what

SEE ONE: WHAT

In this section, SEE ONE: WHAT, you can find an introduction to educational assessment and how it can be used in online teaching and learning contexts in a playful mode.

You can read about key concepts and terminology related to educational assessment, its types, its use in online environments.

You can also test your knowledge of educational assessment, doing the exercises/tasks proposed, and extend your knowledge analyzing the examples and resources provided.

CONTENT EXERCISES / TASK LEARNING OUTCOMES
SEE ONE –  Knowledge about educational assessment + playful + online (WHAT) What is educational assessment? Key concepts

  • Conceptions & beliefs about assessment
  • Assessment and evaluation
  • Assessment types and methods

Overview of online assessment

Playful assessment.

Read texts

Analyse videos and images.

Doing exercises

Write a reflection

Identify conceptions about educational assessment

Distinguish assessment and evaluation

Distinguish assessment types and methods

Characterize usages of online assessment

Identify characteristics of playful assessment

 

What is educational assessment? Key concepts

Concepts and belief about assessment

Assessment in education can have diverse features and characteristics, taking in account dimensions as aims, targets, functions, or instruments. Brown (2003) identified four main conceptions or beliefs of assessment:

  • improvement of teaching and learning
  • certification of students’ learning
  • accountability of schools and teachers
  • the irrelevance or rejection of assessment.

Different concepts of assessment are analyzed by Sir Ken Robinson in the video What are your views about testing and how could it change?

What are the differences between assessment and evaluation?
  • Assessment: points to the process of gathering and synthesizing through different strategies, as observation, written tests or reports, homework, etc.
  • Evaluation: evaluation points to the process of making judgments, assigning value or deciding on worth.
Assessment types

There are different types of educational assessment, namely diagnostic, formative, and summative (e.g. Arends, 2012).

  • Diagnostic assessment focus on what the learner already knows and/or the nature of difficulties that the learner might have, which, if undiagnosed, might limit their engagement in new learning. It is often used before teaching or when a problem arises.
  • Formative assessment information is collected before or during instruction and is used to inform teachers about their students’ prior knowledge and to make judgments about lesson effectiveness. It is through this that the results obtained are compared according to the proposed objectives, in order to verify progress, difficulties and guide the work to the necessary corrections".
  • Summative assessment information is collected after instruction and is used to summarize how students have performed and to determine grades” (Arends, 2012, p. 256).

Formative assessment is also called assessment for learning, and summative, also entitled as an assessment of learning.

The importance of high-stakes summative assessment in national examinations is an ongoing debate in several European countries and around the world, where exams take place at the end of students’ school careers and are all regarded as the passport for future studies and professional life.

Summative assessment can also take place within schools, via, for example, class tests and end-of-year school examinations.

Nonetheless, formative assessment or assessment for learning can take place on a daily basis as an integral part of students’ school experience.

This is where activities by the teacher – and sometimes by the students themselves – provide instant information on how students are progressing. The subsequent class activities are then modified to meet the evolving needs of the students and improve learning outcomes (see Black and Wiliam, 2001).

There are other types of assessment, namely:

  • Authentic' or work-integrated assessment, where the tasks and conditions are more closely aligned with what you would experience within employment. This form of assessment is designed to develop students skills and competencies alongside academic development”.
  • Ipsative assessment, that is a developed assessment against the student’s own previous standards. It can measure how well a particular task has been undertaken against the student’s average attainment, against their best work, or against their most recent piece of work. Ipsative assessment tends to correlate with effort, to promote effort-based attributions of success, and to enhance motivation to learn.
  • Self-assessment 

Demonstrations of learning

Competence based assessment

Comprehensive assessment

Self assessment

Peer assessment

Self and peer assessment

Assessment methods

Assessment methods are the strategies, techniques, tools, instruments for collecting information to determine the extent to which students demonstrate desired learning outcomes.

There are several methods that can be used to assess student-learning outcomes. Brown et al. (1997) refer that there are six categories of general assessment methods.

Online assessment

Online assessment is becoming widely used. Following tendencies in usage of online assessment are presented.

  • Technology Applications have been used in current large-scale assessment programs such as those run by states or nations and by major testing companies, technology currently supports a myriad of assessment functions, including test development, delivery, adaptation, scoring, and reporting (Pellegrino, 2009).
  • The development of numerous tools accessible to teachers and students enable each teacher to develop assessment and evaluation processes with them. There are already several applications to do an online assessment that can be used to develop different types of assessments.
  • Innovative applications of technology also provide rich, authentic tasks that challenge the sorts of integrated knowledge, critical thinking, and problem-solving seldom well addressed in paper-based tests.
Overview on technology enhanced assessment

R. Christine (2013) provided an overview of developments and trends in technology-enhanced assessment by elaborating the work of Bunderson (1989), Martin (2008) and Bennett (2010).

In the image below you can identify main characteristics about online educational assessment.

Figure elaborated by Dr. Jagannath Dange & Dr. M.U.Paily

Characteristics and challenges to online assessment in contemporary Higher Education are analyzed by Andrea Karpatiin the video Defining assessment and credits in the digital age.

Challenges on online educational assessment

By using online assessment tools we are empowering 21st century learners to seek assessment for learning independently and improving the assessment practice of educators.

Playful assessment

What is playful assessment? There are going one discussions about the topic.To explore the topic, start to analyse dimensions of playful learning and reflect on how they can used in assessment.

Dimensions of playful learning
What playful assessment can be

Read the documents and visualize the videos in order to explore what playful assessment can be.

Know about your knowledge

Exercise 1. See One - What

Exercise 2. See One - What

Exercise 3. See One - What

Write a paragraph about how assessment and testing appear in the movies and on the television.

 

Recap

Central points covered in the 'see one -what - sections'