e-assessment (f)or learning

My post on ‘Adjectives of assessment’ omitted ‘learning-oriented’, and to be honest it wasn’t until reading this afternoon that I realised what a  powerful concept learning-oriented assessment might be.  I was reading Keppell, M. and Carless, D. (2006) Learning-oriented assessment: a technology-based case study, Assessment in Education, 13(2), 179-191. Keppell and Carless deliberately use the term ’learning-oriented’ instead of the more common ‘formative’ or ‘assessment for learning’ and they make the point that both formative and summative assessment can be learning-oriented (and I’d add that both formative and summative assessment can be anti-learning-oriented too). It is also noteworthy that Keppell and Carless’s work was done in Hong Kong, where assessment is generally characterised as being exam oriented.

I’d also overlooked the full impact of the phrase technology-enhanced assessment. That little world ‘enhanced’ presumably means that the assessment is better because of the use of technology. So if the technology doesn’t make it better, perhaps we shouldn’t be using it. Nice.

Writing about the various terms used to describe e-assessment made me realise just how littered with adjectives the whole area of assessment is.

We have formative, summative, thresholded and diagnostic assessment.

We have peer assessment and self assessment, and when you’re assessing yourself against previous performance, the assessment becomes ipsative. (more…)

We use ‘e-assessment’ to mean different things, but we also use a variety of terms to describe e-assessment!

We have CAA (computer-aided assessment), or is it CAA (computer-assisted assessment); CMA (computer-marked assessment), or is it CMA (computer-mediated assessment).  (more…)