The Assessment for Learning theme encompasses technology-based mechanisms for supporting both formative (diagnostic) assessment and summative assessment to help students, teachers, school systems, and communities see qualities of student achievement that are invisible on traditional, standardized tests.
Since 1997, the Assessments for Learning theme team has been exploring fundamental aspects of assessment necessary to provide learners with meaningful assessment activities and useful feedback to help refine their understanding and for instructors to refine their instruction to meet these needs of their learners. Members in this theme pursue a variety of research projects that include 1) defining effective assessment items that measure desired outcomes defined by standards, 2) designing assessment activities that are integrated into the instructional process, and 3) defining assessment rubrics that characterize a group's discourse and knowledge building process.
National and state standards provide guidelines for what should be taught in school, but are not prescriptive in how they should be taught or assessed. Identifying instructional methods and assessments that meet these standards is an important goal for the theme. For example, several projects have engaged in reviewing existing math and science assessment items and aligning them with national and state standards (e.g., Keodinger seed grant abstract 1998; Quellmalz seed grant abstract 1999). These efforts have helped identify a process for interpreting standards and defining meaningful assessment, technology methods for achieving this alignment, and creating advanced libraries of meaningful instructional methods and assessment items that teachers can access to select appropriate items that align with their learning outcomes.
A common goal for everyone in the theme centers on creating assessment activities that are integral to the instructional process, rather than isolated activities that only measure what learners remember. Achieving this goal requires designing learning activities where learners display what they know in various authentic ways (e.g., making and explaining decisions during problem solving, building ideas through collaboration, synthesizing research into a report, etc.). Members of the Assessments for Learning theme have conducted research to evaluate how to design activities that promote this kind of generation of ideas and defined methods to characterize the products the learners create (e.g., Duschl seed grant abstract 1998; Cuthbert seed grant abstract 1999; Hickey seed grant abstract 2000; Duschl seed grant abstract 2000). The results of these projects are great starts toward defining rubrics that can help systematically evaluate the products learners create during instruction.
The other challenge associated with performance assessments is the increased burden on a teacher to provide meaningful feedback based on these new measures defined above. Technology can play a significant role in this process. Multiple research paths have been taken to explore methods of designing technology based learning environments that capture and/or characterize various states of student understanding so that the technology can be used to provide intelligent feedback to students. The investigation of component based simulations has provided insights into designing software architectures that provide both visualization for conceptual development and tracking of students' decision-making to evaluate their conceptual development (e.g., Hilfer seed grant abstract 1999; Suits seed grant abstract 2002).
The efforts by the members of the Assessments for Learning theme team have helped the field explore multiple dimensions for integrating assessment into a learning environment to increase its effectiveness. These projects are instrumental in helping to understand the potential of assessment for improving learning, how to use technology to make this potential a reality, and how to characterize assessment to help new instructors integrate it into their instructional process.