Educational Assessment in an Era of Innovative Learning Technologies: New Challenges, new Solutions?

This proposal for a joint WERA-EERA-session with the title ‘Educational assessment in an era of innovative learning technologies: new challenges, new solutions?’ brings together international research on the question if and in what ways the development of new technologies for teaching and learning affects (positive or negative) educational assessment. New technologies open up a wide range of possibilities to optimize assessment, for example in the context of Large Scale Assessment Studies. Here, new technologies are applied and tested with respect to the quality of testing procedures. One example here is that test participants differ considerably in the time they spend on a task. Individual differences in processing strategies can lead to different performances, i.e. they can influence the measurement and impair its comparability. It is, however, argued that the application of new technologies can control for such factors. Developments like this follow the desire to increase the throughput as well as the quality of assessment. But in the end they stay connected with ‘conventional’ modes of testing as well as their aims and objects. For the proposed symposium we ask the question whether new technologies will lead not only to innovations of the ‘how’ to test, but also of the ‘what’? Can we expect inventions that allow us to, for example, assess the quality of a student’s solution rather than the appropriateness with a prefabricated set of potential correct answers? What will ‘artificial intelligence’ add to future methodologies of educational assessment? Will a ‘human rater’ become superfluous in the future? And how would developments like these affect the traditional, already fragile 'interaction' between teaching, learning and assessment in education? The contributions to the symposium will present state of the art knowledge on new technologies and assessment, associated with critical reflections on the desired and undesirable implications of such developments.

As part of the commitment of EERA to ensuring that our annual European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) is as sustainable as possible, we were delighted to work with the local organisers of our Hamburg 2019 conference to develop our 'Green Agenda'.  Watch this videoto learn more!