Abstract:

Future generations will look back at current assessment practices at all levels of education and wonder why it took so long to replace paper based assessment processes with multimodal digital processes. Hand written evidence of achievement is still practiced at all levels of education, while marking is still predominantly done by pen and paper. The presenter has been researching in this area of digital assessment for the past 10 years and will discuss what is involved in the digitization of the assessment environment in this presentation. The importance of not only having the student task match the learning outcomes but of equal important is that the marking process is transparent and matches the learning outcomes is enhanced in the digitization process.

Assessing live performances, be they individual or group, is one of the most challenging tasks teachers face, because the nature of performance is in the moment. Authentic evidence of student assessment tasks (performances) can now be captured and embedded in the digital marking rubric. The evidence collected can be a mixture pictures, videos, audios, hand written or typed text. The feedback and feedforward can be formative or summative and can be customized to meet the needs of the student and teacher. This presentation will showcase an innovative assessment app that bring together the unique features of iOS devices, Filemaker GO and best practices in assessment. The app is in its fourth year of development.

A third year university pre-service teachers live performance activity is used to demonstrate this innovative digital assessment method. Three content experts in drama, music and visual arts carried out the assessment. The app allowed their judgments to be record via the app in the cloud. The app also allowed the performance to being recorded and peer-assessment. Touch does matter as the app eliminates all the busy unproductive activities involved in marking process by the teacher. These activities include the writing of student names, collating of sub-marks and manually distributing the results. The instructional rubric provides educative feedback and the captured video evidence of achievement is seamlessly recorded within the app and stored remotely. In addition, the cognitive load is greatly reduced for the markers as the app interface mirrors what they have been accustomed to in the paper environment. The whole assessment process was paperless and seamless, from the recording of marks and video, to students receiving an email of their marks as a PDF with the video of their performance embedded. The session will conclude with a discussion on how these types of apps might augment and enhance the assessment process through ways not achievable by traditional marking methods.

Keywords:

Mobile multimodal assessment, iPad, authentic assessment, mobile assessment.