Assessment has the power to shape educational outcomes, but are we really measuring what matters? Ensuring assessment is fair, inclusive, and meaningful for all students is increasingly a priority for educators. Biases, whether systematic or unintentional, can affect accuracy and disadvantage students from diverse backgrounds. This requires thinking critically about what and how you assess, and ensuring that the most important skills and knowledge are prioritized.
Educational leaders are addressing these concerns by creating assessments that are not only standardized but also fair and relevant. By bringing together diverse stakeholders such as assessment authors, teachers, and students, we can design tools that provide a more complete picture of learning.
Recently, EdSurge webinar host Matthew Joseph discussed with education experts the need for assessment to measure what really matters and advance human progress. Webinar panelists include Patrik Kaironen; ETSfrom Candice Tillet Stanford Graduate School of Educationfrom Eugene Thor JFFLabs and Temple Loveless. good review.
Edsurge: How can schools and educational institutions ensure that assessments are fair and inclusive for all students?
So: Participation is key. in JFFwe focus on the development of federations. When discussing consensus and assessment goals, it’s important to consider who is at the table validating the skills. Having more diverse stakeholders working together around the table improves the goal-setting process and results.
Loveless: One group I would like to add to this discussion of fairness and inclusivity in evaluation is evaluation makers themselves. These issues should be considered from the outset of the assessment tool.
At Assessment for Good, we revisit our tools over and over and ask whether their language captures a diverse range of experiences. We use collaborative design to ensure equity and inclusion by understanding students’ current experiences and co-creating tools with educators and students that align with those experiences.
Kaironen: Equity has a lot to do with opportunity, and assessment uniquely provides learning opportunities. Evaluation feedback is key to showing performance and room for improvement.
Students must know what will be assessed. There should be no confusion! Otherwise, proper evaluation will not be possible. If students do not know what will be evaluated, they will not be able to demonstrate their skills. These issues are discussed in detail below. Drawing the future of evaluation.
What role does assessment play in personalized learning, and how can it be used to tailor educational experiences to the needs of individual students?
Tillet: Personalized learning involves individualizing the experience to support the learner’s goals. You need to consider not just the learner, but all the human stakeholders in the system and the decisions they need to make to support that learner’s journey. These stakeholders include mentors and assessment authors. They need to align with the goal and gain insight into the learner’s current state relative to that goal. This is where assessment comes into play, providing real-time insight into the changing state of the learner throughout the learning process.
As learners engage, these activities provide evidence for assessment. The insights gained are shared with all stakeholders (instructors, mentors, and learners), allowing them to make informed decisions about next steps toward the learner’s goals.
So: As we compound our learning, we move away from a two-dimensional view based on transcripts and degrees. Instead, we capture unique experiences that give you a more holistic view of what you’re evaluating and what goals you’re working toward.
Students often view evaluation as punitive rather than fruitful, meaning that failing a test is damaging. In industries such as fitness, assessments measure progress towards goals. How can this performance-based assessment approach be used in education? Assessment practices from other sectors can inform new approaches in education.
How can educators implement innovative assessment methods to improve student learning?
Loveless: We often ask learners to pause their learning to take an assessment. Ideally, you should think about how to evaluate them. Continue You can learn individually, in groups, or in a community.
Our research also focuses on “power skills,” or skills that enhance the learning process. Knowing fractions is important, but believing that you are a math learner is just as powerful. To provide educators with more complete data, we need to consider what we assess and how we assess it.
The speed of assessment is also important. As an educator, getting my scores back after summer break didn’t help. We need to leverage new technologies to innovate and capture data almost as fast as we teach and learn. This allows everyone, including learners, to make the best data-driven decisions possible.
How can assessment data effectively inform instructional decisions and support educator professional development?
Kaironen: Rich process data, such as student conversation data, can now be used to go beyond traditional methods. Communication and relationship building have always been in the background, but technology can bring them to the forefront. Analyze conversations and behaviors to understand student thinking with interactive simulations.
As technology advances, we will be bombarded with information about the classroom. To understand these conversations and interactions, we need to develop process analysis models. For example, facial expressions can indicate whether a student understands, is irritated, or satisfied.
This rich data provides a deeper understanding of classroom dynamics. It’s up to us to harness this and develop systems that can inform teacher professional development and improve student instruction.
Tillet: This means disambiguating the signal-to-noise ratio. We faced the challenge of extracting meaning from early clickstream data due to the low signal-to-noise ratio.
The advantage of new technology is that more data can be collected. However, this creates a greater challenge in identifying patterns in the data that actually represent the signal.
Educators need insights, not just data. And it needs to provide insight in an actionable way.
Loveless: We can collect richer data from educational experiences, but we need to do more to make it truly meaningful to educators, families, and learners. We need to communicate this data in an easy-to-understand way.
Educators don’t want more disparate data. They want to understand its immediate importance, how it relates to what they just taught, and receive recommendations for next steps based on their chosen curriculum and current unit. Masu. It’s great to have technology that provides us with more data, but if we can’t make sense of the data at the point of teaching and learning, we need to do more work to incorporate it into our daily teaching practices.
What are the most common misconceptions about valuations?
So: One misconception is that appraisals are punitive. As practitioners and innovators, we have the opportunity to think of assessment tools as non-punitive. Rather than viewing them as penalties, we can use them to reveal human potential and identify paths to opportunity. This change allows us to leverage individual strengths and support growth.
Kaironen: Another misconception is that assessments take away learning time. Just like games and presentations, tests can be part of the learning experience. In cognitive psychology, we know this as the testing effect. Taking tests is a better way to learn than reciting or memorizing. This gives the evaluation a different perspective. We need to take advantage of evaluation opportunities and take advantage of the methods, procedures, and technologies that have been developed.
What trends do you think will emerge in the assessment field in the future, and how should educators prepare for them?
Tillet: This is not just about AI in assessments, which we have been using for decades. It’s about new forms of AI, especially generative AI. Now that we know that generative AI can score higher on traditional assessments, and that learners have direct access to these tools, we need to rethink our approach to assessment.
You can’t simply tell your learners not to use these performance support tools. It’s like saying, “I can’t use a calculator.” Instead, the focus should be on helping people build skills using these available tools. This changes what we are trying to evaluate.
The big challenge now is figuring out how to use these new features to create interesting assessments and evaluate what matters. The goal is to use these tools to increase diversity of opinion rather than standardization, and to provide evidence about what works and for whom, under what conditions, to support human learning. That’s it.
