Measuring hard-to-assess skills
If there is one takeaway from the OECD’s experiment, then, it is that a full transition to digital assessment may be – at least in part, and temporarily – stymied as soon as it has begun. If the theoretical trend is towards constructing assessments that are able to assess complex skills in complex contexts – the skills that the modern worker needs – digital assessment will remain, for the time being, a step behind.
One might argue that this is only temporarily to be the case. AI will doubtless continue to advance, and, as human educators get better at defining the constructs that they seek to assess, the finest educational technologists of the age will be, progressively, better-able to set up technology that can measure performance according to those constructs.
Nor is this meant to detract from the excellence of DigiExam. DigiExam remains a highly-effective IT tool that allows teachers to create, administer, and mark exams in the fraction of the time that it previously took to do so. It is designed to revolutionise current practice, and it received its award as the result of our judges believing that it is able to do so.
Rather, this piece is designed to make clear how much scope there is for the ed tech industry to innovate in the field of assessment. If Bonnier’s belief that the future of assessment is digital has the quality of truth, Ahmed et al.’s paper makes it clear that it is only a partial truth – at least for the foreseeable future.
To make that future a present for the world’s students and educators, the type of collaboration that Reimagine Education is designed to foster is necessary. Employers must continue to identify the skills that they believe that their workforce will need, and must liaise with the academic community to define both precisely what those skills are, and how they might be measured.
The ed tech community – both within academia and outside – will then be empowered to use the talent at their disposal to ensure the vision that Ahmed et al., and DigiExam, articulate becomes a reality: valid, reliable assessment of complex skills, in a format that reduces the administrative and temporal burdens on the educators that seek to teach those very skills.
Jack Moran
Reimagine Education
03.05.2017
To find out more about DigiExam, join the “DigiExam: Digital Assessments Made Easy” webinar to discuss strategies for navigating and selecting digital assessment tools, hear about the benefits of digital assessments, and learn how to easily create, administer and grade digital assessments using DigiExam.