Transforming Student Assessment
The Assess-As-You-Go Writing Assistant
Imagine having a learning information environment which provides learners, parents, teachers and the public with all they need to know about student progress without having to have end-of-program tests. That seems like science fiction? A team of researchers in the The College of Education at the University of Illinois is thinking ambitiously about such a possibility, while working modestly and incrementally to build a web-based-learning environment which does just this.
A team lead by Dr Bill Cope is working on a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Education to create the Assess-As-You-Go Writing Assistant. This will be a web-based working environment in which students can create written texts, as well as embed images, sound and video. Students will be able to work both individually and collaboratively, representing online various kinds of complex knowledge performance – such as scientific report writing or persuasive writing in language arts.
A repertoire of mechanisms of assessment will accompany student work at all times: teacher-created and student-actioned rubric or schema based tagging; automated natural language processing; and ‘web 2.0’ style commenting and rating of student works by teachers, parents, experts, peers and self. Psychometric mechanisms will measure individual student progress over time and individual student performance in relation to cohorts (the class, students of the same demographic profile etc.). These mechanisms will provide students with continuous feedback (formative assessment), whilst also collecting enormous amounts of data on student learning activity, and synthesizing this into more valid and reliable summative assessment data than available in today’s end-of-activity or end-of-program tests.
This exciting project involves a world-leading, multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Illinois: writing experts Dr Bill Cope, Dr Mary Kalantzis and Dr Sarah McCarthey; psychometrics expert Dr Hua-hua Chang; evaluation experts Joe Robinson and Jennifer Greene; and computer scientists Dr Dan Roth and Dr Marc Snir.
Also working on the project are Dr Colleen Vojak, Project Coordinator; Duane Searsmith, Senior Research Programmer; and Sonia Kline, David Lundgren, Jeehae Ahn, and Alla Rozovskaya, Graduate Research Assistants.
The team is currently trialing the environment (called u-author.net) in Grade 8 Science and Language Arts classrooms at three East Central Illinois public schools.
For more on the tools developed for use with the Assess-as-You-Go Writing Assistant, see their individual pages.
Survey
Suggest forthcoming
Check forthcoming
This research is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A090394 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
