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.