Search

The collection and scoring of student artwork, for high-stakes assessment, across a large jurisdiction such as Western Australia is challenging. An alternative approach would be to submit digital representations of the artworks online for assessing. However, to give a valid and reliable measure the representations would need to be of adequate quality. Further, judgements of artworks are necessarily subjective giving concern about the reliability of scoring. The comparative pairs method of scoring lends itself to addressing this problem and is feasible where the work is in digital form. This paper reports on one component of a three-year study to investigate the representation of student practical work in digital forms for the purpose of summative assessment. The first phase of the project involved the researchers creating digital representations of the artwork submitted at the end of secondary schooling by a sample of students. The second phase involved a sample of students creating digital representations of their own work and submitting them through an online system. The study found this process was feasible, and the results were acceptable, but it lacked support from teachers and students who wanted the original artworks to be assessed. The comparative pairs method of scoring was found to provide reliable scores and be well suited to making judgements around creative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little doubt that the curriculum content and pedagogy in schools is driven by the structure and forms of assessment employed, particularly for summative purposes. When most such assessment was limited to what a student could do with a pen and paper in short 'exams' this pushed the content of the curriculum towards small descriptive chunks, and the pedagogy towards memorisation and replication techniques. Over the past two decades alternative forms of assessment supported by the power of computer systems have been conceived and tried. This paper discusses progress towards various forms of computer-based exams and how these may encourage curriculum and pedagogy suited to 21st Century learning. In particular it draws attention to research I have led to investigate the feasibility of a number of forms of computer-based exams for high-stakes summative assessment in secondary education. The result was the successful development and implementation of audiovisual stimuli and response computer-based exams, and digital production exams resulting in portfolios of evidence. Each implemented form of exam was tested for feasibility to ensure a defensible balance of manageability, reliability and validity. I believe that for most highstakes summative assessment in Australian schools it is time to replace the ancient paper-based technology with computer-based technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) use in schools is increasingly finding that the impact on learning outcomes is not directly causal but depends on how the technologies are used within learning environments. This paper presents one key dimension, the 'Learning Environment Attributes' dimension, of a complete literature-based framework — the 'New ICT Supporting Schooling' (NISS) framework — designed to provide systematic rich guidance for teachers and school leaders in deciding how to facilitate ICT use. A substantial trial showed that this theory-building stage has produced an effective rubric-based tool to facilitate the measurement of this dimension. Indications are that it is particularly useful for whole-school analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]