028 Are They Really Learning?
Assessment is one area we often take for granted for reasons unclear. Is it because it’s something so obvious and straightforward that we think we need not bother with it? Is it because we’re content with what we have? Is it because it’s actually too complicated to dissect that we tell ourselves let’s just do what we’ve been doing all these years? Or is it because it’s boring?
Of course, many teachers have made deliberate attempts to make assessment more relevant and effective.
Whether to check on the progress of students or to make them accountable for what they should have learned, some teachers do make the conscious effort to make assessment and learning one seamless activity, wherein students don’t even realize that they are being assessed through such an activity.
Obviously, this is often seen in preschool. But there are creative teachers out there—in elementary and in high school—who come up with innovative approaches to assessment that allow them to assess their students’ understanding of a particular lesson without having them go through the stresses of doing the usual “test”. To this end, game-based assessment has gained some traction too, most certainly to the delight of students.
But even though I’m one to advocate for fun in learning (and therefore, fun in assessment follows), I’m still not convinced that it should be all fun and that we abandon the more stringent and stressful assessment tools we all went through in our youth. There is value in those tools as well. Stress, after all, isn’t an absolute wrong. Students can learn from stress. They need the stress in fact to better prepare themselves for greater challenges—and stressors—that they should expect to come as they go up the education ladder and more so later on in life (As they say, what doesn’t break us will only make us stronger). Yes, stress builds character (and yes, assessment activities can be a good way to help build character).
Another thing worth considering is the role technology can play in assessment. Beyond using tech as a tool for encoding questions and answers (thereby reducing the students’ fatigue from old school handwriting as well as reducing the teachers’ fatigue from coping with barely legible handwriting) and for scoring (thereby reducing the teachers’ need to encode and compute test scores), there are exciting technological developments as far as assessment is concerned.
Today’s technological advancements can result in more reliable assessment of student performance, not to mention of course more seamless assessment protocols.
It’s exciting to imagine, for instance, how biofeedback can be used in academic assessment. The technology is already here—tech-based measurement of brain waves, breathing, heart rate, temperature, even sweat gland activity, all of which are already being used as indicators of a person’s physical and mental state. It’s all a matter of applying the technology to assessment (Think of how it would be like to know if a child read and understood an assigned chapter just by checking on his pulse rate or the dilation of his pupils). Yes, it’s easier said than done, but in the world of high tech, that could be here in 3-5 years.
It would also be safe to assume that technology can someday help learners better understand their own learning style—and learning processes—so that they can learn to learn more effectively. And technology can of course be instrumental in analyzing big data in order to better understand how learners learn.
We live in exciting times. So much can happen in the blink of an eye. In the world of student assessment, what’s important is that we reflect on these possibilities and see how we can better perform our tests, no matter what form we opt to use for our students, to help ensure that they are in fact learning.