Whilst attending the recent eAssessment Association AGM, the future of assessment came up at one of the excellent speed learning sessions that the eAA organised. It reinforced my view that much assessment, testing and examining is still shackled within the chains of paper-based technology. A technology that has served us well for many, many years, but which has now been surpassed by what could be done digitally.

I am not talking about simply recreating the paper-based assessments in a more efficient and effective way, but of radically improving the usefulness of assessment. With the ever-broadening digital footprint that our children and our children's children are and will be creating, there is suddenly a wealth of longitudinal data to analyse rather than a simple snapshot taken at a particular point in time because, pre-digital, that was the best we could do.

Imagine the richness of being able to map development paths for both summative and formative assessments of all this data. I suspect that this is something that will come into being, initially at least, alongside the current snapshot approach, but will gradually surpass it as educational institutions and employers see more value in being able to tap into such a wealth of data. Undoubtedly it will mean a whole new analytical industry springing up and the psychometricians will be busy!

Avenida Blog

The future of assessment

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