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An Anywhere/Anytime Formative Assessment and Learning Feedback Environment

Social networking technologies allow the social relationships of learning which have been initiated in the classroom, to continue beyond the walls of the classroom and the timeframes of the school timetable. This project has developed a "Web 2.0" environment that provides feedback for learners and supports formative assessment. It supports the capture of text, image, table, diagram, video and audio, thus allowing the construction of a wide range of multimodal texts such as scientific reports, writing in language arts, history essays and social studies projects. It also supports collaborative work, maintaining an audit trail of co-authors’ varied contributions. Alongside the student work environment, there are three formative assessment processes and learner feedback mechanisms:

1. a commenting and editing module
2. a review and rating module
3. a semantic tagging module

Classroom-based research and development has involved overlapping and iterative processes of feasibility analysis, technical specification, software development and beta testing.

The outcomes of this research have included the creation of the "semantic editor," "publisher, "review," "annotations," and "project" components of Scholar.

This research has been supported by the Small Business and Innovation Research Program (SBIR), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant ED-IES-10-C-0018 to Common Ground Publishing LLC.