Technology Tools For Assessment and Evaluation

This article discusses the NETS-T standards of technology use for teachers, and how the standards are aligned with the course work of the IT classes offered at WWU. Evaluations of student progress toward meeting these goals has revealed that many students don't have a full understanding of assessment technologies. This has prompted questions about what can be changed in the IT curriculum to better educate students about the role of assessment and evaluation technologies. This article outlines the faculties plan to implement models of assessment technologies and provide better conceptual understandings for student teachers. This article also seeks to provide a conceptual understanding of assessment and assessment technology by providing background knowledge for the reader.

The article begins by explaining the difference between assessment, analysis, and evaluation. Assessment are the data collection procedures, analysis is the process of organizing the data into an interpretable form, and evaluation is making a judgment and a decision based on the information that has been gathered. The article also discusses formative and summative evaluation used to make decisions about what to teach (formative) and how to teach (summative). The role of assessment technologies, this article states, should be to bridge the gap between formative and summative evaluation. Assessment technologies are tools that are used to enhance assessment, analysis, and evaluation. The technologies are distinct form the actual methods though, the article emphasizes.

Assessment technologies help support the decision making process in multiple ways, and this article describes a taxonomy categorizing assessment tools based on their functional characteristics:

Producing and Creating Measures: Developing and formatting tests and other assessments

Grading graphing and reporting: Interpreting data and displaying it in an organized and interpretable form

Measuring specific skills and competencies: software programs can measure program specific skills or other specific skills

Ongoing progress monitoring: Curriculum based measures and general outcome measures (such as ORF) are included in online programs and other software, which compare scores to national standards.

Situated Performance Assessment: Digital software and other programs provide a means for evaluating performance completing specified tasks.

 Interactive Tasks and Simulation: Software can provide more authentic contexts in which students perform tasks.

Electronic Portfolios: Using digital technologies to collect and organize performance data as well as growth and evaluation of learning information.

Data Warehousing and Aggregation: Effective storage of large amounts of assessment data and information which can be accessed later for analysis and evaluation.

The authors conclude by stating that there are many tools an educator can use to collect and analyze information, and that these technologies provide us with many more options for conducting assessments and displaying data so it is interpretable. It is important that teachers understand the availability of existing tools as well as how they pertain to certain aspects of the decision making model; these are important and necessary understandings needed to make effective instructional decisions.

Reflection:
I liked this article, especially because it gave me a good refresher on some of the concepts we learned about in CBE (which I was in need of). Fully understanding many of the subjects in the course and being able to apply the concepts to real contexts is definitely not a simple task, but I liked the way this article presented specific assessment technologies and related them to the decision making model and other CBE concepts. I would agree with the authors that a full conceptual understanding of the decision making model and assessment technologies is needed in order to bridge the gap between them, although this seems like an entirely different kind of knowledge that is separate from knowing about CBE or assessment technologies. Bridging the gap between the two subjects definitely warrants further explanation, which I think this article does a good job of doing. I would really like to brush up on what I learned last quarter now.