Online Assessment of Students’ Learning

            Rowntree (1977) makes the comment about the assessment system that ‘If we wish to discover the truth about an educational system, we just look into its assessment procedures.’ This statement highlights the importance of assessment in learning. Along with the virtual mode of education, online assessment has become more essential. Online assessment has become an integral part of pedagogy in the ICT blended education system.

It is an enormous challenge to carry out assessments, making them more effective and reliable, but online assessment makes them easy. Nowadays, we adopt participatory assessment that refers to the active participation of the students in the assessment process (Partti, Westerland, & Lebler, 2015). In this regard,  ICT tools can be the best tools to achieve the objectives of  participatory assessment. Likewise,  Lebler (2008) mentions that there are three functions of students’ assessment: assessment of learning (to examine the students’ achievement to ensure learning outcomes); assessment for learning (to provide feedback and direction for future activities); assessment as learning (to produce learning by involving students actively in the assessment process). Agreeing with Lebler (2008),we can say that assessment can be more effective when we use ICT tools. It is believed that students change their learning behaviors according to what they think the teacher assesses and learn in ways that will produce the best results for the type of assessment being used. Therefore, how to make online assessment more effective and reliable is more important.

Draves (2000) continues to state that students will learn more, better, and faster than what they do in today's traditional classroom because of having the foremost authorities at their fingertips and having more personal attention, interaction, and individual feedback from the teacher. Online assessment provides the opportunity to improve the result as it offers a variety of tools to assess the learning outcomes. Online assessment can be used as a formative test during the learning process. It can enhance the quality of learners by providing instant feedback. We can use online assessment of  ‘in learning, for learning and as learning’ as  Lebler (2008) mentions.

While discussing the advantages of online assessment, it offers a variety of assessment designs. The facilitator can assess many learning outcomes one at a time. Instant feedback and instant results may help the learners to learn more. Likewise, it tends to be more accurate and easier to conduct to all the students at once. Efficient submission, marking, moderation helps motivate the learners for better performance.

Assessment is a process of continuous measurement of students' learning outcomes. There are two types of assessment of students' learning; formative and summative. Summative assessment, in general, is used for the upgrading of students to higher level through the closed and structured written test at the end of semester or year. In reality, this is not a real measurement of the capabilities of students at different levels. Whereas, formative assessment has been taken as the means of learning in which all students are assessed during their learning journey continuously and they are provided feedback immediately. Such assessments encourage students to go further ahead with timely correction on their weaknesses and drawbacks. Therefore, in overview, assessment can be concluded as a method used to improve the quality of education as it enhances in lifelong learning skills and promotes performance in various educational contexts (Putch et., al, 2010). So, assessment is an integral part of students’ learning that helps them to grow more in future with encouragement and motivation.

            Online assessment is a burning topic of discussion that is profoundly used all over the world. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, its utility, effectiveness, and strength have become more prominent in teaching-learning activities. Although the online assessment was adopted practically only in higher studies earlier now, it has become an unavoidable part of assessment in school’s education as well. Hence, the integration of technology with assessment modality is essential for all of us. Schools and colleges are using different platforms for online assessment of students both through synchronous and asynchronous mode of online assessments. Nevertheless, to mean it productive, teachers' preparedness, infrastructure, digital tools and strong connectivity are also essential for the better online formative assessment of students.

            Here are some best tools which are practiced in online assessment on students.

Google form: It is the simplest and easiest way to create and share formative assessment quizzes, multiple choice questions and even short answer questions through it for the assessment of students.

Socrative: It is the super engaging online platform that allows teachers to create pools and gamified quizzes to assess students’ progress with real time results visible on screen.

Kahoot: It is the free game-based learning platform, which is an excellent way to engage learners of any age with a free basic plan that provides live and asynchronous individuals and access to the ready to use kahoot library as well.

Flipgrid: It is a free, powerful and simple learning tool that allows teachers to initiate class discussion by posting videos. Through this medium, learners can also create and post their responsive videos and texts.

Edpuzzle: It is the video-based learning and assessment platform that helps educators turn one-way videos into interactive formative assessment. We can upload video from youtube, TED or our own computer and then can add questions, links etc. to create meaningful assessment. Pear deck: It is an add-on for google slides that lets teachers quickly create the formative assessment templates by turning ordinary slideshow into an interactive quiz.

            Besides these all, there are other ICT based tools to use for online assessments of students via synchronous and asynchronous mode. Zoom, Microsoft Team, Google meet are also the widely used platforms for synchronous teaching and learning activities. These platforms can also be used to carry out some simple and easier assessments. In addition, Mentimeter, Jamboard, Literbley, etc. are also widely used apps and ICT tools for assessing the students. But a matter of fact that is to be considered seriously while using these platforms is that although these are the best, reliable and easier ICT tools, and techniques for the assessment of students, there might be academic dishonesty, cheating, etc. there (Van, n.d.). But, the teachers’ pro-activeness, vigilance, and creative engagement, along with proper planning of students’ motivation, can come instrumental in reducing the prospective negative flaws of it.

            To sum up, in the age of ICT blended education, online assessment has a significance role in improving the learning experience of a student. Online assessment is an integral part of ICT blended education. Online assessment makes teaching and learning activities and assessment process more accurate, more reliable and more effective. It even motivates the learners to perform better as it gives instant result, feedback and reliable grade. As online assessment provides the opportunity to measure many skills of a learner in different forms through various tools, it will certainly wins the heart of every teacher and will become the inseparable part of innovative pedagogy in near future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Buchanan, T. (2002). Online assessment: Desirable or dangerous? Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 33(2), 148–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7028.33.2.148

Draves, W. A. (2000). Teaching Online. River Falls, Wisconsin: LERN Books.

Partti, H., Westerland, H., & Lebler, D. (2015). Participatory assessment and the construction of professional identity in folk and popular music programs in Finnish and Australian music universities. International Journal of Music Education 33 (4), 476-490.

Puteh, S. N., Nasri, N., Roslan, S. N., Sekuan, M. L., & Bakar, K. A. (2010). Teachers’ perception on alternative assessment. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 7(C), 37 – 42.

Rowntree, D. (1977). Assessing students: How shall we know them? London, UK: Harper & Row

Van, B. G. (n.d.). How cheating helps drive better instruction.         https://www.plagiarized.com/vanb.shtml