Assessment can be a facilitator or bottleneck to innovation in education. When integrating digital technologies into learning and teaching, we must consider how these technologies can enhance existing assessment strategies. At the same time, we must also consider how they can be used to create or to facilitate innovative assessment approaches.
Digitally-competent educators should be able to use digital technologies within assessment with those two objectives in mind. Furthermore, the use of digital technologies in education, whether for assessment, learning, administrative or other purposes, results in a wide range of data being available on each learner’s learning behaviour. Analysing and interpreting this data and using it to help make decisions on how to improve learners’ motivation and achievement is becoming more and more important – complemented by the analysis of conventional evidence on learner behaviour.
At the same time, digital technologies can contribute to directly monitoring learner progress, to facilitating feedback and to allowing educators to assess and adapt their teaching strategies.