Effective Assessment in a Digital Age

[Lacey Smith]

During my content exploration I found an interesting article that provides readers with a great deal of information on how to create effective assessments for 21st century students. Within the article, I found a helpful chart that provided assessment strategies for each of the different perspectives on learning. 

1. Associative - an assessment where concepts and competencies are frequently assessed at a micro level and in combination through macro-level tasks.

2. Constructivist- an assessment by means of experimentation, discovery, and inquiry-based tasks.

3. Social-Constructivist- an assessment involving collaborative and cooperative tasks involving a shared expression of ideas, where learners participate in the design of the assessment tasks.

4. Situative- a holistic assessment in authentic or simulated professional contexts, where students participate in the social practices of inquiry and assessment. 

I think that this chart is really helpful in providing teachers with a variety of strategies for creating effective assessments for their students. I plan to keep this chart with me in my future classroom. One specific perspective and assessment plan that I agree with and hope to utilize frequently in my classroom is the Constructivist approach, where people believe that learning is defined as achieving understanding. The way to best create assessments for this approach is by creating an assessment "by means of experimentation, discovery, and inquiry-based tasks." These types of assessments are engaging for students and will allow for students to demonstrate what they have learned in a way unique from the traditional paper-and-pencil written tests.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/digiassa...