Assessment in the digital age
A short piece from WCER gives a nice description of our recent work on assessment, although it doesn’t mention the help we’ve had from the Macarthur Foundation’s Assessment Working Group led by Jim Gee, and also from Andre Rupp and Bob Mislevy at the University of Maryland.
In computer games, students can learn by solving problems that are realistic, complex, and meaningful. So games have great potential to teach the kind of thinking that young people need in the digital age, says educational psychology professor David Williamson Shaffer. But after years of designing and testing digital learning environments emphasizing learning in action, Shaffer has turned to the problem of assessment. Shaffer’s research is housed in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
Another nail for traditional testing
I was going to say another nail in the coffin, but sadly there is no coffin yet.
This time, the problem is something that a new study calls the N-Effect, which shows that having more competitors lowers test scores.
The abstract is below the jump, but the conclusion is clear: standardized test scores are anything but standard. Even something as simple as the number of other people in the room while you are taking the test can affect your score.
In other words, context matters. And if we want to know what people really can do–how they can solve complex problems, and think about things that matter in the world, we need new ways of thinking about learning and about assessment.
