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Technology in Classroom Assessment

Teaching in today’s modern classroom involves more than just standing in front of the class to cover content. Instead, teachers are learning facilitators, guiding students with curriculum-based activities designed to meet the individual needs and learning styles of each student. Many of these classrooms employ 1:1 laptop or tablet approaches, meaning that every student in the classroom has access to a mobile device (laptop or tablet-type device) every day in every classroom and oftentimes with the ability to take the device home. Technology provides not only an opportunity for teachers and students to be innovative but also an effective and efficient means for classroom assessment.

Historically, classroom assessments have been utilized as a summative measure for students to demonstrate content understanding at the end of a unit or lesson. Present-day classroom practice shares a more formative approach by encouraging the use of assessments for learning, rather than assessments of learning. Although assessment practices will most likely continue to have the external influence of standardized tests, technology has the potential to play a positive role in classroom assessment, using both formative and summative approaches to assess student learning, as well as create digital records of student learning that can follow the student throughout his or her educational journey.

Through constant monitoring of student learning and providing feedback to reinforce learning or to correct misconceptions, effective teachers must know when student learning is correct or incorrect. Classroom assessments that serve as meaningful sources of information reinforce the concepts, skills, and criteria learned in the classroom. Well-designed learning experiences involve feedback loops to assess learning. These feedback loops can be enhanced through the use of technology in the classroom. Within each of the types of assessments lies specific digital tools that help facilitate the assessment of student learning.

Formative and Summative Approaches

As a foundation, technology can be used to enable the delivery of online tests. Teachers oftentimes utilize online testing sites and/or software to create and deliver summative and formative tests for students. These tests might consist of multiple items to assess students’ understanding of a unit or lesson or a simple quiz. Creating an electronic test can be labor-intensive; however, the advantage for teachers is that once the test is developed, it is rather easy to modify the test for future use. Objective-type questions, such as multiple choice and true-false, can be automatically scored, providing immediate feedback to the student and saving time for the teacher who will need to score only essay-type questions. Testing in an online environment can be more interactive than traditional paper-and-pencil testing. Randomizing questions, including skip-logic, and embedding multimedia are just a few of the affordances that technology provides for classroom assessment. In addition, online tests provide accessible options for students with learning differences such as text-to-speech options for reading the questions or speech-to-text options for answering essay questions.

Formative classroom assessment provides a means for teachers to consistently check for understanding. Digital tools paired with research-based strategies and techniques provide teachers with valuable feedback to adjust their teaching and move student learning forward. Similar to online testing, websites and/or software can be used for formative assessment to assess whether a student is grasping the curriculum concept or knowledge being taught. Polling technologies (e.g., clickers, student response systems, and free online resources) can be utilized for students to respond to questions within a classroom environment. These technologies can potentially eliminate the feedback gap, as students are provided immediate feedback on their responses. With teacher guidance, students are able to reflect on their thinking and revise their knowledge and understanding before further misconceptions occur. Many of the free online resources provide game-like environments to engage students in multiplayer competitive formats. Digital graphic organizers can be used to help students visualize their understandings. Although some graphic organizers may only be provided in a digital format for students to access, print, and complete, others are online and may be accessed by a collaborative team of students and the teacher. Technology provides an authentic audience for student writing through the use of blogs, wikis, and individual websites. Writing passages can be shared online allowing for the teacher, classmates, and others to post comments to the student author. Additional classroom discourse opportunities can be provided through posting content-related questions to social media sites or a backchannel chat for students to respond. Collaborative note-taking offers further means for teachers to assess student’s understanding of topics during the course. If used appropriately, these digital formative assessment tools can strengthen the feedback loop and allow instructors the opportunity to check for understanding, guide instruction, and develop student mastery.

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