tendencies? Perhaps we could measure which students are the most helpful, willing to offer assistance to classmates. Or we could identify students who are “helpless,” continuously seeking the support of their peers. Of course, students who prefer to work alone would be easy to pick out of the data.
There are clear benefits to collecting data on the effectiveness of class resources or the speed with which students grasp the course material, but why might we be interested in assessing a student’s perseverance or helpfulness? I would argue that in order for summative assessment to be truly useful in the future, especially in light of our rapidly changing society and economy, it must evaluate more than just content knowledge. Only with computer-based learning can we carry out a large-scale, quantitative assessment of individual student’s intellectual strengths, learning tendencies and work habits.
THE NEW TRANSCRIPT Looking to the future, I can imagine a new type of transcript, one where courses
and grades are only part of the story. Starting in primary school and continuing through college, this digital transcript could contain multiple components: content knowledge, acquired skills and individual qualities. The content knowledge that students gained throughout their learning could be presented as a list of specialties: grammatical structures, 17th-century history, physics, etc. Acquired skills such as abstract reasoning, mechanical drawing or dissection could be shown along with an evaluation of their ability in each area. And each student’s individual qualities such as their perseverance, helpfulness, accuracy or speed could be presented alongside the more traditional measures.
Instead of trying to measure students’ ability with standardized tests on just a handful of days throughout a school career, it could be measured continuously as students work through computer-based curriculum, perhaps even tracking how it changes over time. Colleges, graduate schools and employers could use this data to find individuals with the content knowledge,
skills and personal strengths that are best suited for their organizations, adding to the transcript as the student progresses or employee matures, evolving it into a digital resume for the 21st century.
Of course, this is only one possible future of assessment. Who can predict how education will change in just the next 10 years? But the technology we possess today is already capable of revolutionizing how we assess student comprehension by taking full advantage of the wealth of data that can be captured in our computer-based courses. It all starts with recognizing that the medium is the assessment.
Andrew Vanden Heuvel is a teacher and course developer with the Michigan Virtual School. In 2010, he was named Michigan Online Teacher of the Year. As the founder of AGL Initiatives, Andrew provides consulting services in STEM education for clients such as USA TODAY Education and NASA. Andrew lives in Grand Haven, MI. He can be reached at
avandenheuvel@mivu.org. Are You Prepared...
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