The Nature of Assessment Systems to Support Effective Use of Evidence through Technology

The National Educational Technology Plan 2010 (NETP) presents a model of twenty-first- century learning powered by technology, with goals and recommendations in five essential areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. This article connects NETP ideas in one of these areas - assessment - with those of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project. Launched by Cisco, Intel and Microsoft, ATC21S released results of a methodological working-group study at the Learning and Technology World Forum 2010 in London. The ATC21S methodological report discusses how the development of a good assessment system is rooted in the inferences the system is intended to support. Assessment is a special kind of evidentiary reasoning with evidence used to support particular kinds of claims. This article will illustrate how key questions and answers for decision-making are influenced by a new era of educational assessment with technology. Areas discussed include the characterization of the constructs to be assessed, the kinds of instruments to be developed, the level of information gathered, and promising avenues for analytic approaches. The National Educational Technology Plan, 'Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology', includes a number of goals and recommendations for the future of US educational assessment. It stresses providing timely and actionable feedback about student learning in the classroom. Data are to be used directly to improve achievement and instructional practices for individual students, rather than primarily as a post-intervention accountability process. The intent is to serve not only students and teachers but also a variety of other educational stakeholders, such as school administrators and the state, for continuous improvement. Goals of the plan emphasize the need for much richer and more complex tasks, building capacity for use and research on assessments in the schools, and revising policies and regulations to protect privacy while enabling effective data collection and use. These are laudable goals. They are also challenging. When considering educational assessment, perhaps one of the most important yet most commonly overlooked components is the issue of how to present results to various types of stakeholders. This is of prime importance, as it is from the results of an assessment that decisions are made which influence the future knowledge acquisition of test takers. Reflecting on the kinds of reports on assessment results that we aspire to provide can present us with an excellent starting point to think about the challenges that we must face in the design of assessment structures to support the development of twenty-first-century goals such as described by the NETP. In this article we look at the NETP goals and recommendations through the lens of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project. Launched by Cisco, Intel and Microsoft, ATC21S released results of working-group studies at the Learning and Technology World Forum 2010 in London (Wilson et al, 2010a). The ATC21S methodological report discusses