to teaching and learning activities, i.e. those that lead to learners having a better understanding of what they are trying to learn, what is expected of them and how to make improvements. Ostensibly, assessment for learning can be seen to be premised on high quality interactions, including questioning, listening, responding and reflecting, between teacher and learners, learners and learners as well as learners with themselves. In this way, assessment can be seen to be integral to much of what goes on in a classroom.

With the increasing prevalence of ICT in teaching and learning a further challenge pertains to the integration of the insights in the area of assessment in technology-enhanced settings, be they characterised by the use of ICT in classroom context, mixed-mode provision or, indeed, online or distance learning or even self-study. The increased use of virtual learning environments and online tools in teaching and learning poses various challenges and opportunities. In the UK policy context, e-assessment tends to be understood as ‘end-to-end electronic assessment processes where ICT is used for the presentation of assessment activity, and the recording of responses’ (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/themes/elearning/effpraceassess.pdf ). The focus of work has been on institutional strategy, the development of standards (http://www.frema.ecs.soton.ac.uk) as well as on technical infrastructure and learning support and much less on the pedagogical dimension. The latter is on the increase, though, not least in view of a recent policy focus on personalisation and e-portfolios. We argue that in addition to increased efficiency in the provision of on-demand assessment opportunities and attendant feedback, effective e-assessment also needs to take account of the human-centric, social dimension as well as the data-centric perspective. With reference to the state-of-the-art pedagogical literature on formative assessment we will show in this project that learning, of which assessment is an integral part, is a social as well as a cognitive process. Effective formative assessment opportunities are fundamentally premised on human interpretation as well as the mediation of data for diagnosis and forward planning. For this reason we will in particular look at the use of handheld devices and classroom aggregation technologies as well as other computer-assisted (instead of only computer-based) methods and applications, including participation in online discussion and group tasks, for example using blogs. This clearly poses considerable challenges for e-assessment as defined above but also requires a broadening of the definitional base and current scope of e-assessment, all of which the current project aims to provide. Indeed, it is the dialogic processes involved in formative assessment, which we consider to be an area where the current bid can make a significant contribution to process modellling, which, in turn, can be fed into technological design. The project will examine the changes to assessment development processes and outputs required for formative content and how ICT tools should support this across Further and Higher Education in the UK as well as the English-speaking world more widely; it will also look at formative assessment in work-based contexts and on work-related courses.