Technology for assessment

Over the years, there has been an increase in the amount of time spent on assessment by teachers and students. This has stimulated the interest of educational researchers and practitioners into looking at how technology can assist in this area. Assessment involves sampling students' behaviour at a given point in time and estimating the value of those behaviours. On the basis of the kind of samples taken, teachers infer a student's achievements, potential, aptitudes, intelligence, attitudes and motivations. In Chapter 3, we discussed how to engage learners in meaningful, self-directed learning (Jonassen, Howland, Marra & Crismond, 2008) with ICT and described the kind of higher-order thinking that ICT can foster. This chapter discusses how technology can support assessment, which is an important aspect of learning. After all, either as a learner or an educator, we would want to gather and analyse the data to determine if the intended learning has been achieved (Gagne, Bridges & Wayne, 1998).