I am acutely aware that the overall approach to assessment at my school is not ideal–for students or teachers. While we also have significant barriers in using technology, I think online assessment can help shift our approach to assessment in a direction that is more useful for students and teachers.
It was Bates’ (2014) list of assessment purposes that really got me thinking about assessment at my school. Bates put his list in order from most important to creating an effective learning environment to least important. It was no surprise to me that our overall approach was the reverse. As much as it pains me to admit, as a private school that caters to a very specific demographic, I would say that the number one priority of assessment at my school is “for institutional accountability and/or financial purpose” (Bates, 2014). As this makes Bates’ list, it does have a purpose in creating an effective learning environment, largely ensuring there IS a learning environment to begin with. Surprisingly, I don’t feel pessimistic about this. The results students get on assessments like TOEFL, IELTS, and the SAT help attract more students. More students mean more teachers, which means there is opportunity for change–because there is bound to be a teacher brave enough to switch the focus, if not for the whole school, at least with their classes–and perhaps that will include online assessments.
The benefits of online assessment for my school are two-fold–it would potentially maximize time spent by teachers giving feedback and it would help us reverse our current approach to assessment by focusing on the first two items on Bates’ list: “to improve and extend student learning” and “to assess student knowledge and competence in terms of desired learning goals or outcomes” (Bates 2014). I see online assessment as a means to focus more on formative assessment with feedback. As Gibbs and Simpson’s Condition 4–Sufficient feedback is provided, both often enough and in enough detail states, “feedback may need to be quite regular, on relatively small chunks of course content, to be useful” (p.17). The main obstacle to giving frequent feedback at my school is large class sizes and a heavy teaching load. Using an online assessment with automated feedback would ensure that every student is getting some feedback. Using Socrative, for example, would allow my students to complete quick assessments, perhaps even daily assessments, using their cell phones. I know that precise written feedback is ideal, but even just showing correct answers is feedback that students weren’t getting before–at least not immediately. Gibbs and Simpson’s Condition 6–The feedback is timely in that is received by students while it still matters to them and in time for them to pay attention to further learning or receive further assistance (p.18) supports my assumption, although their example referred to “imperfect feedback from a fellow student” (p.19) rather than learning the correct answers as I suggested. Timely feedback also helps the teacher. For example, if the teacher is also getting feedback from online assessments by way of reports they can quickly identify trouble areas for the whole class, or individual students and address it in the next class, rather than finding out after a summative assessment that no one understood a particular topic. So, even a simple Socrative quiz could make a huge change at our school–as long as the feedback is useful.
There is a flip side to online assessment, and perhaps it’s a comment that doesn’t need to be made because, let’s be honest–many teachers are guilty of making an assessment because they need to assess students and they know it. I think it’s easy to abuse online assessments because, from my experience, they’re easy to use if you’re not using them well (does that make sense?) So, if the online assessment (or any assessment!) doesn’t “[engage] students in [a] productive learning activity of an appropriate kind” (Gibbs and Simpson 2005 p.14) it is a waste of everyone’s time. You would think that’s common sense, but I see it happen everyday. I’m guilty of it myself. But, a good teacher keeps learning and trying new things, so I’m going to make a conscious effort to not assess unless it is worthwhile to both my students and to me as their teacher.
References
Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-8-assessment-of-learning/
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005) Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/GIbbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf