2.2 Why might e-assessment be so useful?
Assessment is a complex activity; meaningful, assessment requires effort on the part of the teacher and student. We can design assessment tasks that are easy to prepare and grade, or we can take the time to design an assessment that has intrinsic worth for both the student and the teacher.
E-assessment offers a range of potential opportunities and advantages for teachers,
Pic.4 E-assessment advantages
The quickest benefits to be gained from using e-assessments are associated with diagnostic and formative tasks which provide detailed and timely feedback for students to use in a subsequent task. By requiring students to complete assessment tasks early in the course, you can highlight the key concepts that students must understand in order to build new learning experiences. Diagnostic assessments allow students to benchmark their current level of skill development and capabilities against what is required for the current course. You can use students’ responses to diagnostic assessments to gauge which learning activities are appropriate for the first few classes or where you should commence a course so that students are not left behind.
Formative tasks allow students to benchmark their learning against the expectations of the teacher. You can use the students’ responses to formative questions to gauge how quickly they can move from one concept or learning activity to the next. In order to encourage students to complete formative tasks many teachers have found it useful to use low stakes summative quizzes for formative purposes by using a databank of e-assessment items and allowing students to attempt the quiz as many times as they wish for formative purposes and only using the highest mark for summative purposes. This has the advantage that students can use the same assessment task for diagnostic, formative and summative purposes thus increasing the efficiency of the assessment process.
2.3 What can e-assessment do for Learning and Teaching?
This publication serves as part of a review by the e-Assessment Association in its desire to make a positive contribution to the assessment arena. The eAA advocates that Technology should serve Education and seeks to build on research principles identified by, amongst others, the Assessment Reform Group.
In general, the eAA supports a more complex question structure for automated assessment than multiple choice or its variants permits, the effective deployment of fast and accurate feedback as students’ progress through a question and the efficient use of data generated during tests to enhance the whole experience. Pointers to successful deployment of e-assessment indicate a way forward for the efficient and effective delivery of automated assessment.
This document has been created following a meeting of e-assessment experts under the auspices of the e-Assessment Association. It aims to set out some defining principles for eassessment, review current practice and outline the way forward for a more educationally rich deployment of electronic assessment. The eAA encourages fast accurate feedback to learners, sensible use of data generated during tests to improve student engagement and sets out a check list of ingredients that have led to successful roll out for automated assessment pointing out where this validates the findings of the Assessment Reform Group and other relevant research.
There appear to be two definitions of e-assessment in common use:
E-assessment occurs when there is an automated marking/response, to student input on-screen in a test, informing on the process of answering a question and providing feedback to learners and their teachers through wellcrafted advice and reports. Alternatively,
E-assessment occurs when there is use of technology in testing which encompasses the on-screen computer-marked assessments of above but also includes on-screen human marking of tests, electronic management and presentation of results, moderation and awarding processes with awarding bodies, anti-plagiarism software, tools which enable collaboration on the assessment and feedback processes, voting systems/clickers and e-portfolios
This difference in scope is not helpful as it confuses those who are not “into eassessment” and even allows experts to talk at crossed purposes at times. So, for this part of the eAA analysis of current practice, definition only will be considered.
The differentiation is that which draws on technology to provide automation in the pedagogic process rather than where an assessment still requires significant human intervention at stages of the process.
The e-Assessment Association promotes understanding and expertise in applying technology appropriately and effectively to support current developments and innovations in assessment policy and practice. The eAA understands some important distinctions in approaches to assessment and testing as an integral part of teaching and learning, central to achievement and standards across all sectors of education.
Assessment, which seeks and interprets evidence for use by students and their teachers to decide where the students are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there is essentially formative. The eAA recognises some of the principles set out by the Assessment Reform Group (ARG) and believes that software solutions designed for formative assessment should:
Be part of the effective planning of teaching and learning.
Focus on how students learn.
Be able to be central to classroom practice.
Promote professional skills for teachers.
Be sensitive and constructive, being aware of emotional impact.
Foster learner motivation.
Promote commitment to learning goals and assessment criteria.
Help learners to know how to improve.
Develop the learner‟s capacity for self-assessment.
Recognise a range of educational achievement.
This checklist provides good advice for teaching practice and advocates the treatment of learners more as individuals and not merely as members of a larger group. So, where and how can e-assessment enhance the ARG checklist?
Summative assessment as used by ARG, is employed by teachers to summarise what learners know or can do at certain times in order to record and report on their achievement and progress.
The eAA proposes that software solutions which support such assessment, recording and reporting should facilitate the trend towards giving teachers a more central and professional role in this aspect of their work.
While the outcomes of summative tests continue to play an important role (for individuals) in certification and selection and (for organisations) in national and regional bench-marking of system performance, their role in providing evidence for target setting, monitoring and self-evaluation as part of internal organisational improvement is of growing significance. Any assessment software solution would do well to conform to the four criteria spelt out by the ARG:
Validity: the assessment must cover all aspects, and only those aspects, of students‟ achievement relevant to a particular purpose.
Reliability: it should be designed so that users can have confidence that the results are sufficiently accurate and consistent for their purpose.
Impact: it should not only measure performance but have desirable onsequences for teaching, learning and users‟ motivation for learning. Assessment generally has a strong impact on the curriculum and on pedagogy, so it is vital that any adverse effects are minimised.
Practicability: the resources required to provide it – teachers‟ time, expertise and cost, and users‟ learning time – should be commensurate with the value of the information for all its participants.
One of the eAA experts had some problems with the current definitions of formative, seeing it as: an activity is formative if its outcome causes its actors or observers to adapt their behaviour. so, the expert argued that what is currently referred to as summative assessment and, in particular, high-stakes examining, can be thought of as the most formative of all current assessment activities since its effects are felt in every classroom and every FE and HE course. Thus, the expert pointed to the use of the term informative assessment and the introduction of the ideas about „information value‟ well explained in the article by McBride. McBride believes that assessment of learning, should not be equated to summative assessment only, providing as it does information which may be used to inform self-assessment, teaching or judgements ie across all shades of assessment practice. However, for the remainder of this article, we will retain the notion of formative and summative as described by the ARG.
There has been quite a long history of e-assessment to date, its ubiquity in UK public qualifications is still a long way off (particularly in academic qualifications) and it remains a technology nearing the end of the early adopter phase with many technical, pedagogic and assessment hurdles to overcome before its use becomes widespread.
It is worth noting that assessment (particularly summative or high stakes assessment) is not an area where innovation is easy because of regulatory and public pressure to avoid the downside of risk-taking. While new approaches are welcomed, they can only be introduced in such a way as to avoid disadvantage for the students pioneering them, and this can act as a brake on progress. For example, the annual furore at the time of primary and secondary school examination results and the media fascination with league tables means there is a desire to identify how results are improving (or otherwise) and with e-assessment seen as a recent phenomenon it is an easy place to lay blame. This also highlights that the use of technology in teaching, learning and assessment are ahead of the curve with younger learners who may be more comfortable with technology but perhaps not with those who are procuring such services. If it is generational then this may constitute a block in the system for the advancement of e-assessment.
There have been some notable successes such as ALTA (McAlister, Montgomery) and E-Scape (Ripley) in Primary and Secondary Education, SCHOLAR in Scotland at the school/university interface and in HE projects like CALM (Computer Aided Learning in Mathematics) and the introduction of e-assessment at Newcastle University for both Honours and Service mathematicians (see Foster and Fawcett et al). Even failures of public e-assessment programmes such as the ICT test in England at Key Stage 3 have proved to be useful and added to the lessons learned. E-assessment seems to have been most successful where it has been introduced with good planning but minimal fuss and, of course, where the pedagogic need and “authority for change” are very clearly established.
If e-assessment is embedded in an e-learning environment then feedback can direct users to similar examples worked through by an expert. Are our teachers and trainers able to make this shift or has CPD failed to deliver?
So, to repeat, this document deals exclusively with definition 1 cited above. In this area sufficient face validity has been established both in the UK and USA (see Greenwood et al, Ashton et al, Sandene et al and Ashton et al, so it is now time to move on.
Development Background
In any type of task or work, we always use different techniques, technologies, which facilitates the job and saves a lot of time.
The word technology refers to the making, modification, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems, and methods of organization, in order to solve a problem, improve a preexisting solution to a problem, achieve a goal, handle an applied input/output relation or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, including machinery, modifications, arrangements and procedures. Technologies significantly affect human as well as other animal species' ability to control and adapt to their natural environments. The term can either be applied generally or to specific areas: examples include construction technology, medical technology, and information technology.
The human species' use of technology began with the conversion of natural resources into simple tools. The pre-historical discovery of the ability to control fire increased the available sources of food and the invention of the wheel helped humans in travelling in and controlling their environment. Recent technological developments, including the printing press, the telephone, and the Internet, have lessened physical barriers to communication and allowed humans to interact freely on a global scale. However, not all technology has been used for peaceful purposes; the development of weapons of ever-increasing destructive power has progressed throughout history, from clubs to nuclear weapons.
Technology has affected society and its surroundings in a number of ways. In many societies, technology has helped develop more advanced economies (including today's global economy) and has allowed the rise of a leisure class. Many technological processes produce unwanted by-products, known as pollution, and deplete natural resources, to the detriment of the Earth and its environment. Various implementations of technology influence the values of a society and new technology often raises new ethical questions. Examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity, a term originally applied only to machines, and the challenge of traditional norms.
In this document I will explain which technologies I’ve used to create my project. It is the Django Web Framework. Below I’m explaining what does mean both Web Framework and what is Django is.