New assessment scenarios

This report outlines some of the main challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in the field of technology-enhanced assessment. Our primary aim was to identify some of the main trends in school assessment and situate them within current developments in policy and academic research, in the UK and internationally. Some of these trends are associated with technological innovation, but more often they relate to wider aspects of pedagogy and policy. The findings of this study can be summarised in two high-level points: − Assessment can benefit from a number of innovations that, if embraced, can have a positive impact on all other aspects of teaching and learning. Such innovations are clustered in the three scenarios which constitute the main outputs of the study. They are pedagogical, institutional and technological in nature and include: use of different sources of data to complement basic attainment; introduction of notions of interpretive validity; increased emphasis on instructional design to support formative assessment. − There are calls for assessment methods in schools to keep pace with major shifts that are taking place in society, and which are reflected in the ways people participate in a variety of technology enhanced contexts.